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HAITI’S DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

David Geggus, University of Florida

To redress, perhaps, the biases of earlier generations that either ignored the Haitian

Revolution or emphasized its aberrant peculiarity, the recent scholarship on the topic has often

sought to integrate it within larger narratives of liberal democracy, Atlantic revolution, or

emergent modernity, and thus to stress similarity rather than otherness. Although this has been a

salutary development, this paper, focused on Haiti’s manner of declaring independence, departs

from this trend toward inclusivity, and emphasizes instead the revolution’s distinctiveness.

The Haitian declaration is unusual in a number of respects: 1) it concluded rather than

initiated the revolutionary process; 2) it did not establish a republic, and said nothing about

rights; 3) it called for the elimination of the the former colonizers, and 4) there were in fact, not

one, but two declarations of independence.

Proclaimed January 1, 1804 in the port city of Gonaïves, a month after the last French

troops had left, the text now known as Haiti’s declaration of independence marked the end of

fifteen years of revolution. In its social and political complexity, the Haitian Revolution

resembled the simultaneous revolution in France more than the mainland independent

movements. As the white, free colored, and enslaved populations in Saint Domingue each

pursued their own separate struggles, the revolution’s achievements were correspondingly more

wide-ranging and included not just decolonization but the establishment of racial equality and

the outright abolition of slavery. It was the most transformative of the Atlantic revolutions, both

because of these multiple achievements and because of the high price paid for them. By the time



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independence was declared, the former French colony had lost more than one-third of its

population and at least three-quarters of its export capacity.1

The declaration is a three-part document.2 The longest and most important section, “Le

Général en Chef au Peuple d’Hayti,” which is known as the “proclamation,” functions as a

prologue.3 It has one signatory, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the senior general, a former slave. The

act of independence itself records, in the name of the “Armée Indigène,” an oath to renounce

France taken by 37 senior officers. The third section, signed by 17 of these officers, names

Dessalines head of state. Before an enthusiastic audience on the main square of Gonaïves,

Dessalines began the independence-day ceremony with a speech in Haitian Creole that recounted

“the cruelty of the French toward the native people.”4 As Dessalines was illiterate and did not

speak French, his secretary Louis Boisrond Tonnerre then read out the proclamation, followed by

the act of independence, which were both written by Boisrond.5

Of the 37 signatories, more than two-thirds were of mixed racial descent, probably all of

whom were freeborn. One was a white creole, and apparently 11 were black, of whom 6 or 7

seem to have been born into slavery. None was African, although in 1804 about half the adult

population of Haiti would have been African-born and barely 1 in 20 of mixed racial descent.

1 David Geggus, “The Haitian Revolution in Atlantic Perspective,” forthcoming in The Atlantic World c.1450-c.1820, ed. Nicholas Canny, Philip Morgan, Oxford University Press.

2 Only one copy of the original printed version survives; it was recently found in the British National Archives,

Kew, by Julia Gaffney, a student at Duke University, and is accessible at

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/dol/images/examples/haiti/0003.pdf . 3

The original printed version makes a non sequitur by placing the prologue, known as the proclamation, after the actof independence. The account of the declaration ceremony in Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti (Port-au-Prince,

1989 [1848]), 3:144-152, shows that the act was signed before the ceremony began but that it was read out after

the proclamation.4 Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 3:146. What else Dessalines said is unknown other than that he concluded, “Let us

swear to fight to our last breath for our country’s independence.” 5 Louis-Félix Boisrond Tonnerre (1776-1806) was born into a family of landowners of mixed racial descent on

Saint-Domingue’s south coast. He was educated in France and lived there about ten years. His uncle was a

colonial deputy in the French legislature: John Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint- Domingue (New York, 2006), 289, 308-310.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/dol/images/examples/haiti/0003.pdf





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1) A Terminus Ad Quem

Declarations that marked the end rather than the beginning of a revolutionary struggle

were unusual prior to the mid-twentieth century,6 and in Haiti’s case this timing points to an

important aspect of its revolution. Unlike the other colonial American struggles, in which

independence quickly became the central issue, this was not so in Saint Domingue. For slaves,

whites, and free people of color, the question of secession was entirely subordinated to those of

racial equality and slave emancipation.

