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our tears and listen to the voice of liberty that speaks in the hearts of all of us.” The conspirators then took an oath of secrecy and revenge, an oath sealed by drinking the blood of a black pig they offered in sacrifice. The revolt had begun.
    Setting fire to the sugar fields, the rebel slaves burned and tortured their former oppressors. In the first eight days of their insurrection, they destroyed nearly 200 sugar plantations. By the end of September, the slave army numbered between 20,000 and 80,000. “There is a motor that powers them and keeps powering them and that we cannot come to know,” wrote one planter who had only narrowly escaped death.
    They did not know it yet, but these slaves had initiated one of the most radical revolutions in the history of the Atlantic world. Over the next twelve years, these rebels fought and defeated the local white planters, the soldiers of the French empire, a Spanish invasion, and a British expedition of 60,000 men. But their greatest challenge would be the mighty armies of the French emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte.
    In control of France by 1800, the great conqueror of Europe was plotting the creation of a “Republic in the New World,” with Saint Domingue at the center and the North American colony of Louisiana as the breadbasket for the sugar island. In 1800, he ordered Charles Victor Emmanuel LeClerc, his right-hand man and brother-in-law, to subdue Saint Domingue, backed by a force of 42,000 battle-hardened men. These were troops that had defeated the most powerful armies of Europe: Austria, Prussia, Spain, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands.
    LeClerc landed in Saint Domingue expecting easy victory. And in the first few months, he obtained it. Within ten days, the French controlled most of the island’s ports and cities. Within three months, the French controlled nearly the entire island and had forced the main Haitian generals—including former slave turned commander of Haiti Toussaint L’Ouverture—to lay down arms.
    But the rebels did not give up. French soldiers marched out into the countryside and the slaves melted into the hills, holding out in hopes of outlasting the invading force. Fate came to their aid. Yellow fever was ravaging the French army. And though the French now controlled the island, almost half of their military force died of disease. By the end of 1802, LeClerc himself fell prey to the dread disease. His second-in-command, Rochambeau, took over in his place.
    Before he died, LeClerc declared that Saint Domingue could only be secured through a “war of extermination.” He believed he would simply have to kill any black person who had ever been involved with the rebellion.
    Thus began perhaps France’s darkest hour. In desperation, in 1802 Rochambeau brought in packs of bloodhounds trained in Cuba to eat human flesh and unleashed them on the battlefield. But the dogs were “ignorant of color prejudice” and ate French soldiers as well. Rochambeau ordered slaves burned alive, drowned in sacks, or shot after digging their own graves. He became legendary for his brutality. But the slaves did not surrender, and by November of 1803 the rebel forces had driven what remained of Napoleon’s soldiers out of the country. Over 80 percent of the French army sent there died on the island.
    Amid the blood and destruction, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the leader of the revolt and Toussaint L’Ouverture’s successor, proclaimed the eternal freedom of the Haitian republic. “Let us imitate those people who, extending their concern into the future and dreading to leave an example of cowardice for posterity, preferred to be exterminated rather than lose their place as one of the world’s free peoples,” he declared. Victorious, black Haitians abolished slavery, declared racism illegal, and fought the first successful anti-imperial revolution in the history of the Atlantic. They also forever banned Frenchmen from the colony. “May the French tremble when they