Girard JeanJacquesDessalinesAtlantic 2012

Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal
Author(s): Philippe R. Girard

Source: The William and Mary Quarterly , Vol. 69, No. 3 (July 2012), pp. 549-582
Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.69.3.0549
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Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic
System: A Reappraisal
Philippe R. Girard
J EAN-JACQUES Dessalines, slave, revolutionary, and first leader of

independent Haiti (Saint Domingue), has proved a divisive figure
(Figures I–II). Nineteenth-century non-Haitian authors generally por-
trayed him as a bloodthirsty brute on account of his decision to massacre
most of Haiti’s white population in the spring of 1804. Early Haitian histo-
rians were somewhat circumspect, acknowledging his courage and decisive-
ness in the struggle for independence while lamenting the corruption and
despotism that characterized his rule. Non-Haitian historians now tend to
ignore him and instead focus on Toussaint Louverture, but for the past 150
years, many Haitians, and particularly black nationalists, have held him up
as the father of independence. Haiti’s national anthem, the Dessalinienne,
is named after him; his likeness adorns stamps; and his statue is featured
prominently on Port-au-Prince’s Champ de Mars. Alas, Haitian scholarship
has been polluted by racial politics: emphasizing Dessalines’s achievements
is a way for black nationalists to minimize those of mixed-race revolution-
ary leaders such as Alexandre Pétion or of more moderate figures such
as Louverture; criticizing him is a covert way to denounce the economic
exploitation of Haitians by the nation’s army, black dictators in particular.
As a result, books on Dessalines can be highly polemical and unschol-
arly. “Most of the literature produced in Haiti remains respectful—too
respectful, I would say—of the revolutionary leaders,” wrote Michel-Rolph
Trouillot. “They excel at putting facts into perspective, but their facts are
weak, sometimes wrong, especially since the Duvalier regime explicitly
politicized historical discourse.”1
Philippe R. Girard is an associate professor of Caribbean History at McNeese State
University. The author would like to thank his colleagues at McNeese State University
and the anonymous readers of the William and Mary Quarterly, whose feedback helped
refine the content and thesis of this article.
1 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
(Boston, 1995), 105. For unflattering nineteenth-century non-Haitian accounts, see [Louis
Dubroca], Vida de J. J. Dessalines, gefe de los negros de Santo Domingo . . . , ed. Juan Lopez
Cancelada, trans. D. M. G. C. (Mexico [City], 1806); [Sir James Barskett], History of the
Island of St. Domingo, from Its First Discovery by Columbus to the Present Period (1818; repr.,
New York, 1824), 179; Charles Mackenzie, Notes on Haiti Made during a Residence in
that Republic (1830; repr., London, 1971), 1: 143–45; Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on
William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 69, no. 3, July 2012

DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.69.3.0549

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550 william and mary quarterly
Figure I
This portrait of Dessalines, subtitled “Jean-Jacques Dessalines, fondateur de
l’indépendance d’Haïti” (Jean-Jacques Dessalines, founder of Haiti’s inde-
pendence), appeared in Dantès Fortunat, Nouvelle géographie de l’île d’Haïti:
Contenant des notions historiques et topographiques sur les autres Antilles (Paris,
1888). Fortunat’s book was intended as a history textbook for use in Haiti’s
schools.

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dessalines and the atlantic system 551
Figure II
Dessalines as bloodthirsty tyrant. From [Louis Dubroca], Vida de J. J.
Dessalines, gefe de los negros de Santo Domingo . . . , ed. Juan Lopez Cancelada,
trans. D. M. G. C. (Mexico [City], 1806), 12 (between A-69 and A-70).
Courtesy, University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries, http://ufdc.ufl
.edu/UF00026483/.

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Though assessments of Dessalines’s record vary immensely, most are

based on a similar premise: that he was a radical with a profound hatred
for slavery, colonialism, France, and white planters. To his detractors and
admirers, Dessalines may have been a psychopath or a hero, but he was
undoubtedly a rebel. One should be wary of such one-sided claims, how-
ever; Louverture’s own reputation underwent a thorough reevaluation after
scholars first submitted him to the rigorous standards of modern historical
inquiry.2 Dessalines’s popular image should thus be approached with con-
siderable caution until the scholarship develops.
Another unfortunate penchant of the historiography is scholars’ ten-
dency to analyze Dessalines within a narrow national and racial context.
Works written by his countrymen today describe him as a Haitian states-
man preoccupied with independence and as a black nationalist whose
policies prefigured the black-mulatto disputes that later plagued Haitian
society. Nineteenth-century non-Haitian works, by presenting him as a
crude slave eager to shed the blood of white planters, also confined him to
a black and Haitian world. Deborah Jenson’s recent work brought much-
needed attention to Dessalines as an independent actor and author, but
she still analyzed him as a revolutionary of African descent. “There was
nothing subtle about the radicalism of Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s discursive
death match with European obliviousness to its self-selected paradigm of
the human,” she wrote. He “explicitly contextualized himself as radically
Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge, La., 1988), 91. For
early Haitian histories, see Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haiti, 3 vols. (Port-au-Prince, 1847–
48); B[eaubrun] Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, suivies de la vie du général J.-M.
Borgella, 11 vols. (Paris, 1853–60). For admiring works, see Timoléon Brutus, L’homme
d’Airain: Étude monographique sur Jean-Jacques Dessalines, fondateur de la nation haïti-
enne, 2 vols. (Port-au-Prince, 1946); Dantès Bellegarde, Dessalines a parlé (Port-au-Prince,
1948); Gérard Mentor Laurent, Six études sur J. J. Dessalines (Port-au-Prince, 1950);
Luc Dorsinville, Jean-Jacques Dessalines et la création du drapeau bleu et rouge haïtien
(Port-au-Prince, 1953); Henock Trouillot, Dessalines ou la tragedie post-coloniale (Port-
au-Prince, 1966); Martin Renauld, Jean-Jacques Dessalines dans la guerre d’indépendance
haïtienne: Les stratégies utilisées pour imposer son leadership (Montreal, 2004); Berthony
Dupont, Jean-Jacques Dessalines: Itinéraire d’un révolutionnaire (Paris, 2006); Gérard
Desnoyers Montès, Dessalines face à l’armée de Napoléon Bonaparte (Montreal, 2006).
For a rare look at Dessalines in non-Haitian scholarship, see Deborah Jenson, Beyond
the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool,
2011). On the growing cult of Dessalines, see Joan [Colin] Dayan, Haiti, History, and the
Gods (1995; repr., Berkeley, Calif., 1998), 27; Michael Largey, Vodou Nation: Haitian Art
Music and Cultural Nationalism (Chicago, 2006), 74–89. For an example of politicized
scholarship (on the origins of the Haitian flag), see Michel Aubourg, Le drapeau dessali-
nien: Contribution à l’histoire d’Haïti (Port-au-Prince, 1964), 38–40. On Dessalines and
racial politics, see David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National
Independence in Haiti (Cambridge, 1979).
2 Marie-Antoinette Menier, Gabriel Debien, and Jean Fouchard, “Toussaint
Louverture avant 1789: Légendes et réalités,” in Toussaint Louverture et l’indépendance
d’Haïti: Témoignages pour un bicentenaire, ed. Jacques de Cauna (Paris, 2004), 61–67.

