Haiti is about 10,714 square miles big and is about the same size of Massachusetts. It is located on the island known as Hispaniola in the middle of the Caribbean sea where Haiti takes up the western 1/3 of the island and the Dominican Republic takes up the eastern 2/3. Haiti was inhabited by the indigenous Taino people, and later, it was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1942. Columbus' ship Santa Maria sank on the north side of what is now Haiti. The Spanish quickly learned that Hispaniola was not rich in gold, but a place they converted to be a farming source for them. African slaves were imported to Hispaniola as early as 1504 to labor the sugar, coffee, and tobacco crops. The Spanish started losing interest in Hispaniola and in the 17th century, French pirates purchased Haiti from the Spanish and this is when the island of Hispaniola was divided into two countries. .
For the next 100 years, Haiti was becoming one of the wealthiest countries in the world with the cheap slave labor and the amount of resources (sugar, coffee, the die indigo, tobacco, cotton, and exotic spices) they were producing. But the foolish Frenchmen got carried away with their slave workers and had a 10-1 free to slave population with almost 500,000 slaves and only 50,000 free men. The spirit of the French revolution affected Haiti and in 1791, a huge slave revolt broke out and a revolutionary war lasted for more than 10 years. Haiti finally gained its independence in 1804 and became the first independent nation of Latin America and the Caribbean, and all the first leaders of government were former slaves. Haiti became an all black republic with a constitution that prohibited white people from owning land. They wanted to basically imitate the French agricultural and plantation system, but without slavery. This lasted until the early 1900's when the U.S. forced a constitution onto Haiti which did not contain the prohibition.
