family conditions of war victims and their suffering compared to any revolutions like Freedom Struggle
Answers
The American Revolution of 1776 proclaimed that all men have “inalienable rights,” but the revolutionaries did not draw what seems to us the logical conclusion from this statement: that slavery and racial discrimination cannot be justified. The creation of the United States led instead to the expansion of African-American slavery in the southern states. It took the Civil War of 1861-65 to bring about emancipation.
Just when the American constitution was going into effect in 1789, a revolution broke out in France. Like the American revolutionaries, the French immediately proclaimed that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” But did this apply to the slaves in France’s overseas colonies? The question was an important one. Even though France’s colonies looked small on the map, the three Caribbean colonies of Saint Domingue (today’s Republic of Haiti), Guadeloupe and Martinique contained almost as many slaves as the thirteen much larger American states (about 700,000). Saint Domingue was the richest European colony in the world. It was the main source of the sugar and coffee that had become indispensable to “civilized” life in Europe.
The French slave colonies had a very different social structure from the slave states of the American South. The white population in the largest colony, Saint Domingue, numbered only 30,000 in 1789. In the United States, non-whites were almost always put in the same class as black slaves, but in the French colonies, many whites had emancipated their mixed-race children, creating a class of “free coloreds” that numbered 28,000 by 1789. The free coloreds were often well educated and prosperous; members of this group owned about 1/3 of the slaves in the colony. They also made up most of the island’s militia, responsible for keeping the slaves under control.