Literature

Being a plantation slave in the New World's Caribbean colonies wasn't exactly a super happy fun time picnic of rainbows, ultrasuede teddy bears and delicious handfuls of pastel-colored tropical fruit flavored Skittles. I know that my cubicle-dweller day job provides me with little in the way of actual first-hand experience to substantiate this wild, completely over-the-top claim, but in my defense, I'm pretty sure that most big-shot History PhDs these days agree that backbreaking fourteen-hour days working hard labor in burning hot temperatures and hygrometer-snapping humidity isn't exactly the most enriching character-building life experience a human being could possibly endure. It was a brutal, thankless, grueling existence that sucked a bag of fiery dicks with the efficiency of a bagless Dyson, and there's really no way you can argue otherwise without coming off sounding like a total fucking jackass. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, take this into consideration: When the Spanish and French first settled the island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), they enslaved the local natives and made them work the sugar cane and coffee fields – the end result was that a giant chunk of the indigenous population ended up dying from exhaustion, dehydration, and disease, and the European plantation owners had to go out and import slaves from Africa to pick up the slack and fill out their conscripted work force.

Since Toussaint's sole goal in the war was freedom for his people and the end of slavery, and the French were offering it in cold, hard legislation while the Spanish were content to sit back and just say, "Yeah dudes it'll be awesome, trust me! Just drive the French off the island, install us as your new all-powerful overlords, and we'll sit around the campfire all night long singing Kumbaya in Spanish and drinking awesome sangrias" the decision wasn't quite as mind-racking as you might think. Toussaint pulled the Spanish flags down from his forts, ran up the French flags, offered safe passage back to Spanish lines for any of his men who disagreed with his decision, and just like that the former enemy of France immediately went to war on the side of his former masters, taking on not only the Spanish, but also a British army that suddenly showed up out of nowhere for some reason.

Toussaint L'Ouverture and his now-hardened core of ex-slave asskickers immediately proceeded to beat the crap out of both the Spanish and the British and whatever else stood in their way, driving the enemies of France from Saint-Dominque in the span of just a few months of relentless kicks to the metaphorical nutsacks. The Spanish were pushed back to their side of the island, and a heaping dose of cannon fire and Yellow Fever (which was known to the Brits by the significantly less-sexy moniker "The Black Vomit") decimated the British army to the point where a couple English regiments actually fucking mutinied when they received orders to reinforce the units on Haiti.