The Haitian revolution ended in a very interesting way in my opinion. With their leader, Toussaint L’ouverture, dead after being imprisoned, former general under Toussaint, Jean-Jacques Dessalines leads a bloody purge of the white French from the island. I find this interesting that such a drastic outcome would come from this revolution. From the beginning of the revolution, race was not an important factor in the fighting of the revolution. But for such a bloody end to come from the revolution caught me off guard. In the beginning this revolution seemed to me to mostly be a conflict of ideas, not of color. The plantation owners and the wealthy wanted to keep control over their own economy, which was run through the power of the black slaves. But the plantation owners were not all white, some were free black who had been born free or even bought their freedom. As the movie stated, at the time of the slave revolt, Toussaint was running a plantation of his own, utilizing slave labor. So the idea of color had not yet seemed to become the main component of the revolution. After the free blacks had begun fighting the whites of the island, the slaves were still considered separate from the free black cause, even when the slaves joined the fight. It did not seem like an issue of color up until the Dessaline’s purge of the white French. This turning point seems to me to be when race suddenly became the big issue of the revolution.