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anticolonial and pro-independence.”3 What is too often left unmentioned
is the fact that Dessalines grew up in a Creole colony at the confluence of
French, American, and African influences, that he served for eight years as
an officer of the French Republican army, and that he was acutely aware of
the larger diplomatic and commercial networks in which he operated. Only
by taking into account these larger trends (and accessing the U.S., British,
and French archives that document Dessalines’s dealings with non-Haitian
actors) can we fully comprehend his actions and relevance as a man inspired
by, and fully integrated into, the Atlantic system in which he was raised.
This Atlantic system was characterized in the Caribbean by five major
elements. First came the colonial bond, which (except in the nearby
United States) had remained unchallenged since the days of Christopher
Columbus. Second came the international trade links that connected
European metropolises with their colonies, particularly the exchange of
foodstuffs and manufactured goods for tropical crops. Third came the
predominance of the large plantation as the preferred unit of production,
particularly for Saint Domingue’s dominant export crop, sugar. Fourth, in
response to the high labor needs of sugar plantations and the prohibitive
death rate among white newcomers, came African slavery and the atten-
dant slave trade. In turn, the arrival of five million African slaves in the
Caribbean (one million of them in Saint Domingue), along with preexist-
ing Native American settlements, European immigration, and widespread
miscegenation, explains the fifth element that characterized integrated
Atlantic societies such as Saint Domingue: the intricate fusion of races and
ideas from three continents into a manifold Creole culture.
Leaving aside Dessalines’s youth and early career, about which too
little is known to reach definitive conclusions about his views, a thorough
reappraisal of Dessalines’s place in this Atlantic system must focus on
the period 1802–6, immediately before and after Haiti’s independence.
These years saw Dessalines’s rise from relative obscurity to international
prominence and marked the first time that documents by and about him
became abundant. These, interestingly, showed him to be a skillful, even
duplicitous individual willing to betray officers of color and to exploit
black cultivators to further his political and economic interests—in other
words, a fairly typical character in a tumultuous era and a commerce-
driven region of the globe in which upward financial mobility and political
survival loomed larger than moral scruples, national loyalty, and even
race. In particular, archival findings show that Dessalines encouraged
French officers to arrest fellow revolutionaries such as Louverture, was
long ambivalent about advocating independence from France, and had
close relations with some white Frenchmen even after the 1804 massacres.
3 Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 10 (“nothing subtle”), 85 (“explicitly”).

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He maintained diplomatic channels with Haiti’s neighbors (particularly
Jamaica) in an effort to keep open the trade routes inherited from the
colonial era. He also strove to preserve Haiti’s plantations (albeit in the
hands of black and mixed-race officers rather than white planters) and
made no effort to export the Haitian slave revolt. Further, Dessalines
enforced a strict feudal system among former slaves and encouraged slave
traders to deliver some of their human cargo to Haiti. It is clear from
the sources, too, that he drew from a Creole culture that incorporated
American and European influences as well as African.
All of these policies, it should be noted, were inspired by the Atlantic
system, not developed in opposition to it, and could have been embraced
by colonial officials and planters of any race in the eighteenth century. Of
course one should not deny entirely the revolutionary nature of a rebel
colony governed by a black ex-slave. But the reputation of Dessalines as
a destroyer of worlds, one whose political agenda could be summarized
as “coupé têtes, brûlé cazes” (cut off heads and burn houses), must be
thoroughly reappraised, along with, by extension, the image of early Haiti
as a pariah nation isolated from and at war with white Atlantic societies.4
Dessalines’s cunning ways, occasionally conservative policies, and
international savvy will surprise those of his admirers who view him as a
one-sided Haitian patriot; these characteristics also stunned contemporaries
such as Louverture, who looked down on him as an obedient and dim-
witted executioner only to see him outsmart and replace them. To fully
account for his actions, one must thus question ideological factors such
as his supposed yearning for independence and abolition (cited by his
admirers to the present time) and correct for the lingering echoes of
antiquated psychoracial explanations such as his innate thirst for blood
(cited by his detractors in the nineteenth century). Instead, highly pragmatic
and personal motives more convincingly explain some of his policies,
starting with his economic interests as a planter and including his political
ambitions as an officer and statesman, his personal grudges and friendships,
and the strategic and commercial needs of his new country. Despite the
sharp contrast usually drawn between Dessalines and Louverture, each of
whom has his supporters in present-day Haiti, the former’s combination of
revolutionary activism with hard-nosed realpolitik eerily matches the latter’s,
which suggests that, ultimately, one last dynamic may have been unfolding:
Dessalines as a rebellious son, simultaneously emulating and betraying the
man who had been his superior for so many years.
4 Ardouin, Études, 6: 241–42 (quotation, 6: 242). According to Beaubrun Ardouin,
Dessalines made this comment when advising Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de
Miranda to break away from Spain by using violence instead of issuing a formal declara-
tion of independence.

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The early life of Jean-Jacques Dessalines is shrouded in mystery. He is
traditionally presented as a créole (Caribbean-born) roofer born in Cormier
around 1758 who was held in slavery first by a white man named Jacques
Duclos and subsequently by a free black after whom he was named. But
several contemporaries actually described him as a congo or bossale (African-
born), not a créole, though this may have been a slur meant to cast him as a
barbaric African chieftain. In either scenario Dessalines was a nouveau libre,
a slave emancipated by the Haitian Revolution (as opposed to the anciens
libres who were already free when the revolution began), and a noir of full
African descent (as opposed to the mixed-race mulâtres), both of which put
him at the bottom of the colonial pecking order. Dessalines’s black owner
was apparently Janvier Dessalines, who married Toussaint Louverture’s
daughter in 1787, which would explain the unequal relationship that devel-
oped between Louverture, a free black, and Dessalines, the former slave of
his son-in-law.5
Dessalines’s contentious relationship with anciens libres such as Louver-
ture, the mulâtres, and the grands blancs (white planters) must be under-
stood within this social context; so should the contempt with which his
more elite contemporaries, both whites and people of color, viewed him.
At the risk of venturing into ex post facto psychoanalyzing, one could easily
interpret Dessalines’s resentful ambition as a reflection of his humble ori-
gins. Conversely, if he was indeed a créole craftsman as the tradition claims,
he would have considered himself one step above African-born field hands,
a prejudice that is also consistent with his political record.
Dessalines’s rise from anonymous slave to French general took
place entirely under the supervision of Louverture, who appreciated his
courage on the battlefield and severity toward the black rank and file.
Like Louverture, Dessalines played an obscure role in the 1791 slave
revolt that began the Haitian Revolution, served in the Spanish army in
nearby Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) in 1793–94, and joined
the French revolutionary army after France’s 1794 law of emancipation
and Louverture’s volte-face. As Louverture gained full control of French
5 On Dessalines’s origins, see Laurent, Six études; Dupont, Jean-Jacques Dessalines,
73–77. On Dessalines as a bossale, see M. [Jean-Baptiste] Lemonnier-Delafosse, Seconde
campagne de Saint-Domingue du 1er décembre 1803 au 15 juillet 1809 (Havre, France,
1846), 126; A[lphonse] de Lamartine, Toussaint Louverture: Poème dramatique (Paris,
1850), xxiv; Dorsinville, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, 5–11; Antonio del Monte y Tejada, His-
toria de Santo Domingo (Ciudad Trujillo, Dominican Republic, 1953), 3: 246–47. On
Janvier Dessalines, see “Acte de mariage” (Oct. 4, 1787), 1DPPC 2325, Archives nationales
d’outre-mer (ANOM), Aix-en-Provence; Desaline [sic], “Etat des services tant militaires
civils que militaires troupes soldées de Jeanvier Dessalines” (ca. 1796), COL E129, FM,
DPPC, ANOM. These documents were communicated to me by Jean-Louis Donnadieu.
On Janvier Dessalines as the owner of Dessalines, see [François-Richard de Tussac], Cri
des colons: Contre un ouvrage de M. l’evêque et senateur Grégoire, ayant pour titre de la lit-
térature des nègres . . . (Paris, 1810), 229.

