When a hundred Whites who believed in racial equality chose to abandon Rochambeau, they welcomed Dessalines as their hero. Furthermore, the French often tried to get enslaved people to join their forces by offering them freedom to help put down the rebellion. He exclaimed in his famous speech: Our God who has ears to hear. Slavery and Resistance Through History Quiz, https://www.britannica.com/question/Why-is-the-Haitian-Revolution-important. Perhaps a nation bred out of such tensions from racial disparity was fraught from the beginning with imbalance. According to historian Franklin Knight, "The Haitians were forced to destroy the entire colonial socioeconomic structure that was the raison d'etre for their imperial importance; and in destroying the institution of slavery, they unwittingly agreed to terminate their connection to the entire international superstructure that perpetuated the practice and the plantation economy. The Haitian Revolution was the only successful revolt by enslaved Black people in history, and it led to the creation of the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere, after the United States. Her work has been published by CNN Opinion, Pacific Standard, Poynter, NPR, and more. He established a constitution in 1801 that asserted the colony's autonomy with respect to France and became a de facto dictator, naming himself governor-general for life. The Haitian Revolution. September 28, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/why-the-haitian-revolution-is-so-important/. Treatment of slaves was unnecessarily cruel, and masters often made examples in order to terrorize other slaves by killing or punishing them in extremely inhumane ways hands were chopped off, or tongues cut out; they were left to roast to death in the scalding sun, shackled to a cross; their rectums were filled with gun powder so that spectators could watch them explode. The clash of interests, due partly to (1) purely local interests, (2) events in France, (3) the declaration of freedom for all slaves in Haiti in 1793, and (4) the British and Spanish invasion, contributed to the confusion and growing conflict on the island. Haiti thus emerged as the first black republic in the world, and the second nation in the western hemisphere (after the United States) to win its independence from a European power. They made their own religion, Vodou (more commonly known as Voodoo), which mixed in a bit of Catholicism with their African traditional religions, and developed a creole that mixed French with their other languages to communicate with the White slave owners.