For easily blockaded Caribbean islands dependent on trade and with small populations,

independence was a much less viable proposition than it was for the mainland colonies. Most of

Saint Domingue’s white revolutionaries sought political autonomy, not independence; and

Revolutionary France, was willing to grant a good deal of what they wanted (unlike the case of

Fernando VII and the Spanish colonies). When the revolution in France became in 1791-93 a

threat to white supremacy and slavery, the white colonists who favored secession sought a

British protectorate, not independence.7

The aims of the slaves who rebelled in 1791 are more controversial,8 but once the French

Republic ended slavery in 1793/94, there was a huge incentive for the emancipated in a hostile

world to remain colonial subjects. By the late 1790s, many commentators suspected that the

colony’s black governor, Toussaint Louverture, was aiming for independence, and this view is

supported by most Haitian historians. It is more likely, however, that Toussaint wanted a de

facto, not de jure, independence, as Cyril James and Yves Benot concluded; he was feeling his

6 David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), 111.7 David Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793-1798 (Oxford,

1982), ch. 3.8 Cf. Yves Benot, “The Insurgents of 1791, their Leaders, and the Concept of Independence,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. D. Geggus, N. Fiering, (Bloomington, 2009), 99-110; David Geggus, “The Caribbean inthe Age of Revolution,” in The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840, ed. David Armitage, Sanjay

Subramanyam (New York, 2010), 95-97.



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way toward a sort of associated statehood.9 The free men of color, too, were probably more

interested in the substance of independence than its trappings, whatever their sense of

“Americanness.”10 It is true they lived in autonomous fiefs and launched a coup against the

white governor in 1796, but increasingly they came to need the French as a counterweight to the

power of the ex-slaves.

It was only Napoleon Bonaparte’s decision in 1802 to overturn both racial equality and

slave emancipation that forced former slaves and free men of color into alliance in a joint

struggle for independence to preserve the gains of the revolution. The Haitian Revolution,

therefore, produced the Americas’ second independent state but decolonization was far from

being its primary goal.

9 David Geggus, “The Biographers of Toussaint Louverture,” forthcoming in Stories of Saint-Domingue, Stories of Haiti: Representing the Haitian Revolution, 1789-2009, ed. Jeremy Popkin; C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins:Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York, Vintage, 1963); Yves Benot, La démencecoloniale sous Napoléon (Paris: La Découverte, 1992).

10 John Garrigus, “Colour, Class, and Identity on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution: Saint Domingue’s FreeColoured Elite as Colons Américains,” Slavery & Abolition 17 (1996): 20-43.



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2) Political Content

Truly remarkable is the frequency with which historians of all persuasions have written

of the founding in 1804 of the “Haitian republic.” The new state that Dessalines proclaimed was

called l’État d’Haïti and there was nothing republican about it. Arrogating all power to himself,

Dessalines took the title “governor -general for life,” which he replaced nine months later with

“emperor.” The proclamation of independence actually ends with a threat to the populace never

“to reject or grumble at” whatever laws he will choose to make. Freedom from slavery is

asserted throughout the document, but the word “rights” appears nowhere.

This raises an important point that tends to get obscured in recent studies of the Haitian

Revolution that link it with “democratic ideals,” “citizenship,” and “republican rights.” What

characterizes the black revolution from the slave uprising in 1791 through Toussaint

Louverture’s constitution of 1801 to those of Henry Christophe, who in 1811 created an absolute

monarchy, is an unabashed authoritarianism.11

Freedom was construed in the profound but

narrow sense of freedom from slavery; it had nothing to do with liberalism. Although the Latin

American revolutions created a monarch or two, and the French Revolution similarly ended in

military dictatorship, this autocratic tradition tends to set the Haitian Revolution apart from the

other Atlantic revolutions.

Of course, it was not the whole revolution. The revolution’s earliest years saw the

development of a radical democracy, representative and direct, among Saint Domingue’s white

settlers. But because of their hostility to racial equality, it was suppressed in the fall of 1792 by

commissars sent from France. It would be the free men of color, till then excluded from political

participation, who would develop a liberal republican politics in Saint Domingue. They,

11 Geggus, “The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution,” 97-98.



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including many of the signatories of the declaration of independence, would go on to found the

first Haitian republic, but only after they had assassinated the emperor Dessalines in 1806.