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Saint Domingue in the late 1790s, Dessalines’s stature grew, and he was
eventually promoted to général de division, a rank that only two other
black generals had achieved in the colony (Louverture and his nephew
Moïse). Even so, Louverture saw him as a subordinate more than a peer
and employed him for missions that required more brawn than brains, such
as executing civilians. Delegating unsavory tasks to Dessalines also gave
Louverture plausible deniability when his more controversial policies came
under attack, as they often did, and Louverture was quick to blame any
excesses on his supposedly overeager subordinate.6
Two aspects of Dessalines’s service during Louverture’s apex in
1798–1801, both of which were well documented by nineteenth-century
historians but tend to be forgotten today, are worth noting here due to
their later significance. The first was his role as inspector of cultivation
in the western province of Saint Domingue, which he fulfilled with
brutal efficiency as he forced former slaves (now renamed “cultivators”)
to continue working on plantations despite the 1794 general law of
emancipation. The second was his attitude during the popular uprising led
by Louverture’s nephew Moïse in October 1801, which saw cultivators near
Cap Français (present-day Cap Haïtien or Cap) rebel against Louverture’s
harsh plantation regulations (Figure III). Though the area fell outside
his immediate command, Dessalines eagerly joined in the repression that
followed the uprising and that led to the deaths of an estimated three
thousand cultivators.7
Dessalines’s record as inspector of cultivation and his behavior
during the October 1801 Moïse uprising cannot be explained using the
dominant black nationalist model (or the older “racist madman”
interpretation), since in both situations he defended planters, most of them
white, from their rebellious black workers, thus directly contradicting
his perceived stands on race and abolition. The most likely explanation
for Dessalines’s conduct was that he stood to benefit, both economically
and politically, from the cultivators’ continued exploitation. The planters
who had fled Saint Domingue during the earlier slave revolt qualified as
émigrés (counterrevolutionaries) under French revolutionary law; in their
absence, their estates had accordingly been confiscated by the domaines
Madiou, Histoire d’Haiti, 2: 50; Ardouin, Études, 4: 243.
6
7On Dessalines’s strictness with cultivators, see M[ichel] E[tienne] Descourtilz,
Voyage d’un naturaliste en Haïti, 1799–1803 (1809; repr., Paris, 1935), 166; Madiou, Histoire
d’Haiti, 2: 106; Ardouin, Études, 4: 405; Robert K. Lacerte, “The Evolution of Land and
Labor in the Haitian Revolution, 1791–1820,” Americas 34, no. 4 (April 1978): 449–59.
On the Moïse uprising, see Law to Joseph Inginac, Oct. 26, 1801, Colonial Office (CO)
137/106, National Archives of the U.K. (NA), Kew; Silas Talbot to James Madison,
Oct. 30, 1801, 208 MI/2, Archives Nationales, Paris; Toussaint Louverture, “Récit des
événements qui se sont passés dans la partie du nord de Saint-Domingue,” Nov. 7, 1801,
CO 137/106, NA; “Extracts of letters,” Philadelphia Aurora, no. 3418, Nov. 30, 1801, 2;
[Painty?] to Médéric Moreau de Saint-Méry, Feb. 27, 1802, FM/F/3/202, ANOM.

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Figure III
Saint Domingue (Haiti) during the revolutionary era. Santo Domingo
(Dominican Republic) was also under French control from 1801 to 1809.
Adapted from David Patrick Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The
British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–1798 (Oxford, 1982), xii. Drawn
by Rebecca Wrenn.
(public estates) and leased to well-connected officers such as Louverture

and Dessalines. Contemporary claims that Dessalines owned dozens of
plantations might have been exaggerated, but during the revolution he
became a large landowner who could not allow his estates to wither due to
the former slaves’ opposition to plantation work.8 Such financial self-interest
led him to perpetuate the forced labor model that had once exploited him,
a contradiction that had been common among black freedmen before the
revolution. Dessalines must also have agreed with Louverture’s argument that
8 Pamphile de Lacroix, La Révolution de Haïti, ed. Pierre Pluchon (Paris, 1995),
275. The actual list of Dessalines’s plantations remains to be drawn up. The Habitation
Marchand appears repeatedly in documents such as Dessalines to Toussaint Louverture,
Apr. 9, 1802 [19 Germinal 10], Sc. Micro R-2228 reel 4, Schomburg Center, New York
Public Library. An Habitation Délugé is mentioned in Dessalines to Donatien de
Rochambeau, May 21, 1802 [1 Prairial 10], Ms. Hait. 66-102 (6), Boston Public Library.

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using some degree of violence to ensure the prosperity of the plantations was
a necessary evil. “If I made my people work, it was for them to understand
the price of liberty without license, it was to prevent the corruption of
morals, it was for the general happiness of the island,” Louverture later
wrote.9
Dessalines’s political ambitions also deserve a mention. Born around
1743, Louverture was an aging statesman who under article 30 of his July
1801 constitution was entitled to select his own successor as governor-
general of Saint Domingue. There were several potential candidates for the
post, the most prominent of whom were Dessalines and Moïse. This likely
explains Dessalines’s enthusiasm for helping to suppress the Moïse uprising:
he must have seen the episode as an opportunity to eliminate a man who,
as a général de division and Louverture’s nephew, was a likely heir and rival.
If such was his plan, it succeeded brilliantly: in the aftermath of his failed
uprising, Moïse was court-martialed and shot on Louverture’s orders.
Since Dessalines was under the direct command of Louverture during
the period summarized here, he did not entirely control his actions and
cannot be fully held accountable for his conduct. He may have been, to use
a familiar line of defense, “just following orders.” The period after 1802, by
contrast, saw the emergence of Dessalines as an independent agent whose
actions were more representative of his deep-seated agenda.
Concerned by Toussaint Louverture’s increasingly autonomous

policies as governor of Saint Domingue, First Consul of France Napoléon
Bonaparte assembled a large army as soon as the October 1801 peace
protocols with Britain made a cross-Atlantic expedition feasible. Led by
his brother-in-law Victoire (or Charles Victor) Emmanuel Leclerc, the
expedition reached Cap Français in February 1802.10 Three months of
bitter and inconclusive fighting between Leclerc’s and Louverture’s armies
followed, marked by the siege of Crête-à-Pierrot (in which Jean-Jacques
Dessalines played a justly celebrated role) and the massacre of about three
thousand civilians (which established Dessalines’s notorious reputation
among white contemporaries). By May general exhaustion on both sides
had led to a ceasefire agreement under which Louverture obtained a general
amnesty for his subordinates (Dessalines included), while he chose to retire
to his plantation at Ennery.
Because of the May armistice, Dessalines and most other revolutionary
leaders spent most of the remainder of 1802 serving in the French army
9 “Mémoire du général Toussaint Louverture,” ca. September 1802, dossier 1, AF/
IV/1213, Archives Nationales. All translations from French and Spanish are my own.
10 Commonly referred to as Charles Victor, Leclerc is listed on his baptismal record
as Victoire: Curé Aubert, “Extrait des registres de baptême,” June 25, 1786, 7Yd328, Ser-
vice Historique de la Défense, Département de l’Armée de Terre, Vincennes.

