1791-08-22: (The Night of Fire, the Haitian Revolution Begins, as Enslaved People Across the Northern Plains Rise in Coordinated Insurrection, Burning Planta…

1791-08-22: (The Night of Fire, the Haitian Revolution Begins, as Enslaved People Across the Northern Plains Rise in Coordinated Insurrection, Burning Plantations, Killing Enslavers, and Launching the Only Successful Insurrection of the Enslaved in the History of the Americas): On August 22, 1791, the Haitian Revolution erupted across the northern plains of Saint-Domingue in an event known as the Night of Fire. Within a week, thousands of sugarcane and coffee plantations were burning, hundreds of whites had been killed, and over one hundred thousand enslaved people had joined the revolt. The insurrection Boukman had planned at Bois Caïman eight days earlier was now a conflagration that the colonial regime could not contain. The speed and scale of the uprising shocked the enslavers, who had convinced themselves that the enslaved were too degraded, too divided, too broken to organize. They were wrong. The enslaved had built, through Vodou and through the maroon communities in the mountains and through the networks of communication that ran invisibly through the plantation system, a revolutionary infrastructure that the enslavers had never seen because they had never looked. The Night of Fire was the beginning of a thirteen-year war that would cost the lives of roughly one hundred thousand enslaved people, annihilate or exile the entire European population of forty thousand, and produce, on January 1, 1804, what the world would call the first independent Black republic and the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere. No other insurrection of the enslaved in the Americas succeeded. This one did.