People are misunderstanding something about the Haitian Slave revolt and the following massacre.
The National Hero of Haiti was Toussant Louverture. Toussant was the real leader of the Haitian Revolution and from all sources inspired by the French Revolution and the American Founding Fathers. He was a slave of African parents who through his own labor was freed and managed a coffee plantation. Eventually he caught the revolutionary fervor, but was above everything a diplomat and about business more than war.
Dude was very good at diplomacy and not bad at strategy (burn the port cities and plain villages, retreat inland where malaria and yellow fever would kill off non-Island people), but above all was a master at trade.
You want to know what happened to Toussant? Backstabbed by his fellow Revolutionaries when Napoleon smacked the French back into not being disgraces. He died in a cell in France awaiting trial. Two Haitian leaders really stood out.
Andre Rigaud was a mullato that tried to assassinate Toussant and who’s protégés would later be the only leaders who lasted more than a few years. He basically undermined Toussant and spread lies that he was going to help restore slavery. But honestly he’s not as important as the next guy.
Jean-Jacques Dessalines is the vilest nigger to ever breathe the sweet air of Hispaniola. His role was the actual arrest of Toussant after Toussant surrendered when Napoleon took back most of the island (What is now the Dominican Republic) and the Massacre. The Massacre itself is a piece of work. He later declared himself Emperor of Haiti and was killed 5 years later by his own people because he basically brought back slavery.
Most of Haiti’s initial rebels were a mixture of freed slaves, mulatto slaves, slaves, and a few sympathetic plantation owners. When Dessalines took power he ordered the execution of every white remaining in the area of Haiti he controlled (basically most of modern Haiti). Initially no one wanted to do this.
So what does Dessalines do to make this happen? He personally goes to every city and demands Total Whitey Death happens. He even goes as far as to force mullattos to partake.
Why did he force Mullatos to partake? Because that way people couldn’t say that it was only the Blacks. Then he killed them and pinned the blame of the massacre on them.
Who were the Whites massacred?
The French who didn’t leave, yet. Most of them weren’t plantation owners, those had left for Cuba prior to Toussants death. There were some slave owners, but most were just tradesman and their families. Dessalines declared that the Polish and Germans who aided the Haitians black and didn’t kill them.
Tl;dr:
The Haitians killed their best man and then ordered the mullattos to kill the whites before killing the mullatos themselves in an attempt to cover it up.
I hope you learned something.