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under the direct command of Leclerc, who had been sent by Bonaparte
to restore French control, and possibly slavery, in the colony. Dessalines’s
biographers rationalize this surprising period of accommodation as a
temporary retreat until yellow fever thinned out French ranks. But the
extraordinary extent of his collaboration with Leclerc’s expeditionary army
indicates that there was more to Dessalines’s attitude than mere tactical
considerations.
One of the most infamous events of the Leclerc expedition took place
in June 1802 when Leclerc, after concluding that Louverture was planning
to resume his revolt at the earliest opportunity, ordered him deported to
France in violation of the recent amnesty. Louverture’s surprise arrest and
subsequent death in exile are typically portrayed as indicative of Leclerc’s
and Bonaparte’s racist, imperialist bent and lack of honor, but several
authors, including Louverture’s son Isaac, assert that it was Dessalines
who initially denounced Louverture to Leclerc.11 Heretofore overlooked
documents confirm that Dessalines was indeed partly responsible for
Louverture’s arrest and—more interestingly—flesh out his motives for this
controversial move.
Dessalines’s involvement began two weeks before Louverture’s arrest,
when on May 20, 1802, he met with French general Jean-Baptiste Brunet
to complain that “Toussaint had only used him as a workhorse, that he
had never called on him when an assembly met, and that he thought that
Toussaint feared him more than he loved him.”12 Two days later, when
Dessalines learned that Louverture had failed to instruct a local rebel leader
to lay down his arms per the recent ceasefire agreement, he immediately
wrote Leclerc to denounce Louverture’s conduct as “extraordinary.” 13
Dessalines was subsequently invited to meet Leclerc in Cap Français, where
they no doubt discussed Louverture’s alleged disloyalty, since Leclerc cited
Dessalines’s accusations as one of the main reasons he decided to arrest
Louverture. So convinced was Leclerc of Dessalines’s trustworthiness that
he asked him to arrest Louverture personally. But Louverture unexpectedly
agreed to meet Brunet without a large escort on the evening of June 7 and
11 On Dessalines’s alleged role, see Antoine Métral, Histoire de l’expédition des
Français à Saint-Domingue sous le consulat de Napoléon Bonaparte (1802–1803) . . . (1825;
repr., Paris, 1985), 298; Lemonnier-Delafosse, Seconde campagne, 5, 48; Ardouin, Études,
5: 164–70; H. Castonnet des Fosses, La perte d’une colonie: La révolution de Saint-
Domingue (Paris, 1893), 312; C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture
and the San Domingo Revolution (1963; repr., New York, 1989), 333. Louverture
remained unaware of his subordinate’s betrayal. Louverture to Napoléon Bonaparte,
July 20, 1802 [1 Thermidor 10], dossier 1, AF/IV/1213, Archives Nationales.
12 Jean-Baptiste Brunet to Donatien de Rochambeau, May 20, 1802, lot 224, Vente
Rochambeau, Philippe Rouillac Auction House, http://www.rouillac.com/da-FR-7-16
-34461-grid-1-0-orangerie_de_cheverny_pour_la_20eme_anne_fonds_rochambeau.
13 Jean-Jacques Dessalines to Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc, May 22 1802 [2 Prairial
10], Sc. Micro R-2228 reel 4, Schomburg Center.

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was arrested without the need for Dessalines’s assistance.14 Brunet must
have relied on his tacit acquiescence nonetheless, because a list of “extraor-
dinary expenses incurred by general Brunet in regards to [the arrest of]
Toussaint” started with “gifts in wine and liquor, gifts to Dessalines and his
spouse, money to his officers: 4000 francs.”15
Dessalines’s willingness to denounce Louverture, just like his role in
the Moïse uprising, is best understood when placed within a personal con-
text. Politically, Louverture’s exile vacated the spot of leader of black Saint
Domingue, which Dessalines hoped to secure for himself (Louverture’s
sons St. Jean, Isaac, and Placide, who could conceivably have inherited
their father’s mantle, were also deported). Financially, Brunet’s “gifts” may
have eased any misgivings Dessalines had about Louverture’s demise. Last
and most importantly, Dessalines resented Louverture for looking down on
him as a workhorse, as he had explained to Brunet. Another conversation
following Louverture’s arrest was equally revealing. “Dessalines is pleased
with the arrest of Toussaint,” Brunet wrote, because he “never gave him
anything but ingratitude.”16
Armed resistance to the French expedition’s presence resumed in June–

July 1802, when Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc’s attempt to disarm cultivators
and the news of the brutal restoration of French power in Guadeloupe con-
vinced many black Dominguans that he and Napoléon Bonaparte planned
to restore slavery in Saint Domingue.17 For months, however, the rebellion
remained a grassroots movement solely involving runaway plantation labor-
ers. Despite the rumors about a potential restoration of slavery, the officers
of color who had rallied to Leclerc’s side after the May ceasefire remained
in French employ, including Dessalines, who spent the summer of 1802
fighting popular uprisings, not participating in them.
The role played by Dessalines in containing the cultivators’ revolt
remains controversial in Haiti, where patriotic historians are unwilling to
14 Dessalines to Donatien de Rochambeau, June 6, 1802 [17 Prairial 10], box
6/462, Rochambeau Papers, Special and Area Studies Collections, University of Florida,
Gainesville; Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc to Denis Decrès, June 11, 1802 [22 Prairial 10],
CC9B/19, Archives Nationales; Leclerc to Napoléon Bonaparte, June 6, 1802 [17 Prairial
10], Leclerc to Decrès, June 15, 1802 [26 Prairial 10], B7/26, Service Historique de la
Défense, Département de l’Armée de Terre; Jean-Baptiste Brunet to Victoire Emmanuel
Leclerc, June 9, 1802 [20 Prairial 10], Kurt Fisher Collection, folder C25, Howard
University, Washington, D.C.
15 Jean-Baptiste Brunet to Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc, June 19, 1802 [30 Prairial
10], box 2:4, John Kobler/Haitian Revolution Collection, MG 140, Schomburg Center.
See also Brunet to Leclerc, June 19, 1802 [30 Prairial 10], 135AP/6, Archives Nationales.
16 Jean-Baptiste Brunet to Donatien de Rochambeau, June 15, 1802, lot 224, Vente
Rochambeau, Philippe Rouillac Auction House.
17 Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc to Denis Decrès, Aug. 9, 1802 [21 Thermidor 10],
CC9B/19, Archives Nationales.

