Free Republic

Coffee has been the fulcrum of life here for almost three centuries, since enslaved people cut the first French coffee plantations into the mountainsides. Back then, this was not Haiti, but Saint-Domingue — the biggest supplier of coffee and sugar consumed in Parisian kitchens and Hamburg coffee houses. The colony made many French families fabulously rich. It was also, many historians say, the world’s most brutal. Ms. Present’s ancestors put an end to that, taking part in the modern world’s first successful slave revolution in 1791 and establishing an independent nation in 1804 — decades before Britain outlawed slavery or...

It is all too easy, seeing the appalling scenes from Port-au-Prince yesterday, to forget America's historic debt to Haiti, scene of the first successful slave revolt, which defined the destiny of Africans in the New World. The establishment of the first black independent state had tangible consequences. It denied Napoleon his foothold in the Caribbean and led him to sell New Orleans and the Louisiana territories to Jefferson. But, for as long as anyone can remember, Haiti has been treated as a basket case where corruption, gang violence and natural disaster combine to drag the country backwards. Now an earthquake...