A first draft of a Declaration of Independence was presented, on December 31st of 1803, to General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who had recently overseen the withdrawal of all French forces from colonial Saint-Domingue. Written by "an admirer of the work of Jefferson," it used the model of the U.S. Declaration independence to craft a document that "exposed all the rights of the black race, and the just complaints" the colonial population had against France. Dessalines, however, was dissatisfied with the document, believing it lacked the "heat and energy" required for the occasion. A young officer, Boisrond-Tonnerre, agreed with him, declaring: "In order to draw up our act of independence, we need the skin of a white to serve as a parchment, his skull as an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen." Dessalines concurred, and put the task of writing a new, more impassioned, version of the independence proclamation in his hands. He spent the night readying it for the ceremonial proclamation of independence scheduled for the next day. In place of a positive declaration of rights, the document he wrote proclaimed a new Haitian identity by focusing on the need to erase, and avenge, the past of French colonialism.²

"It is not enough to have expelled the barbarians who have bloodied our land for two centuries," the declaration began. "We must, with one last act of national authority, forever assure the empire of liberty in the country whose birth we have witnessed." But what would assure this "empire of liberty"? How could the past be buried, when the order of colonialism and slavery had left its mark everywhere? "The French name still haunts our lands. Everything revives the memories of the cruelties of this barbarous people: our laws, our habits, our towns, everything still carries the stamp of the French." The solution was an outright rejection of everything colonial, of everything French:

What do we have in common with this people of executioners? The comparison between their cruelty and our patient moderation, the difference between our color and theirs, the extent of the oceans that separate us, our vengeful climate, all announce to us that they are not our brothers, that they will never be, and that if any of them find refuge among us, they will continue to be the cause or our troubles and our divisions.

The declaration asked the people of the colony "to swear to posterity, and the entire universe, to forever renounce France, and to die rather than live under its domination." The nation’s "cry" must be "Anathama to the French name! Eternal hatred of France!" The declaration went further, however, and also called for a purification. Speaking on behalf of those who had died at the hands of the French, the declaration demanded that their relatives take revenge against their assassins. If revenge was meant to assuage the spirits of the dead, it was also meant to provide a message to those who might threaten the new country. The generals who had won a military victory for independence would have "done nothing" until they had given "to the nations" a "terrible, but just, example of the vengeance that a people proud of having won back its liberty, and ready to jealously preserve it, must exercise."²

In February 1802, a large French military expedition sent by Napoleon Bonaparte arrived in the colony with the mission to re-establish metropolitan control over the colony and dismantle the autonomous regime led by Toussaint Louverture. It had, from the first, encountered strong resistance on the part of Louverture’s army, which was joined by some plantation laborers who feared that the French had in fact come to re-establish the slavery in the colony. (Emancipation had been decreed in Saint-Domingue in 1793, and the abolition of slavery ratified and extended to the rest of the French empire in 1794). Although the French generals denied that this was their intention, with time their actions (and those of Bonaparte’s government in Paris) convinced most in the colony that re-enslavement was their aim, and that they were ready to carry out a war of extermination if necessary in order to accomplish their goal. In the meantime, some insurgents in the colony took white hostages, and massacred several hundred of them, as they battled the French. Although the French mission managed to defeat Louverture, who was deported from the colony, and gain the submission of most of his major officers and those soldiers who served under them, by the middle of 1802, resistance continued throughout the colony. By the second part of 1802, many soldiers who had formally surrendered to the French began to desert, swelling the ranks of the resistance. Driven by paranoia, and consistently defeated on the battlefield, the French began a conter-productive strikes against black troops who had not defected. In time, their fear of subversion drove them to brutal excess, and they began massacring whole units of black soldiers, gassing them in the holds of ships, drowning them in the harbors, executing officers and their families. Both sides, then, identified their enemies increasingly according to skin color rather than according to political or ideological criteria.⁴

Since 1791, when slaves in Saint-Domingue rose up in a mass revolt that set the colony on the path to emancipation, and eventually independence, race had been a central part of the conflict. It could not be otherwise in a colony based on racial slavery and governed by laws that sought to enforce a strict racial hierarchy not only between masters and slaves but also among those who were free, with those who were of African descent subjected to a series of restrictive laws. Nevertheless, during the early part of the Revolution the political ideology that ultimately carried the day was one of a racial egalitarianism that promised an end to racial exclusion and the extension of rights to all individuals, regardless of their color. In the regime that was constructed in the colony in the wake of emancipation in 1793, administrators sought to a create an order in which blacks and whites would co-exist, and the military—perhaps the most central institution in the colony during these turbulent years—was thoroughly racially integrated. If there were strains placed on this racial egalitarianism, and alternative ideological strains that emphasized racial difference, they remained relatively marginal until the war of 1802, when racial faultlines began to play a much more central role, and began to make the difference between life and death.