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admit that their revolutionary hero spent the summer of 1802 persecuting
black cultivators on France’s behalf. Convoluted rationalizing or outright
denial is the norm. Gérard Mentor Laurent claimed that Dessalines was actu-
ally playing a double game, pretending to combat the rebels so as to have an
excuse to request ammunition from the French, which he would then sur-
reptitiously pass on to the rebel side. Jean Fouchard, for his part, preferred to
denounce the letters retracing Dessalines’s role in the counterinsurgency opera-
tion as forgeries rather than dare to undermine his historical reputation.18
Dessalines’s role in the French disarmament campaign is actually
well documented, particularly in the day-to-day divisional records kept at
the French army archives in Vincennes. General Donatien-Marie-Joseph
de Vimeur, Vicomte de Rochambeau, described Dessalines and another
black general as “two false and perfidious man who are secretly meditat-
ing new crimes,” but other French generals, including Leclerc, viewed
him as genuinely committed to the disarmament campaign.19 Following
Dessalines’s first major operation, the disarmament of the La Brande area,
near Plaisance, Jean-Baptiste Brunet’s chief of staff, Pierre Thouvenot, wrote
in awe that “for seven days, Dessalines has been hunting the brigands of la
Brande the way one hunts wild beasts. He has shot, clubbed, and hanged on
a daily basis.”20 “Dessalines works like a god,” Thouvenot also wrote, while
Brunet emphasized that “Dessalines is doing wonders” and Leclerc informed
Bonaparte that he was using Dessalines as the “butcher of the blacks.”21
Based on these reports, Fouchard’s claim that Dessalines never took part
in the disarmament campaign must be dismissed outright, while Laurent’s
assertion that Dessalines was secretly assisting the rebels cannot be accepted
until it is proven with actual documentation. It was not until the end of the
summer that Leclerc finally expressed doubts about Dessalines’s loyalty: in
18 Laurent, Six études, 54–57; Jean Fouchard, The Haitian Maroons: Liberty or
Death, trans. A. Faulkner Watts (New York, 1981), 358.
19 Donatien de Rochambeau to Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc, July 28, 1802, lot
216, Vente Rochambeau, Philippe Rouillac Auction House (quotation). On the
Rochambeau-Dessalines feud, see also Rochambeau to Dessalines, July 25, 1802, AR-5,
Nemours Collection, University of Puerto Rico; Dessalines to Brig. Gen. Jean-Baptiste
Brunet, Aug. 10, 1802, 135AP/6, Archives Nationales; Brunet to Leclerc, Aug. 16, 1802,
B7/19, Service Historique de la Défense, Département de l’Armée de Terre; Leclerc to
Rochambeau, Aug. 17, 1802, lot 215, Vente Rochambeau, Philippe Rouillac Auction
House.
20 Pierre Thouvenot to Bertrand Clauzel, Aug. 13, 1802 [25 Thermidor 10], B7/19,
Service Historique de la Défense, Département de l’Armée de Terre.
21 Pierre Thouvenot to Bertrand Clauzel, Aug. 23, 1802 [5 Fructidor 10], B7/19,
ibid. (“works like a god”); Jean-Baptiste Brunet to Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc, Aug. 24,
1802 [6 Fructidor 10], B7/20, ibid. (“doing wonders”); Leclerc to Napoléon Bonaparte,
Sept. 16, 1802 [29 Fructidor 10], in Paul Roussier, ed., Lettres du général Leclerc (Paris,
1937), 228–37 (“butcher,” 230).

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late September he informed Bonaparte that “Dessalines, who until now had
not thought of rebelling, is now thinking of it.”22
However bothersome to his present-day admirers, Dessalines’s conduct
in the summer of 1802 was consistent with his previous record and his eco-
nomic interests. Given his background as Louverture’s inspector of cultiva-
tion and his actions during the Moïse uprising, punishing the cultivators
who refused to go back to work in the summer of 1802 was hardly incoher-
ent behavior. As a planter, Dessalines had a vested interest in securing the
long-term submissiveness of Saint Domingue’s labor force, which is proba-
bly what he had in mind when he wrote that “I hanged a few [rebel cultiva-
tors] and shot the others, and I hope that ten years from now la Brande will
remember the lesson I taught them.”23 The fact that most of the rebels that
summer were described by contemporaries as congos (African-born) may
have added to his eagerness to extinguish the uprising, if he was indeed a
créole (Caribbean-born) who belonged to a more elite and cosmopolitan
stratum of the population.
Armed resistance remained limited to African-born cultivators until the
end of August, when a new uprising broke out in the Artibonite region. It
was attributed to Charles Bélair, a créole general who, like many other officers
in Louverture’s army, had rejoined the French army after the May armi-
stice.24 The Bélair uprising was thus particularly significant, as it marked
the first time since the spring campaign that a colonial officer of any promi-
nence had rebelled against France.
The French, their ranks depleted by yellow fever, were by then heavily
reliant on colonial units and would likely have been defeated if all officers
of color had followed Bélair into rebellion, but no such thing happened.
Instead Bélair, whose personal involvement in the uprising was uncertain
at first, was denounced as its main instigator by Dessalines’s second. 25
Dessalines himself immediately expressed “his ardent desire to help stop
this insurrection.”26 He seemed particularly eager to capture Bélair’s wife,
22 Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc to Napoléon Bonaparte, Sept. 26, 1802 [4 Vendémiaire
11], B7/26, Service Historique de la Défense, Département de l’Armée de Terre.
23 Dessalines to Jean-Baptiste Brunet, Aug. 11, 1802 [23 Thermidor 10], B7/6, ibid.
24 On the Bélair uprising, see Faustin Répussard to Donatien de Rochambeau,
Aug. 21, 1802 [3 Fructidor 10], BN08270/lot 110, Rochambeau Papers; Dessalines to
Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc, Sept. 1, 1802 [14 Fructidor 10], reel 4, Sc. Micro R-2228,
Schomburg Center; François Pageot to Rochambeau, Sept. 9, 1802 [22 Fructidor 10],
box 11/994, Rochambeau Papers.
25 On the French army’s vulnerability, see Leclerc to Bonaparte, Sept. 16, 1802, in
Roussier, Lettres du général Leclerc, 229. On the denunciation of Bélair, see Louis Baz-
elais to Donatien de Rochambeau, Aug. 23, 1802 [5 Fructidor 10], box 10/864, Rocham-
beau Papers.
26 Dessalines to Jean-Baptiste Brunet, Aug. 26, 1802 [8 Fructidor 10], B7/6, Service
Historique de la Défense, Département de l’Armée de Terre.

