Although the slaves were not expected to participate in a rebellion, suddenly on August 22, 1791, a great slave uprising plunged the country into civil war. Thousands of slaves in the fertile Nord Department region rose up to take vengeance on their masters and to fight for their liberty. Within the next ten days slaves had taken control of the entire northern province in an unprecedented slave revolt that left the whites controlling only a few isolated fortified camps. Within the next two months as the violence escalated, the rebelling slaves killed 2,000 whites and burned or destroyed 280 sugar plantations. Within a year the island was in revolutionary chaos. Slaves burned the plantations where they had been forced to work, and killed masters, overseers and other whites. This was the beginning of the Haitian Revolution.