At The Foot of Vesuvius

In Chapter 18 of Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild depicts a large slave revolt in St. Domingue and the French Revolution. St. Domingue was the area with the harshest slavery and largest slave population in the Caribbean. This revolt was shocking because St. Domingue was “the Eden of the western world.” When word reached London of the brutal slave revolt, British forces sailed to France’s Caribbean colonies. Next we are introduced to Touissaint Louverture, a tactical French slave leader with an intensity that brought him much success. Yet as the French Revolution continued, armies were dying out due to the spread of malaria and yellow fever. The hypocritical British began buying slaves to fight in their army because their numbers were quickly dwindling. “There was no disguising one central fact: the soldiers of the world’s greatest slave-trading nation had given way before an army of ex-slaves.”