In August of 1793, in a last-ditch effort to win over the rebel leaders (Louverture having now risen among them), Sonthonax declared freedom—and full French citizenship—for all slaves in the north of the colony. It was expanded to the whole colony that October. The rebels, still sensing a trap, remained allied with the Spanish. But in February of 1794, Sonthonax’s declaration of abolition was ratified by the French National Convention. Finally placated, the organized rebels joined the French and, with their help, the Spanish and British are handily expelled. 

Thus the first half of the Haitian revolution was complete. Slavery was abolished in Saint Domingue and a former slave was installed as the undisputed leader of the colony, although it remained a colony nonetheless. After slavery was abolished but before Louverture and his ilk had switched their loyalties to the French, the system that remained in place looked suspiciously like slavery: in an effort to maintain for France the colony’s high productivity (particularly important because of the needs of France’s war economy), the declaration of abolishment tied workers to their previous owner’s plantations for a year, with one quarter of each plantation’s revenue divided among the plantation’s now-free laborers. Carolyn Fick referred to the arrangement as a kind of “plantation citizenship.” Under Louverture, the situation if anything worsened. Agricultural labor became mandatory for all but the military and Louverture banned all land transactions that dealt with fewer than the equivalent of 165 acres, effectively precluding the establishment of any small farmers from among the population of freed slaves.
Louverture’s system served to entrench a system almost as bad as slavery while furthering his own ambition. At this midway point, the answer to the question posed at the beginning of this paper is undoubtedly that the Haitian revolution failed, if its goal was to drastically change the lives of the enslaved blacks of Saint Domingue. The former slaves were dependent upon a military dictator and forced to remain as agricultural laborers on the very plantations from which they had ostensibly been freed. 
But that was not the end of the revolution, because France had acquired a military dictator of its very own in Napoleon Bonaparte, who seized power in a coup d’état in 1799. While Louverture had never attempted to secede from France and seemed comfortable in his position as the governor, Bonaparte felt threatened by the colony’s relative sovereignty and desired the colony to return to the profitability of its slavery days. In 1802, he sends General Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, his sister’s husband, to Haiti with troops that would eventually number 44,000, with the surreptitious goal of deposing Louverture and reinstating slavery in the colony. Leclerc, known to be a capable soldier, was instructed by a frugal Bonaparte to employ subterfuge rather than vast resources to bring Saint Domingue to heel. For a start, Louverture’s army of 20,000 took a hit when Leclerc offered military rank and continued freedom to those who would switch sides. The ensuing conflict—more a proper war than a revolution—was, if anything, more brutal than the first: at one point, General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, one of Louverture’s right-hand men, ordered the butchering of 800 white men, women, and children in one brutal massacre, a degree of violence reciprocated in kind by Leclerc and his troops. The tide is turning in favor of the French when a yellow fever epidemic decimated Leclerc’s troops in the spring of 1802, ultimately killing more French soldiers than Louverture’s military would. 
