When the French revolution broke out in 1789 both the Spanish and French colonies of Santo Domingo were enjoying a high degree of prosperity. In the French colony there were about 30,000 whites, and the haughty white planters were wont to indulge in every form of luxury and sybaritic pleasure; the negro slaves, whose number had grown to almost half a million, were subjected to the most barbarous ill-treatment; and a class of about 30,000 ambitious free mulattoes had arisen, many of whom where cultured and wealthy, but who were all rigidly excluded from participation in public affairs. It was evident that but a spark was needed to produce what might turn out to be a general conflagration.
The spark came in the formation of the National Assembly in France and its declaration of the rights of man. The mulattoes at once petitioned the National Assembly for civil and political rights, which were in 1790 equivocally denied and in 1791 finally granted them. The whites resisted the government decrees and uprisings began. The first of these was a revolt of the mulattoes under Ogé, which was quickly suppressed. Ogé fled to Spanish Santo Domingo, but was surrendered by the Spaniards on condition that his life be spared, a promise that was not kept for he was publicly broken on the wheel. Jean François, another mulatto, then raised an insurrection of the negroes in the north, marching on Cape Français, burning and murdering, with the body of a white infant carried on a spear-head at the head of his troops. His forces were defeated by the whites, who commenced an indiscriminate slaughter of their victims. The negroes thereupon rose in every direction and the paradise of the West Indies became a hell. The great plantation houses were burned, the wide estates desolated, white women were ravished and murdered and white men put to death with horrible tortures, while the liberated slaves indulged in orgies at which the beverage was rum mixed with human blood. It was a fearful day of reckoning.
In 1793, France went to war with England and Spain. The Spanish authorities of Santo Domingo made overtures to negro leaders of whom a number entered the Spanish army as officers of high rank, among them Toussaint, an intelligent ex-slave who later assumed the surname of l'Ouverture and who showed remarkable military and administrative qualities. The French government sent commissioners to the colony, whose tactless handling of a difficult situation fanned the flames of civil war. The English attacked the colony, captured Port-au-Prince, and enlisted the aid of the revolted slaves in overrunning the surrounding country. When they besieged Port-de-Paix the French commander sent secret emissaries to Spanish Santo Domingo and induced Toussaint to desert from the Spanish ranks and with his negro followers help to drive out the English. Killing the Spanish soldiers he found in his way, Toussaint went to fight the English, with such success that in 1797 he was made general-in-chief of all the French troops. The English, decimated by disease, were obliged to leave in 1798 and sign a treaty of peace with Toussaint by which the island was recognized as an independent and neutral state during their war with France. The operations in Santo Domingo are said to have cost the English $100,000,000 in money and 45,000 lives.