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Sanitte, whom he described as “a tigress.”27 Dessalines did not personally
nab the Bélairs, but after their capture he wrote Leclerc that he had “unde-
niable evidence that Charles Bélair was the leader of the latest insurrection”
and asked that “Charles and his wife be punished.”28 They were sentenced
to death and executed on October 5.
Dessalines’s opposition to the Bélair uprising, even more than his role
during the summer disarmament campaign, puzzled Laurent, who claimed
that Dessalines had actually tried to free Bélair, only to see his efforts
ruined by his wife, Sanitte. 29 This Byzantine explanation is not backed
by evidence; attributing Dessalines’s actions to his social profile, politi-
cal ambitions, and personal grudges is more consistent with the historical
record. In a letter expressing his eagerness to combat the “cowardly treason
of the miserable Charles Bélair,” Dessalines explained that Bélair’s follow-
ers likely included the members of a band of African-born maroons he
called the “Doco” and that now was the time to finally eradicate a rebellious
group that Louverture, and before him Spain, had long combated due to
its visceral opposition to plantation agriculture.30 On a more political level,
Bélair, usually described as Louverture’s nephew, had close personal ties to
the fallen governor of Saint Domingue. This made him another strong can-
didate for his succession, amply explaining Dessalines’s refusal to assist him
when he raised the standard of revolt.
Personal animus might also have been at play, since a French observer
had once described Bélair as an “enemy of General Dessalines in his
heart.” 31 Bélair had fought under Dessalines’s direct command during
the spring 1802 campaign, but he had used his personal relationship with
Louverture to appeal Dessalines’s orders and ultimately ignore them. 32
Such insubordination had outraged Dessalines, who had complained to
Louverture of Bélair’s “stubbornness” and even accused him of treason.33
27 Dessalines to Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc, Sept. 3, 1802 [16 Fructidor 10], Sc.
Micro R-2228 reel 4, Schomburg Center.
28 Dessalines to Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc, Sept. 10, 1802 [23 Fructidor 10], B7/7,
Service Historique de la Défense, Département de l’Armée de Terre.
29 Laurent, Six études, 34–41.
30 Dessalines to Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc, Aug. 26, 1802 [8 Fructidor 10], Ms.
Hait. 71-4, Boston Public Library. The term “Doco” may have referred to the Doko-
Uyanga people of Nigeria or the Dokoa of the Congo.
31 [Pascal], “Mémoire secret,” ca. 1801, Sc. Micro R-2228 reel 8, Schomburg
Center.
32 Charles Bélair to Toussaint Louverture, Mar. 28, 1802, in Cauna, Toussaint
Louverture, 15. See also Bélair to Louverture, Apr. 1, 1802 [11 Germinal 10], Sc. Micro
R-2228 reel 5, Schomburg Center; Bélair to Louverture, Apr. 26, 1802 [6 Floréal 10], ibid.
33 Dessalines to Toussaint Louverture, Apr. 29, 1802 [9 Floréal 10], Sc. Micro
R-2228 reel 4, Schomburg Center (quotation). For accusations of treason, see Dessalines
to Louverture, May 4, 1802 [14 Floréal 10], Fisher Collection, folder C2; Dessalines to
Louverture, May 5, 1802 [15 Floréal 10], ibid., folder 23C.

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The French had also encouraged Bélair to arrest Dessalines, which must
have further outraged him if he heard of it.34 Collaborating with Bélair’s
later capture and execution, in this context, must have appeared to
Dessalines an appropriate way to avenge his rebellious subordinate’s previ-
ous slights while eliminating a rival for Louverture’s succession and finally
subduing a congo group irrevocably opposed to plantation work.
Dessalines’s habit of denouncing his competitors as traitors to incite
the French to execute or deport them was so common in 1802 that one
can speak of a pattern (such denunciations were frequent in the politically
competitive era of the Haitian Revolution). His last victims were the black
generals Jacques Maurepas and Henry Christophe, whom he denounced
to Leclerc in September (the former, whom Leclerc had long suspected,
was executed; the latter defected to the rebel side before he could be
apprehended). Leclerc by that time was harboring serious doubts about
Dessalines’s ultimate intentions as well, so denouncing other colonial
officers had the added benefit of burnishing Dessalines’s credentials as a
devoted servant of the French cause until the time came to defect, which
Dessalines finally did in October when Leclerc sent orders for his arrest.35
The defection of most officers of color from the French army in October
1802 seemingly brought greater clarity to the revolutionary struggle, which
is generally presented from that point on as a binary conflict pitting a
white French army bent on the restoration of slavery against a black and
mixed-race rebel army committed to emancipation and independence.
The contrast seems particularly sharp after November 1802, when Victoire
Emmanuel Leclerc died of yellow fever and was replaced as captain general
of the colony by Donatien de Rochambeau, an aristocratic French general
with a reputation for racial bigotry.36
But this neatly delineated portrayal oversimplifies the social and racial
complexity of the Haitian Revolution. Disputes pitting rank-and-file black
cultivators yearning for yeomanry against landowners such as Jean-Jacques
Dessalines—and, more generally, African-born congos against créole officers
who had adopted the Caribbean plantation model—continued to plague
the revolutionary struggle. As shown in the nineteenth-century works of
34 Donatien de Rochambeau to Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc, Mar. 27, 1802 [6 Ger-
minal 10], Ms. Hait. 75-47, Boston Public Library.
35 On the denunciation of Jacques Maurepas and Henry Christophe, see Victoire
Emmanuel Leclerc to Napoléon Bonaparte, Sept. 26, 1802 [4 Vendémiaire 11], B7/26,
Service Historique de la Défense, Département de l’Armée de Terre. On Leclerc’s sus-
picions regarding Dessalines, see Leclerc to Donatien de Rochambeau, Oct. 12, 1802, lot
215, Vente Rochambeau, Philippe Rouillac Auction House.
36 Donatien de Rochambeau was the son of the famous French general of the same
name who fought in the American Revolution.

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Thomas Madiou and Beaubrun Ardouin (and Carolyn E. Fick’s more
recent project), Dessalines faced determined opposition from large bands of
African-born marrons (runaway cultivators). In the months that followed his
defection from the French army, Dessalines accordingly arranged to have his
two main congo rivals, Sans Souci and Lamour Derance, arrested and killed.
Thousands of angry cultivators subsequently refused to be incorporated into
his army and, amazingly, chose to ally themselves with French expeditionary
leader Rochambeau instead.37 Even after the French evacuated the colony,
Dessalines continued to battle renegade groups totaling fifteen hundred to
four thousand congos, one of which called itself “the Rochambeau army.”38
Dessalines eventually managed to capture and execute their most prominent
chief, Jacques Tellier, but lower-class opposition to the Haitian landowning
elite was there to stay, most famously in the form of an independent state
established by Jean-Baptiste Perrier (Goman) in southern Haiti in 1806–20
and later reestablished in the 1844–48 Piquet uprising.39
Another issue that reflected Dessalines’s composite politics during the
last year of the Haitian Revolution was his tentative embrace of indepen-
dence. Whether his predecessor, Toussaint Louverture, secretly aspired to
sever the colonial bond is an actively disputed issue in the historiography;
but scholars take for granted that Dessalines, who famously delivered
Haiti’s 1804 declaration of independence, overtly aspired to statehood by
the time he left the French army in October 1802.40 The historical record,
however, is far more convoluted. When Dessalines made public his deci-
sion to defect from the French army in an October 24, 1802, letter, he
made no overt call for independence and instead described himself as a
“Frenchman, a friend of my country and liberty” who was reluctantly join-
ing the rebel side because of recent French atrocities and concerns that
Napoléon Bonaparte planned to restore slavery in Saint Domingue.41 In
37 On the conflict between Dessalines and the marrons, see Madiou, Histoire
d’Haiti, 2: 322; Ardouin, Études, 5: 373, 420; Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti:
The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990), 216, 232. On the
marrons’ support for the French, see Pierre Thouvenot to Denis Decrès, Aug. 26, 1803,
B7/20, Service Historique de la Défense, Département de l’Armée de Terre.
38 La Chevardière to Denis Decrès, May 22, 1804 [2 Prairial 12], CC9/B21, Archives
Nationales.
39 On Jacques Tellier’s death, see “Déclaration que fait le sieur Beaumont . . . ,”
ca. December 1804, 1M593, Service Historique de la Défense, Département de l’Armée
de Terre. On nineteenth-century labor unrest, see Michel Hector, “Les deux grandes
rebellions paysannes de la première moitié du XIXe siècle haïtien,” in Rétablissement de
l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises 1802: Ruptures et continuités de la politique coloniale
française, ed. Yves Bénot and Marcel Dorigny (Paris, 2003), 179–99, esp. 180, 191–95.
40 Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 293.
41 Dessalines to Pierre Quantin, Oct. 24, 1802 [2 Brumaire 11], box 13/1238,
Rochambeau Papers.

