The National Assembly in Paris in 1790 requires that Saint-Domingue's white Colonial Assembly grant suffrage to landed and tax paying free blacks; the planters' refusal to comply leads to the first rebellion in Saint-Domingue.

A white militia, reinforced by a corps of black volunteers, contributes to the racial tensions by brutally putting down the revolt, which is led by Vincent Ogé.

The outbreak of revolution in France in the summer of 1789 has a powerful effect on the colony of Saint-Domingue.

While the French settlers debate how new revolutionary laws will apply to Saint-Domingue, outright civil war breaks out in 1790 when the free men of color claim they too are French citizens under the terms of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Ten days before the fall of the Bastille, in July 1789, the French National Assembly had voted to seat six delegates from Saint-Domingue.

In Paris, a group of wealthy mulattoes, led by Julien Raimond and Vincent Ogé, had unsuccessfully petitioned the white planter delegates to support mulatto claims for full civil and political rights.

Vincent Ogé travels to St. Domingue to secure the promulgation and implementation of this decree, landing near Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien) in October 1790 and petitioning the royal governor, the Comte de Peynier.

After his demands are refused, he attempts to incite the gens de couleur to revolt.

Ogé and Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, a veteran of the Siege of Savannah during the American Revolution, attempt to attack Cap-Français.

However, the mulatto rebels refuse to arm or free their slaves, or to challenge the status of slavery, and their attack is defeated by a force of white militia and black volunteers (including Henri Christophe).

Afterwards, they flee across the frontier to Hinche, at this time in the Spanish part of the island.

The National Assembly grants full civic rights to Saint Domingue's gens de couleur in March 1790 through the efforts of a group called Société d'Amis des Noirs, of which the mulattoes Julien Raimond and Vincent Ogé are prominent leaders.

The domineering Vincent Ogé, as leader of the Colons Américains, lobbies the Parisian assembly for colonial reforms.

In July 1790, Ogé journeys from France to Saint-Domingue.

Vincent Ogé, returning to Saint Domingue from Paris via London and the United States, stops at Charleston, South Carolina, where the mulatto leader visits with leading abolitionists to discuss strategy, coordinate action and to procure weapons.

Vincent Ogé, aided by the British abolitionist society, reaches Saint Domingue from Paris by way of England, accompanied by a group of mulattoes from France.

More meet him on his arrival.

On October 28, he raises a rebellion in the northern mountains near the Santo Domingo border, with a force of three hundred men, seconded by Chavannes.

Several days later, an expedition from Le Cap, led by du Plessis, defeats him, and he and Chavannes, with nearly all of their army slain, flee across the frontier to Spanish Santo Domingo.

Ogé's rising is answered by parallel insurgencies in the west that are quickly quelled.

The ease of putting down the rebellion convinces the colonists that it is safe to pursue their internal dissensions.

The petits blancs attack Saint-Domingue's bureaucracy, then turn from the bureaucrats to the mulattoes.

Vincent Ogé has raised a mulatto rebellion in the east, answered by parallel insurgencies in the west, but du Plessis suppresses these with relative ease by December 1790.

Vincent Ogé, surrendered to Saint-Domingue by the Spanish governor of Santo Domingo, is taken prisoner along with other leaders.

He and Chavannes, tried and found guilty, are brutally executed by being broken on the wheel in a public square at Le Cap.

Dozens more of his men are severely punished in February 1791.

Their treatment served only to heat up the already boiling cauldron of dissatisfaction among free men of color and slaves in the colony.

Ogé becomes an important symbol of the injustices of a colonial slave society that wants to restrict the benefits of the French Revolution to whites only.

The petits blancs subsequently go on a rampage, executing more than two hundred other mulattoes who had no connection to the Ogé Rebellion.

News of Ogé’s execution turns French national sentiments against the colonists.

Ogé is made a hero in the theater, a martyr to liberty.

Planters living in Paris are endangered, often attacked on the streets.

The newly formed Jacobin Clubs seize on the issue to demand that the Rights of Man be extended to include the mulattoes.

In March of 1791, two deputies, Maximillien Robespierre and the Abbé Henri Grégoire (both members of the Amis des Noirs) are thwarted when they introduce a motion to abolish the slave trade.