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Description
Slavery was a bane to the progress of humanity but it was vital to the economic prosperity of the sugar plantations of the West Indies in the eighteenth century. Thus was the case on the island of Hispaniola which today is home to the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. During the 1700's the western part of the island, called Saint-Domingue, became the richest of all of France's colonial holdings. By the time the French Revolution in 1793, Saint-Domingue consisted of thirty thousand wealthy French, twenty-seven thousand mulattoes, and almost half a million black slaves. The revolution in France inspired the oppressed in Saint-Domingue to consider revolt themselves, At this time it became evident also that the mulattoes and the blacks would not be represented in the new French National Assembly while the white planters of the island would. The colony-soon erupted in revolution as the black slave Toussaint L'Ouverture led an insurrection which saw the white French either dead or gone from the island.
Publication Date
11-20-1991
Recommended Citation
Edenfield, Steven, "Edward Coppee, Savannah Physician" (1991). Savannah Biographies. 45.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/sav-bios-lane/45
