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On this day in 1804, Haiti declared its independence after a slave uprising turned into a revolution that crushed the French colonizers.
General Toussaint L’Ouverture, a former Haitian slave, led the revolution that would defeat the French and Spanish colonizers and established the first free, Black republic shortly after his death.
L’Ouverture led the anti-slavery uprising in his country into a war for independence, using his political and military genius against colonial forces led by Napoleon Bonaparte.
The revolution represented one of the largest slave uprisings since Spartacus’ unsuccessful revolt against the Roman Republic nearly 1,900 years earlier.
The Haitian Revolution became a world-historic event by itself, challenging long-held European beliefs about alleged white superiority and about ordinary and enslaved peoples’ inability to govern themselves. REDFISH