Battle of Vertières

On 18 November 1803 at Vertières near Cap-Haïtien, Dessalines's forces crushed General Rochambeau's French army. This last major battle of the Haitian Revolution forced France to abandon Saint-Domingue and sell Louisiana to the United States. Vertières marked the first military victory of an enslaved colony against a European metropole.

After Leclerc's expedition failed (1802–1803) and he died of yellow fever, Rochambeau pursued extermination war against rebels. Dessalines, Louverture's successor, besieged Cap-Haïtien. French troops, decimated by disease and exhausted, could no longer hold against a Black army determined for independence.

Dessalines concentrated forces on French positions at Vertières, strategic key to the Cap. Repeated revolutionary assaults, combined with captured artillery, broke French lines. Rochambeau, with no possible reinforcements from France absorbed in European wars, negotiated Cap surrender on 19 November.

France evacuated Saint-Domingue; Dessalines proclaimed Haitian independence on 1 January 1804. Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States (1803), doubly weakened by Caribbean failure. Vertières symbolized the end of French colonial project in America and birth of the first independent Black republic.