This chapter draws attention to the curious ways in which rights and liberty did – and did not – overlap in the context of eighteenth-century abolitionist movements. Many eighteenth-century anti-slavery activists initially focused on improving enslaved people’s condition through legal rights rather than granting them liberty. In Spanish and French empires, there were fairly elaborate legal codes restricting slaveholders from exercising especially cruel and arbitrary punishments or practices. The British Empire was in fact an outlier in its lack of any such restrictions. At the same time, slavery was increasingly regarded as unnatural and a violation of natural rights, a view that triumphed in Somerset v. Steuart (1772). Emancipation in the northern United States also granted some rights before liberty. Conversely, the Haitian Declaration of 1804 spoke of liberty, but not rights, and even liberty was a collective, rather than individual good.

When the Haitian Revolution entered its final years, the leaders of this French colony had to grapple with two main questions. First, should they grant the newly emancipated slaves full control over their lives, or should they curtail the freedom of field hands in the name of economic recovery? Second, should Haiti (Saint-Domingue) remain under direct French rule, or should it seek some political autonomy or even outright independence? Toussaint Louverture, who dominated Saint-Domingue’s politics from 1798 until his exile in 1802, embraced a middle course, forcing field hands to toil as semi-free cultivators on their old plantations while maintaining loose political ties with France. Napoléon Bonaparte, who sent massive expeditions to French Caribbean colonies in 1802, tried to reinstitute direct French control over the colonial empire; he also restored slavery in Guadeloupe and French Guiana and seemed poised to do the same in Saint-Domingue. Louverture’s successor Jean-Jacques Dessalines ousted French forces in 1803 and declared Haiti’s independence in 1804, albeit maintaining the cultivator system that restricted the freedom of freedmen.

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was a key turning point in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. The most successful rebellion by enslaved people in world history, it prompted the first direct colonial representation in a European legislature and created the second independent state in the Americas. Broad-based liberation from slavery won on the battlefield, ratified with the emancipation decrees of 1793-1794, and secured with the 1802-1803 war of independence, served as a continuing reminder of the possibility of emancipation while pressing key questions about the proper structure of post-slavery reconstruction. Haiti was also the first independent state in the Caribbean and Latin America, and the first in the Western Hemisphere to be led by people of African descent. Haitian approaches to governance also paralleled French, Latin American, and U.S. debates about monarchy and authority, liberty and empire, and popular sovereignty and social order. Meanwhile, white U.S. and French responses to Haiti’s successes prompted many revolutionaries in those countries to curtail their ideas about the universalism of revolution.

Blacks living in North America fought on both sides of the American Revolutionary War, though Loyalism proved very appealing to enslaved Blacks who found themselves in a position to choose sides freely. The American Revolution brought abolition to northern states in the new United States, but strengthened slavery in the southern states. The years of the American Revolution brought great material hardship to enslaved people in the British West Indian colonies. The French and Haitian Revolutions produced more than a decade of upheaval in the Caribbean, and their legacies helped change the balance of power between slaves and masters in the three decades that followed Haitian independence. On balance, the Age of Atlantic Revolutions strengthened the hand of Black slaves in the British Caribbean, inspiring the closing of the Atlantic slave trade, the passage of “ameliorative” legislation, and Parliament’s decision to abolish slavery in British America. The American Revolution created a nation split between states that recognized slavery and those that did not, but it also produced an expansive plantation economy that continued to grow and enslave increasing numbers of people until the Civil War ended slavery in the United States.

In 1801-1802 Napoleon dispatched the largest colonial venture of his reign to Haiti. His goal was to remove the famous revolutionary Toussaint Louverture from office and, possibly, restore slavery. But within two years, the remnants of Bonaparte’s once-proud army were evacuated in defeated, and Haiti declared its independence.

The Haitian Revolution (1789–1804) in Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) and the African Protestant movement in the early United States coincided to produce a collective of protest literature by Black authors against the unequal treatment and inhumane bondage of Black people. Black Atlantic revolutionary literature offers a countervailing narrative to a historiography of the Haitian Revolution based on analysis from contemporary literary works by white writers. This repertoire of Black literature presents the history of expanding political and social freedoms across the Atlantic world. Black writers constructed disparate revolutionary views of freedom. In Saint-Domingue, Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines pursued different policies, and Julien Raimond advocated predominantly for enfranchisement of gens du couleur, free persons with African and European parentage. African American clergy Lemuel Haynes, Absalom Jones, and Richard Allen looked to Christian Republicanism to end slavery, while Freemason leader Prince Hall embraced revolutionary violence as legitimate to secure Black liberation. The geopolitical triumphs of the Haitian Revolution inspired transitions in Black Atlantic literature toward resistance writing throughout the nineteenth century. The revolutionary-era collective established a literary foundation upon which later Haitian and Black American authors published works heralding the birth of an independent Black republic in the Caribbean.