27. The Start of History’s Most Successful Slave Uprising
On the night of August 21-22, 1791, thousands of African slaves in Haiti rose up in rebellion. Armed with machetes, knives, pitchforks, and any weapons they could find, they fell upon their masters and repaid generations of abuse with merciless massacres. As a former slave put it:
“Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat excrement? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man-eating dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?”
