1791
Haitian Revolution Begins
Enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue rose in coordinated revolt, burning sugar plantations across the northern plain. Within days, a thousand plantations were ablaze. The rebellion, which would last thirteen years and defeat French, Spanish, and British armies, produced the world's first Black republic and the only successful large-scale slave revolution in history.
Death of Mozart
Only 35, ill with fever for weeks, working on the Requiem that an anonymous patron had commissioned. He dictated passages to Süssmayr; he conducted bars of the Lacrimosa from bed. He died after midnight and was buried next day in a shared grave. Vienna had buried, without ceremony, the century's most prodigious musical mind.
U.S. Bill of Rights Ratified
Virginia became the tenth state to ratify the first ten amendments - freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion, right to bear arms, due process, protections from unreasonable search. Madison had distilled them from state conventions' demands. Americans now had a list of what their new government could not do. Two of the original twelve proposed amendments failed; one of them would eventually be ratified in 1992 as the Twenty-seventh.
Flight to Varennes
Disguised as servants, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette slipped out of the Tuileries at midnight in a lumbering coach, heading for loyal troops on the eastern frontier. A postmaster in Varennes recognized the king from a coin. They were brought back to Paris in humiliation. The king's credibility as constitutional monarch was gone.
Wollstonecraft's Vindication Drafted
Mary Wollstonecraft, a London schoolmistress who had gone to Paris to watch the Revolution, began drafting a reply to those who wanted liberty for men only. Her Vindication of the Rights of Woman would appear the following year - the first major argument in English that women were rational beings deserving education and civic existence.
Vermont Admitted as 14th State
After 14 years as an independent Green Mountain republic - no slavery, universal male suffrage, its own coinage - Vermont joined the United States. It was the first state admitted after the original thirteen. New York received cash to settle old land claims; Vermonters received Washington as their president. Vermont's 1777 constitution, which explicitly banned slavery, made it the first sovereign state in North America to do so.