Dessalines's racialized 1804 proclamation emerged from this context of war and violence, and his call for revenge was a direct response to the racialized political context out of which it emerged. But if Dessalines chose to present vengeance as the purifying and primal act that was to create Haiti, it was also because he faced a particularly challenging problem as he sought to define the new nation. The colony of Saint-Domingue was, officially, less than a century old at the time of the slave uprising of 1791, and its demography was primarily the result of the Middle Passage that had brought approximately 700,000 Africans as slaves to the colony over the course of the 18th century. The indigenous inhabitants of La Española, as Columbus named the island in 1492 (and which would come to be known in the Anglophone world as Hispaniola), had been almost completely decimated by the mid-16th century, even if small numbers survived in the mountains after that.

Dessalines referred to the "indigenous" people of the colony in his 1804 proclamation, and called his troops the "indigenous army." But the people of African descent Dessalines presented as the people of Haiti were no more indigenous to it than the white settlers whose disappearance he demanded in 1804. Many former slaves, including Dessalines himself, had been born in slavery in Saint-Domingue and were known as creoles, the same term that was used to refer to whites born in colony. (The term creole—whether for people, languages, cuisine, etc.—simply refers to the state of having been born in the Americas.) But the majority of the slaves in colony at the beginning of the Revolution—and indeed the majority of those living on the island in 1804—had been born in Africa. Among this group a bewildering array of communities and languages was represented, although the most important were West African and Kongolese. The latter were the largest African group in the colony, having been exported in huge numbers during the last decades of the 18th century. They were exiles, brought to Saint-Domingue on slave vessels, often still speaking their African languages and drawing on their religious and military traditions in their battle for liberty. The African-born, who were referred to generally as "Congos" during the war for independence, often had political and ideological perspectives at odds with the creoles, like Dessalines, who were their comrades in arms. Indeed, during 1802 and 1803, a series of conflicts broke out pitting "Congos" against "creoles" within the ranks of the insurgent army, and a number of important leaders on both sides were killed. Dessalines sought, with only partial success, to overcome such internal conflicts, insisting—notably in his 1804 proclamation—that whatever their differences, the revolutionaries must unite against their most dangerous enemy, the French, or else perish together.

During the course of the Revolution, some French planters had attacked emancipation by insisting that the former slaves, who had been granted the rights of citizenship by the National Convention in Paris in 1794, should be denied these rights on the basis that they were foreigners." Defenders of emancipation had denounced the absurdity of this position, noting that the slaves had been brought to Saint-Domingue against their will and had earned their right to citizenship through the suffering and hard labor they had undergone. Such claims were made on the basis of the egalitarian Republicanism that went with the decree of emancipation, and insisted on the inclusion of blacks alongside whites. The problem of asserting a "native" status for former slaves became more complicated, of course, when it became a question of claiming it for the former slaves, and expelling the French colonizers. How could Africans and descendants of Africans claim a territorial right to the colony of Saint-Domingue, one that superceded the claims of the French empire that had made the colony what it was? How could this claim be legitimized?

The independence decreed in 1804 was the culmination of a long process through which slaves had rejected their status as pure property and insisted on their right to liberty. The colony of Saint-Domingue had been ordered around a brutally simple equation: a small population of free people (roughly 10%) of the population, were the only ones who had any form of legal or political rights in the colony. The remaining residents were literally outside the law, existing purely as property of their masters. They were, officially, no more than laboring machines to be divided among masters and plantations, their main role the production of commodities for export. Their official identification was based on the erasure of their humanity. The enslaved, of course, developed vernacular identifications that strained against this administrative reality, creating networks between plantations, engaging in economic and sentimental relationships with the free that broke down some of their differences, and creating communities that undermined the attempt to keep them separate and safely situated as pure slaves. These forms of vernacular identification were what enabled the process of political organizing that set in motion the 1791 insurrection, which ultimately won for the slaves a new legal and political identity based on freedom and citizenship. This earlier achievement, sanctioned and celebrated by the French Republic, was what was threatened by Bonaparte’s regime in 1802, and what was therefore preserved by Dessalines’ victory in 1804.

Not all of those who joined in rejecting the French in 1804, however, were former slaves. In fact a disproportionate number of the officers who fought with Dessalines, including Boisrond-Tonnerre, came from communities of people of African descent who had been free before the Revolution. As numerous as the white population of the island before 1789, many of these individuals were of mixed European and African descent, and many owners of land and slaves. Over the course of the Revolution, some members of this group had sought to separate themselves from the mass of the formerly enslaved, and the divisions between these two groups had animated a series of violent conflicts. Indeed, one of the major turning points in the battle for independence was the uniting of leaders "of color," as they were called, with formerly enslaved officers such as Dessalines. Their unity in 1802 was, like that of the "Congos" and the creoles, predicated on the presence of a common enemy who had reached the point of making no distinctions between those of African descent, whether loyal or rebellious, rich or poor, former slave or former slave owner. The joining of the two groups was symbolized most clearly in the the flag that the leaders of the "indigenous army" chose in early 1803. They took the French tricolor flag—an earlier local version of which had celebrated racial unity in the colony by placing an image of a black man superimposed over the blue, a "mulatto" over the red, and a white over the white—and removed the white, sewing the red and blue back together to make a new flag. The gesture—one used the previous year by revolutionaries fighting a doomed battle against the French in Guadeloupe—had a clear meaning: through their brutality, whites had forfeited their right to be included in the new political community being forged in the colony.

