In 1779, a regiment of free blacks from Saint Domingue went to America to join in the fight for independence. Already, they'd been given a taste of great change because of a revolution closer to home. As boats arrived in Saint Domingue from France, slaves learned that a revolution was going on in the name of human rights. The trio of great principles behind the French Revolution that began in 1789 consisted of 'liberty, equality, fraternity' (brotherhood). They were fighting for principles that they had learned from Europeans and Americans-from people similar to their own slave masters.

The enslaved people on Saint Domingue were not merely fighting against the terrible conditions on the island. Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World. Which text evidence best supports the authors' claim that sugar processing was a long and difficult process? Over and over again the liquid had to be strained and purified, even as it kept boiling, boiling, boiling in the copper vats. As the juice boiled, a foul scum rose to the top-which a slave had to keep skimming off with a long-handled ladle. Then there was the smell, or rather, the stench of the boiling liquid. Mammoth fires burned in the 'mouths,' clouds of steam billowed above the kettles, and the heat was so intense that the boiling houses had to be sprayed with water so they would not go up in flames. The boiling house was as perilous as the mills, for if a person nodded off for a second, he or she could slip into a bubbling vat. This was the first in a series of ever-smaller cauldrons, and beneath each gaped what the Brazilians called the 'great open mouths'-the huge furnaces that had to be constantly filled with the wood that workers had chopped down and hauled to be ready for this moment. A giant copper kettle-often about four feet across and three feet deep-waited for the pale river. The liquid rushed down a wooden gutter directly into the boiling house, a building of massive furnaces and cauldrons, where the syrup was heated and strained and turned into crystals. A stream of pale ash-colored syrup gushed out from the mills, bubbling white with foam.

The Slave Planet by Seven Steps