The Era of Democratic Revolutions
The American and French revolutions were by no means the only democratic revolutions of their era. Inspired by the French Revolution, slaves in Saint-Domingue rebelled in 1791, and by 1803 had established the Republic of Haiti. Between 1800 and the 1820s, many South American nations, including Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico, rebelled against the Spanish Empire to win their own independence. These revolutions were inspired in part by the impassioned rhetoric of the American and French revolutionaries, as well as by a more tangible desire not to be governed by distant capitals