If a rejection of France was the driving force in the 1804 declaration of independence, the name chosen by Dessalines and his officers for the new nation made a more expansive statement. It was, according to accounts of the conquest of the Caribbean, which were known to members of Dessalines’ staff, the name given Hispaniola by the original inhabitants of the island. By choosing this name, the Haitian revolutionaries presented themselves, as surrogates for and descendants of the vanished indigenous inhabitants. Dessalines had opted for a similar message when he briefly termed his forces the "Army of the Incas" (before changing to the simpler "indigenous army"), mobilizing the symbolism, revived by South American indigenous rebellions in the 1780s, of the Inca as enemies of European colonialism. In claiming the mantle of the long defeated indigenous peoples of the island, the Haitian revolutionaries also presented themselves as their avengers. They infused their own struggle against the French with a broader historical significance, adding to their list of grievances those of the inhabitants brutalized by the Spanish centuries before. As Dessalines put it powerfully in an April 1804 declaration justifying a recent series of massacres of whites: "I have avenged America."⁵

Haiti, then, was to be the negation of French, and more broadly, European colonialism and its attendant brutalities. The new nation was to channel the centuries of suffering of those pushed to the margins by the official activity of colonialism into a new political community meant to guarantee the eternal freedom of its scarred constituency.

At the same time, and despite his unflinching killing of many whites, Dessalines also recognized that not all those with white skin were enemies. Emancipation in the colony, after all, had had its powerful proponents and defenders in Saint-Domingue and in France, and indeed the former slaves of the colony owed their liberty to the actions of two metropolitan-born administrators in 1793. And during the war of independence, some whites had refrained from participating in the brutalities meted out against blacks, and some soldiers had even defected to the rebel side. Among the signers of the Haitian declaration of independence, in fact, was a white creole whose nickname was "the good white." In dealing with this potential contradiction in his political ideology, Dessalines developed a solution that enabled him to maintain a rhetoric of vengeance while also making exceptions to it. Even as he ordered massacres of many whites, he delivered "naturalization" papers to a certain number of them. In order to become Haitian citizens, they had to take an oath to renounce France and to accept the laws of their new land. They were then admitted "among the children of Haiti." Many of those who were naturalized were white women who were allowed to retain their property in Haiti. In the Constitution he proclaimed in 1805, though Dessalines declared that "no white, no matter what their nation," could come to Haiti as "master or property-owner" or could acquire property in the colony, he explicitly exempted those women who had been naturalized from this stipulation. He also exempted two other groups—the "Poles" who had been part of Bonaparte’s army and who had deserted or remained in the colony after the evacuation, and a group of Germans who had been settled in the colony before the Revolution. The Constitution went on to insist that, since all distinctions of "color" should be eliminated in the nation, all Haitians would henceforth be known as "black."⁶

It was a fitting gesture on the part of this ex-slave, now emperor of Haiti, a man who deserves to be included among the "creole pioneers" to whom Benedict Anderson attributed the birth of modern nationalism. In an Atlantic world still obsessed with policing the line between races, having sought to banish the specter of colonialism and slavery by advocating vengeance against whites, he allowed certain whites to become Haitian, and in the process decreed them to be black. Haiti was a black nation, but any who embraced its creed of rejecting France, and the slavery it had propagated, were welcome to become a part of it, and part of the black race, once they had proclaimed their loyalty to its creed of emancipation.⁷

1.The proclamation is printed in Beaubrun Ardouin, Etudes sur l’histoure d’Haïti (Port-au-Prince, Haïti: Dalencourt, 1958 [1853-1865]), 6:8.[Back to text.]

2.Ardouin, Etudes, 6:7.[Back to text.]

3.Ardouin, Etudes, 6:8-9.[Back to text.]

4.The best history of the 1802 expedition is Claude Bonaparte Auguste and Marcel Bonaparte Auguste, L’Expedition Leclerc, 1801-1803 (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1985).[Back to text.]

5.David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 207-220; Ardouin, Etudes, 6:17.[Back to text.]

6.S. Rouzier, "Les hommes de l’indépendance," Le Moniteur Universelle, #34-66, 1 May—18 August 1924; Ardouin, Etudes, 6:15, 33-34.[Back to text.]