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the months that followed, Dessalines and his rebel army presented them-
selves as enemies of the conservative Consulate and the planter lobby but
not of France itself, whose revolutionary ideals they said they were defend-
ing. Fighting under the revolutionary tricolor, they made regular references
to their loyalty to revolutionary France and to the Republican general Jean
Moreau.42 Far from being a distinctly Haitian struggle for independence,
the rebellion was thus seen, at least initially, as a Caribbean extension of
Parisian political disputes and, more generally, as a subset of the pan-Atlantic
revolutionary movements of the era.
A heavily mythologized moment in the war of independence is
the Arcahaye conference of May 1803, where according to popular lore
Dessalines tore the white strip from the French tricolor to signify his hatred
for France and the whites, thus creating the Haitian national flag. Claude
B. Auguste and Marcel B. Auguste have conclusively shown that Dessalines
did not design the flag at the conference.43 To this, one should add that he
had not even embraced independence yet. According to a black sailor who
was captured by the French after he attended the conference, while discuss-
ing the issue of independence “Dessalines was rather inclined to find some
arrangement [with France], but [General Henry] Christophe was opposed
to it.” 44 This crucial piece of evidence—the only surviving firsthand
account of the Arcahaye conference—indicates that, seven months after
defecting from the French army, Dessalines had still not decided whether
to forsake France once and for all.
The appeal of French revolutionary ideals, especially the 1794 emancipa-
tion law, probably underpinned Dessalines’s reluctance to sever all ties to
the metropolis, as did hopes that this reactionary phase in French colonial
policies would eventually fade away (as a similar phase in 1797–98 had). There
are also indications that Dessalines modeled his policies after the diplomatic
environment on both sides of the Atlantic. Though isolated by a French naval
blockade, the Dominguan rebels were kept informed of international devel-
opments by black rebels deported from Guadeloupe and Martinique, British
prisoners, and the British navy. As long as the Peace of Amiens endured in
Europe, embracing independence must have seemed suicidal to Dessalines
42 Pierre Cangé to Lacosse, Jan. 3, 1803 [13 Nivôse 11], box 15/1488, Rochambeau
Papers; Jean-Baptiste Brunet to Donatien de Rochambeau, Feb. 17, 1803 [28 Pluviôse
11], box 16/1625a, ibid.; Charles d’Hénin, “Mémoire historique et politique sur la situa-
´
tion actuelle de la colonie,” July–August 1803, p. 12, box 19/2016, ibid.; Jan Pachonski
and Reuel K. Wilson, Poland’s Caribbean Tragedy: A Study of Polish Legions in the Hai-
tian War of Independence, 1802–1803 (Boulder, Colo., 1986), 203.
43 Claude B. Auguste and Marcel B. Auguste, Pour le drapeau: Contribution a la
recherche sur les couleurs haïtiennes ([Canada], 1982), 78.
44 Louis-René de Latouche-Tréville to Denis Decrès, May 20, 1803 [30 Floréal 11],
CC9/B20, Archives Nationales.

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as France would simply send one army after another. By July 1803, however,
he learned that war had resumed between France and Britain, a develop-
ment that greatly increased the odds of a rebel victory. The changing dip-
lomatic environment probably explains why statements supporting outright
independence finally appeared in letters that Dessalines’s subordinates sent
to Jamaican and Cuban authorities in the summer and fall of 1803.45 War
between Europe’s colonial powers, Dessalines understood, now made it possi-
ble to break from France with impunity as long as he could strike an alliance
with France’s European and Caribbean rivals.
Jamaican manuscripts held at the National Archives of the United
Kingdom help document a wholly overlooked dimension of the Haitian war
of independence: the rebels’ diplomatic overtures to neighboring slave pow-
ers. These began in early August 1803, when Saint Domingue’s three main
factions (the French army, white planters, and the rebels) asked for help
from the British governor of Jamaica, George Nugent.46 Given the just-
resumed French-British war, Nugent promptly rejected the French army’s
pleas for assistance. He was more sympathetic to the plight of the white
planters from Port Républicain (later renamed Port-au-Prince) but took no
effective action on their behalf. He was, however, responsive to rebel over-
tures and sent two negotiators to ascertain Dessalines’s “future intentions
with regard to the white inhabitants [whom he feared Dessalines might
massacre], as well as his intercourse with this island [Jamaica].” He also
allowed the rebel envoy, L. Dufour, to buy some articles in Jamaica so as “to
conciliate the black chiefs as much as possible for the present.”47
The two British envoys met Dessalines in Gonaïves on August 27–30,
1803, then filed an extensive report that underlined Dessalines’s diplo-
matic and political acumen, along with continued troubles with the black
rank and file. After the envoys demanded the towns of Tiburon and Môle
Saint-Nicolas in exchange for a commercial treaty with Britain, Dessalines
adamantly refused for fear that such extensive concessions would incite his
45 On Guadeloupe, see George Nugent to John Sullivan, Aug. 12, 1802, CO
137/108, NA. On Martinique, see Guillaume Mauviel, “Mémoires sur Saint-Domingue
. . . ,” May 24, 1806, p. 48, 1M599, Service Historique de la Défense, Département de
l’Armée de Terre. On British prisoners, see Lyle Carmichael to Nugent, Apr. 4, 1803,
CO 137/110, NA. On the British navy, see Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, “Mémoire pour
servir à l’histoire d’Hayti,” June 22, 1804, p. 49, CC9B/27, Archives Nationales. For
the first appeals for independence, see Nugent to Robert Hobart, Aug. 9, 1803, CO
137/110, NA; Nicolas Geffrard to Sebastián Kindelán, Sept. 14, 1803 [27 Fructidor 11],
in José Luciano Franco, ed., Documentos para la historia de Haití en el Archivo Nacional
(Havana, Cuba, 1954), 152–54.
46 Nugent to Hobart, Aug. 9, 1803, CO 137/110, NA.
47 Nugent to Hobart, Aug. 9, 1803, CO 137/110, ibid. (quotations). See also L.
Dufour to Nugent, Aug. 15, 1803, CO 137/110, ibid.; Nugent to Nicolas Geffrard, Aug.
18, 1803, CO 137/110, ibid.; Nugent to Dessalines, Aug. 18, 1803, CO 137/110, ibid.