The proclamation was addressed to the Haitian people but its intended audience also

included “the Foreign Powers,” as the act of independence states. It assures Haiti’s neighbors

that the new state will not try to export its revolution. Like Toussaint Louverture before him,

Dessalines opted for a revolution “in one country,” because he had to assuage his British

neighbors’ fears of rebellion, as Britain’s navy controlled the sea-lanes.12

In three conciliatory

paragraphs that contrast with the strident tone of the rest of the document, and which avoid

mentioning slavery, Dessalines calls on his countrymen not to “disturb the peace of ourneighboring islands.” Remarkably, those islands are said to have “no need for vengeance against

the authority that protects them,” as their inhabitants had not suffered as the Haitians had.13 This

statement poses some problems for those who interpret the Haitian Revolution as in some sense

universalist.

In writing the declaration, Boisrond Tonnerre eschewed a language of rights and law for

an heroic rhetoric. Calling on Haitians to live independent or die, the document justifies

secession as necessary to maintain freedom from slavery and from the inhumane and duplicitous

conduct of the French. Referencing the geographical distance between France and Haiti, as well

as the cruel character of the French, their skin color, and their vulnerability to tropical disease, it

concludes “they are not our brothers and never will be.”

12 David Geggus, “The Influence of the Haitian Revolution on Blacks in Latin America and the Caribbean,” in Blacks, Coloureds and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, ed. Nancy Naro (London, 2003),

46.13 I use the terms “Haitians” for convenience; the text uses the term “indigènes d’Hayti.”



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3) Revenge

Having noted the different ways in which “the French name still darkens our

landscape”— laws, customs, towns, and the physical presence of French people — Boisrond then

states that if any French remain in Haiti after independence they will continue to be a source of

division and troubles. In a lengthy section that takes up about one and a half of the

proclamation’s five pages, he elaborates this indictment of the former colonizers, who are

described successively as barbarians, vultures, executioners, murderers, and “tigers still dripping

with [the] blood [of your wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, children, and babies at the breast].”

Extraordinary violence had characterized the Haitian Revolution from its early stages, but

it attained an almost apocalyptic climax during the final year, when the French army adopted a

quasi-genocidal strategy. In January 1804, this trauma was fresh in everyone’s minds. After

condemning the French for their past cruelty, their future subversion, and their otherness,

Boisrond made three further points: Haiti’s dead ought to be avenged; a “terrible but just” act of

retribution would send a message to France and the outside world that the Haitians would not

surrender the freedom they had won; and the fruits of their labor should not go to foreigners.

The target of this call for vengeance was the more than 3,000 French people who,

encouraged by Dessalines, had chosen to remain behind after the departure of the French troops.

Beginning in early February, a week after the declaration was published in Port-au-Prince, most

were systematically massacred, men first, women and children afterwards, in two waves that

proceeded from the south of the country to the north.14

The language of Boisrond’s proclamation thus was not mere rhetoric; distilling the raw

hatred of an epic conflict, it prepared the ground for the bloodbath that formed the revolution’s

14 Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 3:159-179. Fear of a massacre had already been building, and whites were prevented

from emigrating, before the declaration, but it must have greatly increased their panic. The massacres lasted

until late April.



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epilogue. On hearing the declaration’s Francophobe sentiments at a reenactment of the

independence day ceremony in Gonaïves on its 150th

anniversary, the French ambassador’s wife

supposedly fainted into her husband’s arms.15 Dessalines, it is said, gave the job of writing the

proclamation to Boisrond Tonnerre because he had declared, "To draw up the act of

independence we need the skin of a whiteman for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood

for ink, and a bayonet for a pen."16

Although such quasi-genocidal tensions were echoed a decade later in Nueva Granada

and Bolívar’s declaration that he would purge America of Spanish “monsters,” the ethno -

national character

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of the Haitian Revolution and the dehumanizing violence that accompanied

it constitute another aspect of its distinctiveness.

The decision to replace the European name Saint-Domingue with an Amerindian name

similarly underlines the revolution’s unusually radical break with the colonial past. Exactly how

the name Haïti was chosen remains unknown. It appears without further explanation in the

declaration of independence, though the document’s injunction to “imitate those peoples

who...preferred to be exterminated rather than” lose their freedom is clearly meant to invoke the

fate of the Taínos.18

The somewhat unorthodox French prose of Boisrond Tonnerre is also often interpreted as

a gesture of autonomy, an expression of the writer’s disdain for the colonizer’s language.

