Explain how Enlightenment and French Revolutionary ideals inspired independence movements in Haiti and Latin America, and describe the conservative reaction at the Congress of Vienna.
Saint-Domingue, France's Caribbean colony, was the most profitable slave colony in the world, producing much of Europe's sugar and coffee through the forced labor of enslaved Africans who vastly outnumbered their enslavers. When news of the French Revolution's talk of liberty and equality reached the colony, an enormous slave uprising began in 1791. Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved man who became a brilliant military and political leader, built an army that defeated French, Spanish, and British forces in turn. When Napoleon sent an army in 1802 to reconquer the colony and reinstate slavery, Louverture was captured by trickery and died in a French prison in 1803 -- but his former general, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, fought on to final victory. On January 1, 1804, Haiti declared independence: the first Black-led republic in the world, and history's only successful slave revolt to found a nation.
On the Latin American mainland, Simon Bolivar (in the north) and Jose de San Martin (in the south) led military campaigns that freed most of Spanish South America, meeting to coordinate strategy at Guayaquil in 1822. In Mexico, a parish priest named Miguel Hidalgo launched the independence movement with his 1810 Grito de Dolores ("Cry of Dolores"); though Hidalgo was captured and executed in 1811, the movement continued under other leaders until Mexico won independence in 1821. Brazil took a strikingly different path: when Napoleon invaded Portugal in 1808, the Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil, and in 1822 the king's own son, Pedro, declared Brazilian independence largely peacefully, becoming Brazil's first emperor. Meanwhile Europe's monarchs, meeting at the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) under Austria's foreign minister Metternich, tried to restore the old order of legitimate kings and a stable balance of power after Napoleon's defeat -- but nationalism and liberalism had already proven they could topple empires, and neither idea would stay contained for long.
Mastery looks like: They can explain Haiti's revolution as a direct, radical extension of revolutionary ideals, name Bolivar, San Martin, and at least one Mexican independence figure, and contrast Brazil's peaceful path with the others.
Common stumbles: Overlooking Haiti's revolution entirely in favor of only the American and French cases, or assuming all of Latin America won independence the same way and at the same pace.