🌴 1791 | The Haitian Revolution | Part I What you’re seeing: Saint-Domingue on the eve of revolution: its ports, coffee terraces, sugar works, racial hierarchy, Vincent Ogé’s failed uprising, and the slave revolt that began in August 1791. Where is this? Saint-Domingue was the French colony on western Hispaniola, in what is now Haiti. Cap Français, modern Cap-Haïtien, was its largest city and an Atlantic port. What made Saint-Domingue so unstable? The colony contained roughly 450,000 to 500,000 enslaved Black people, 30,000 whites, and 28,000 free people of color. Some free people of color owned land, plantations, and enslaved people, yet were denied political equality with whites. Its wealth rested on an extreme racial hierarchy. What was Vincent Ogé demanding? Ogé was a wealthy free man of color who returned in 1790 and led an armed movement for voting rights for free men of color, not abolition. After it failed, he was captured and executed in Cap Français. Why did this happen...