Whether this is true or not, it is a singular irony that Boisrond felt compelled, nevertheless, to

compose the declaration in that language when it was understood neither by the head of state, nor

15 Leslie Manigat, Éventail d’histoire vivante d’Haïti: Des préludes à la Révolution de Saint - Domingue jusqu’à nos jours (1789-1999) (Port-au-Prince, 2001), 420.

16 Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 3:145.17 Leslie Manigat, Évolution et révolutions (Port-au-Prince, 2007), 87-88.18 David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, 2002), 207-220.



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by the great majority of his fellow citizens, and he himself had a better command of Créole, the

indigenous language of the new state.

4) The Other Declaration

It is well known that Dessalines entrusted Boisrond with writing the declaration of

January 1 after rejecting an earlier draft that had been drawn up by another of his secretaries

which he found uninspiring. The text has been lost but it was apparently based on the U.S.

declaration of independence.19

Much less well known is the fact that Dessalines had already

issued an earlier declaration of independence a month before on November 29, 1803. Haiti’s

first historian, Thomas Madiou, briefly described the document but dismissed it as apocryphal.

20

Leslie Manigat, however, has recently made a convincing case that the document, which

appeared in several foreign newspapers, must have been genuine.21

Issued in the town of Fort-Liberté and signed by only three generals, this first

declaration proclaims the independence of “Saint-Domingue.” The decision to rename the island

was thus not taken until the following month, although a vogue for Indian symbolism in the

Armée Indigène had appeared a year earlier.22 The declaration begins, “In the name of the

blacks and men of color.” Drawing attention in this manner to the two rival factions that had

recently fought each other was no doubt meant as an expression of solidarity. It contrasts

sharply, however, with Boisrond’s declaration, which avoided such terms in favor of the unitary

indigènes, and with Dessalines’s 1805 constitution, which explicitly banned their use.

19 Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 3:144. A portion, apparently preserved by Haitian freemasons appears in Gaétan

Mentor, Les fils noirs de la veuve: Histoire de la franc-maçonnerie en Haïti (Port-au-Prince, 2003), 168-169.20 Madiou, Histoire d'Haïti, 3:125 n1. Haiti’s greatest historian, Beaubrun Ardouin, does not even mention it in his

Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, 11 vols. (Paris, 1853-60).21 Leslie Manigat, “Une brève analyse-commentaire critique d'un document historique,” Revue de la Société

haïtienne d'histoire et de géographie 221 (2005): 44-56.22 Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 214.



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The most striking difference between the two declarations is the attitude they express

toward the white colonists. The November text is in fact mainly directed to them. It apologizes

that some “innocent inhabitants” were killed during the revolution by “vengeful laborers and

soldiers,” and it extends a fraternal hand to those willing to renounce their old prejudices and be

part of the new society. The contrast could hardly be greater, and it is not easy to explain.

Perhaps we should see in the first declaration a continuation of Toussaint Louverture’s

multiracialism and desire to profit from the business skills of white landowners. Perhaps the

document was specifically shaped by Henri Christophe, one of its three signatories, whom whites

considered among the most approachable of the generals.

23

Conversely, as Madiou states, and

Manigat agrees, Dessalines was perhaps already meditating the massacres to come and his

assurances to the whites were never sincere.24

Conclusion

For most Atlantic world insurgents, slavery was primarily a metaphor, but in Saint-

Domingue it became the central issue in the revolution. The Haitian Revolution was not just a

revolt against colonial rulers, still less a conflict among people of a shared culture and identity,

but a war against slaveowners who had claimed most of the colonized as property. This basic

fact imparted an extra degree of bitterness to the fifteen-year struggle and shaped its priorities.

This distinctiveness is reflected in Haiti’s declaration of independence that was unusual in its

timing and political content, its treatment of the former colonizers, and in the fact it was not a

single document.

23 However, unlike some senior officers, he did not oppose the 1804 massacres, and Augustin Clerveaux, the other

signatory along with Dessalines, would play a prominent role in them.24 This interpretation is further documented in Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, 5:99-100, 6:7, 12.

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