Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines, and the Winning of Independence (1793-1804)

Toussaint Bréda, an enslaved man born around 1743 on the Bréda plantation who had been manumitted before 1791, joined the insurrection soon after it broke out and rose through the ranks of Georges Biassou's forces to become the war's dominant military figure, earning the nickname "Louverture." Saint-Domingue's civil war drew in rival European powers: Spain armed Black insurgents from its side of the island, and Toussaint himself briefly served under the Spanish crown before switching to the French Republic in May 1794, after the National Convention in Paris had decreed the general abolition of slavery on 4 February 1794 — a decree that itself ratified an abolition already proclaimed on the ground in Saint-Domingue by the civil commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax in August 1793. Toussaint went on to defeat Spanish and British forces (Britain had invaded in 1793 and evacuated only in 1798), to defeat the affranchi commander André Rigaud in the "War of Knives" of 1799–1800, and, in July 1801, to promulgate a constitution for Saint-Domingue that abolished slavery in perpetuity and named him governor for life, all while formally maintaining the colony within the French empire.