After thirteen years of brutal warfare against French colonial forces, revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared the former colony of Saint-Domingue independent, renaming it Haiti after the Taino word for the island. The revolution, which began in 1791, ended slavery in the colony and stunned a world built on the institution, inspiring both fear among slaveholding powers and hope among the enslaved across the Americas.
The Haitian Revolution had been raging since 1791, when enslaved people rose up against French planters in what was then the wealthiest colony in the Americas, producing more sugar and coffee than any other territory on earth. Toussaint Louverture led much of the struggle before being captured by French forces in 1802 and dying in a French prison the following year, never seeing the independence he had fought for.
Dessalines, a former slave and Louverture's fiercest general, finished the job. At the port town of Gonaïves on January 1, 1804, he read a declaration of independence and tore the white stripe from the French tricolor, stitching the remaining red and blue together to symbolize a new nation forged from unity against a common oppressor.
The declaration terrified slaveholding governments worldwide, particularly the United States, which refused to recognize Haiti for nearly sixty years. France did not formally acknowledge the loss until 1825, and only after extorting an independence indemnity that crushed the young nation's economy for generations. Still, Haiti's founding remains a singular moment: the only nation in history established by a successful uprising of enslaved people against their masters.