Toussaint L'Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines: The History and Legacy of the Haitian Revolution’s Most Famous Leaders

The island of Hispaniola is the second largest island in the Antilles chain behind Cuba, and host to the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Haiti, however, covering the western third of the island, is a French-speaking territory while the Dominican Republic, which occupies the other two thirds, is a Spanish-speaking territory. The Dominican Republic, although classified as a developing nation, has never been struck to the same degree by the malaise of poverty, corruption of its neighbor, languishing in the lower ten percent of nations ahead only of some of the most conspicuous failed states in Africa. Many historians and analysts have posed the question of why, and the answer seems to lie in Haiti’s uniquely tortured history.

Hispaniola entered the European record in 1492 when Christopher Columbus made landfall on its southern shore during his first trans-Atlantic voyage, and he named his discovery in honor of the Spanish Crown that had funded and sponsored the voyage. Leaving the crew of the wrecked Santa Maria on the island, he returned to Europe, leaving his men to establish the foundations of the settlement of La Navidad and the first beachhead of the European seizure of the Caribbean and the New World. Columbus would revisit the island three times, leading a vanguard of pioneer colonists to commence the exploitation of the New World.