What kind of choice a slave can have?
An outbreak of The Great Revolution of 1789 horrified slave sugarcane plantators in French colony of Haiti. Despite their attempts of censoring news from Paris, they could not stop the growing unrest of their slaves. Years 1790/1791 are a period of violent revolts of coloured people and black slaves, led by voodoo priests and other weird figures. They resulted in onslaught of thousands of both slaves and their oppressors, virtual destruction of sugarcane economy, and finally an invasion of British army.
In a desperate attempt to fight the Britons, French authorities decided to switch alliances and abolished slavery on the island. They allowed Blacks to organize an army of former slaves, under command of a Black leader Toussaint Louverture. His soldiers drove away the British troops and further in 1801 conquered the Spanish part of the island, Santo Domingo. In the meantime Toussaint's soldiers massacred the mulatto minority on the island, in the so-called "war of knives" (cute name, n'est ce pas?). Toussaint was now the governor of the whole island, ruling still ostensibly in the name of France.
In order to re-establish slavery on the island, Napoleon sent his troops in 1802. They managed to capture Toussaint treacherously, who was further murdered in a cruel and simple way: they kept him naked in a cold cellar in Jura, and simply waited for cold fever to kill him. But the Blacks on the island got their revenge: soon Napoleon troops became decimated by Yellow Fever. On November 18, 1803 Black troops led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines routed the French. On January 1, 1803 Dessalines proclaimed a Black republic.
It would be nice to stop the story here, but I'm not that inhonest. Soon afterwards Dessalines calls himself an emperor Jacob I. In 1806 he is assasinated, and the country splits to a northern Kingdom of the Blacks and a southern Republic of the Mulattos, waging a constant and cruel war. The island was also permanently threated by Spanish, British of French invasion. It was put under strict embargo by the rest of the world, they had therefore no choice but selling sugar and buying weapons under very bad terms-of-trade. Haitan leaders had to force their citizens back to the sugarcane plantations, but - what's interesting - they never ceased to attempt to export the revolution to the neighboring colonies.
There is no happy end in this story. At the end of XIX century Haiti became a North American colony, first economical, then political and (since 1915) military. If you think that the American occupation brought peace and democracy to the island, you are severely wrong. The tyrany of the Duvalier dynasty (1957-1985) was so cruel and inhuman, that Mr. Pol Pot in person might learn a lot there on torture, oppression and genocide.
Did the revolution of 1803 really improve slave's fate? Before you say 'no', read something about working conditions on the Carribean sugarcane plantations. On Haiti a death/birth ratio was so high, that a constant supply of new slaves from Africa was necessary to maintain constant population. This stream of unlucky human beings totals to 3 millions. A figure quite close to that of Auschwitz.
Even if Haitan Blacks merely fell from one oppression to another, slaves of neighboring Carribean colonies won much more on this revolution. Stories of horror from Haiti were a major impulse for abolition of slavery in the whole region. So, if the Haitians did not win much for themselves, they helped a lot for their brothers in chains elsewhere.