Documenting Freedom

Written in French, the declaration has three parts. In the first two pages, the generals of the Haitian army sign their names to an oath swearing to renounce forever the French yoke or die rather than live under its domination: “It is not enough to have expelled the barbarians who have bloodied our land for two centuries.… We must, with one last act of national authority, forever assure the empire of liberty is the country of our birth.” Next, Dessalines addresses the citizens of Haiti in an impassioned defense of independence and the destiny of the nation. He calls on Haitians to “vow to ourselves, to posterity, to the entire universe, to forever renounce France, and to die rather than live under its domination; to fight until our last breath for the independence of our country.” On the final page, the generals proclaim Dessalines governor-general for life and swear to obey without question laws issued under his authority.

The document in the British archives is marked on the back with an official government stamp, which helped validate the assumption that it was an original and not a reprint. It was issued “at the end of an incredibly brutal war,” says Dubois. “In a way it was a total war by the French against the entire black population of the island. There’s a fury in the declaration, a rage that’s linked to this very specific context. The American revolutionaries rhetorically referred to the situation of slavery. But in Haiti it was real. This was a population that was largely enslaved on plantations. So they were refusing foreign control, refusing the control of other people over their bodies, their labor, their lives, their families. The Haitian declaration is a very passionate rejection of all that has come before.”

“While there’s a huge amount of work on the Haitian Revolution, the early period of Haitian national independence has not been studied that much,” Dubois continues. “Partly that’s because you don’t have a really big, well-organized archive and an easy-to-access location. So historians have tended to shy away from it.”

At the time it declared its independence, Haiti was the richest colony in the world, notes Deborah Jenson, professor of Romance studies at Duke. (Jenson came to Duke last year from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Shortly after she arrived, she met Gaffield, and the two of them went to Haiti together for an academic conference.) By the late eighteenth century, Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was known before the revolution, was producing about 40 percent of the sugar and 60 percent of the coffee consumed in Europe. “This is the big question that absorbs everyone: How could you go from the wealthiest colony in the world in the eighteenth century to what is now the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere?”

Jenson says that Haiti became economically and culturally marginalized shortly after independence. In the U.S., Southern politicians feared that diplomatic recognition of Haiti would undermine slave-based economies. “By the spring of 1806, the
tide of public sentiment was turning against international diplomatic relations and free ‘neutral’ commerce with the new
black nation.”

To ward off threats of future French military action, Haitian leaders agreed to indemnity payments to compensate for the seizure of French property. Those payments would amount to the equivalent today of $21.2 billion. “One can imagine that if
Haiti and the U.S. had set up enduring and open trade networks, everything might have worked out differently,” Jenson says.

Among the early obstacles to Haitian prosperity was Dessalines’ continuing effort to eradicate small remaining groups of
French landholders in Haiti; he saw in them the threat of the re-establishment of French dominion in Haiti. Dessalines, a former slave, “was a brilliant military leader and activist for black freedom and autonomy,” as Jenson describes him, “but he was no Gandhi.”

“This whole period of conflict was extremely brutal, with both sides ultimately carrying out a series of atrocities,” says Dubois. “This process actually began under Louverture’s leadership, when the French troops arrived, and famously included the use of attack dogs by the French. The casualties from this period were staggering, as was the destruction of towns. All of this,
of course, played a role in shaping the tone and anger of the 1804 proclamation.” After independence, Dessalines showed himself to be no George Washington, as well: He was inspired by Napoleon’s example to proclaim himself emperor.

Before independence, the labor for Haiti’s plantations was provided by an estimated 790,000 African slaves—accounting for a third of the entire Atlantic slave trade. That aspect of its history is at the root of Haiti’s “hugely traumatic legacies,” as Jenson puts it. “These were people who had come from many different parts of Africa. They came from different religious backgrounds, different linguistic backgrounds. So in the end they were facing extraordinary obstacles, and they have continued to.”

Haiti’s leaders probably printed copies of the Declaration of Independence like the one Gaffield found to mail to other governments and international newspapers, says Jenson, who has studied the U.S. publication of Haitian documents. “I was really stunned when I began working with digital newspaper archives to realize that the text was published in virtually every small town and large city on the Eastern Seaboard. I had always had the assumption that the U.S.was hostile to Haiti. What I found is that initially there was considerable interest—there were editorials saying that no one can contest the right of the Haitians to declare their independence.”

The process of drafting the declaration remains murky to historians. So does its authorship, though Jenson considers Dessalines the most likely candidate. “Dessalines was not literate, but that does not mean that he was not tremendously canny about the production of documents. In the political and military area, very few people were writing their own documents by hand; someone like Napoleon would have been dictating his correspondence. This was the model that the Haitian revolutionary generals were exposed to—sort of a team preparation of documents. But I came to feel that there is an effective authorship here that is uncontestable, that you can hear Dessalines’ thinking. It doesn’t mean that he wasn’t in dialogue with his fellow generals. It does mean that he was crafting something fundamental about what Haitian independence meant and how it would be presented to the broader world.”

In Jenson’s view, Dessalines—who reclaimed the indigenous name of “Hayti” (Mountainous Country, in the language spoken by the indigenous Taino inhabitants) for the new nation—was particularly interested in targeting his message to the U.S., as part of “a legacy of cultural intertwining between close neighbors.” That legacy, she notes, includes Haitians fighting in the American Revolution, along with ongoing commercial ties through shipping. It also includes the Louisiana Purchase: The defeat of the French at the hands of the Haitians was a key reason behind Napoleon’s decision to sell the Louisiana territory to the U.S. The reconstruction of Saint-Domingue had been the centerpiece of Napoleon’s plans for the Americas. Once he lost the colony, Louisiana became far less valuable to him.

Multiple copies of the Haitian declaration were undoubtedly printed, with some sent to newspapers. Unfortunately, Jenson says, newspapers, unlike governments, don’t consider themselves archiving institutions, and there’s no known newspaper archive that includes Haiti’s printed declaration.

Still, at the time, editorial opinion was broadly supportive. An editorial in the Aurora General Advertiser of Philadelphia presented Haitian independence as fundamentally parallel to that of the U.S.: It called the right to proclaim independence “unquestionably inherent in the people of that island,” adding that “there is not a doubt but that the colonial system, pursued since the assumption of the supreme authority of France by Bonaparte, provoked the severance at an earlier period than it would otherwise have taken place.”

Despite its avid interest in Haiti’s shifting status, the U.S. did not recognize Haitian independence until 1862, under Abraham Lincoln. In a message to Congress, Lincoln said, “If any good reason exists why we should persevere longer in withholding our recognition of the independence and sovereignty of Hayti …, I am unable to discern it.” He went on to point to “important commercial advantages” that might be secured by “favorable commercial treaties with them.”

France had officially recognized its former colony in 1825. “Some in the U.S. realized that there was some commonality in the struggle for freedom,” Dubois says. “But ultimately those who were deeply embedded in the slave culture saw this mainly as slaves rising up and killing their masters. And that obviously made them uncomfortable.”

Researchers had long searched for a printed version of the declaration. “It’s tremendously surprising, even confounding” that no original printed document turned up earlier, Jenson says.

In December 1952, the Haitian intellectual Edmond Mangonès wrote to his country’s Commission of Social Sciences on the 150th anniversary of independence to report on what he thought had happened to the original printed version: “All searches to date have been in vain, as we know.” The presumed custodians of Haiti’s culture had not concerned themselves with the fate of printed copies “from the original time period,” he added. “It is really beyond belief that not even a copy of the original printed version has been found in France, or in England, or in the United States.”