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supporters, particularly the congos, to reject his authority. Dessalines also

objected to British demands that he return plantations to their white own-
ers after independence (racial issues aside, Dessalines was probably reluc-
tant to cede plantations he had appropriated for himself). The negotiations
failed, but Dessalines must have calculated that he could reject such oner-
ous concessions while obtaining British assistance anyhow, even without
a formal treaty of amity, by banking on individual greed. He was correct:
Nugent’s own envoys sold him gunpowder and muskets, as did many
British captains in ensuing months.48 French calls for white unity in their
war against black rebellion—an argument they repeatedly used in their
appeals to their British, Spanish, and U.S. neighbors—fell on deaf ears.
Hoping to bypass Nugent’s envoys and their excessive demands but
also to negotiate directly from state to state (instead of colony to colony),
Dessalines wrote directly to the British government in September 1803. His
letter, written in a flowery style, cleverly heaped scorn on “Buonaparte”
before asking Britain to encourage other European nations to recognize
Saint Domingue’s independence.49 In his time Louverture had also tried to
establish direct channels to Britain, only to be told that he should negotiate
with the governor of Jamaica given the practical difficulties of exchang-
ing letters across the Atlantic; the pattern was replicated here, leading to a
temporary pause in Dessalines’s diplomacy while the British government’s
response made its way to the Caribbean.50
In the summer of 1803, Dessalines’s mixed-race second Nicolas Geffrard
also contacted the Spanish governor of Santiago de Cuba. Geffrard’s letter,
notable for its elegant style and erudite references to European antiquity (it
described Rochambeau as “a genius more fecund than Nero, Caligula, and
Heliogabalus”), emphasized common grounds between Dominguans and
Cubans by reminding its reader that mixed-race exiles from the Haitian
Revolution had peacefully found refuge in Cuba around 1800.51 It also
promised not to export the Dominguan slave revolt to Cuban shores, a
shrewd move given the centrality of security fears in Spanish policy. It
then got to the letter’s main purpose: to invite Spanish merchant ships to
48 On the negotiations, see Hugh Cathcart and James Walker, account of their
mission to Dessalines, Aug. 27–30, 1803, CO 137/110, ibid. On British demands, see
also demands by George Nugent and John T. Duckworth to Dessalines, Sept. 17, 1803,
Admiralty (ADM) 1/253, ibid. On Dessalines’s response, see also Dessalines to Nugent,
Sept. 2, 1803, ADM 1/253, ibid. On the envoys’ sales, see Duckworth to Evan Nepean,
Sept. 29, 1803, ADM 1/253, ibid. On other sales, see Pierre Thouvenot to Denis Decrès,
Aug. 14, 1803, B7/20, Service Historique de la Défense, Département de l’Armée de Terre.
49 Dessalines to British Minister, Sept. 2, 1803, CO 137/110, NA.
50 Joseph Bunel to Toussaint Louverture, Aug. 22, 1801, Ms. Hait. 66-72, Boston
Public Library.
51 Geffrard to Kindelán, Sept. 14, 1803 [27 Fructidor 11], in Franco, Documentos
para la historia de Haití, 152–54 (quotation, 153).

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rebel-held ports. Spanish authorities did not respond, in part because they
were unsure of the letter’s authenticity but also because they were generally
unwilling to be drawn into the Dominguan quagmire (they declined simi-
lar French demands for assistance).52
In the last component of his multipronged commercial offensive,
Dessalines also asked U.S. president Thomas Jefferson to encourage
Americans to trade in rebel-controlled areas, where they would find
“an immense harvest in the warehouses and a still more plentiful one
expected.”53 Jefferson, torn between the commercial interests of the U.S.
mercantile community and the security fears of the country’s plant-
ers, did not respond or take action. But his neutral stance meant that, in
practice, U.S. merchants, who had established a lucrative trade with Saint
Domingue under Louverture, were free to head to French-held and rebel-
held ports at their own risk.54
Taken together, Dessalines’s international overtures during the last
months of the war of independence showed him to be a skillful statesman
well aware of the naval, commercial, and diplomatic requirements for vic-
tory. Far from pledging all-out war on white slave-owning colonies, he
promised nonaggression and profit in exchange for weapons and wove a
diplomatic web that stretched from Kingston to Santiago, Washington,
and London. Attentive to his interlocutors’ racial prejudices, he even used
mixed-race officers such as Dufour and Geffrard as intermediates—with
great success, since Governor Nugent’s wife noted admiringly in her diary
that Dufour was “not very dark” and spoke “good language.”55 These goals
and tactics were all reminiscent of Louverture’s own elaborate diplomatic
work in 1798–99, emphasizing the continuity as the rebel leadership passed
from the elder statesman to his supposedly more extremist rival. 56 One
could also draw a parallel with the longtime dream of Saint Domingue’s
white planters (and Caribbean colonists generally) to bypass French com-
mercial restrictions and trade directly with British and Spanish colonies and
the United States.
Jean-Jacques Dessalines and his officers declared independence after the

French evacuation from Cap Français on November 29, 1803, then again
52 For doubts about the authenticity of the letter, see Marqués de Someruelos to
[Sebastián Kindelán], Oct. 1, 1803, in Franco, Documentos para la historia de Haití,
155–56.
53 Gordon S. Brown, Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian
Revolution (Jackson, Miss., 2005), 233.
54 Arthur Scherr, Thomas Jefferson’s Haitian Policy: Myths and Realities (Lanham,
Md., 2011), 448.
55 Philip Wright, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801
to 1805 (Kingston, Jamaica, 2002), 173.
56 Philippe R. Girard, “Black Talleyrand: Toussaint Louverture’s Diplomacy,
1798–1802,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 66, no. 1 (January 2009): 87–124.

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more formally on January 1, 1804. The second declaration of independence

is a well-known document, generally described as an uncompromising
attack on Western imperialism and slavery on account of its vocal denun-
ciation of French crimes.57 In the ensuing months, Dessalines famously
decided to massacre most of the white French people remaining in Saint
Domingue, a step that cemented his militant reputation abroad; began
constructing forts to defend the country from a possible French invasion;
and passed a constitution in 1805 that equated Haitian citizenship with
blackness and barred whites from owning land. He was, one author wrote,
“an exterminating angel, an uncompromising, justified avenger who would
stop at nothing but absolute retribution.”58 A related strand in the U.S.
historiography emphasizes Thomas Jefferson’s fears of the Haitian prece-
dent, economic embargoes against Haiti, and generally Haiti’s status as an
international pariah under Dessalines. Two important collections of essays
similarly underline the rebellion’s potential appeal to slaves in neighbor-
ing plantation systems.59 But overlooked episodes of Dessalines’s reign add
complexity to his personality, particularly his continued use of non-African
cultural references; his refusal to export the Haitian Revolution beyond
Hispaniola’s shores; his diplomatic ties to slave-owning regimes, especially
British Jamaica; and his continued embrace of the colonial economic
model, including the slave trade.
Haiti’s singularity as an “African” rebel nation sharply distinct from
its neighbors has been a recurrent refrain in the scholarship and a badge
of pride among Haitian nationalists. Dessalines’s most recent biographer,
Berthony Dupont, even rejected outright the notion that Haitian revolu-
tionaries such as Dessalines could have imported any of their ideals from
overseas, particularly from France, and argued that the entire Haitian
revolutionary process was sui generis.60 And yet the new nation was a
composite one whose culture, symbols, and language were borrowed from
three continents. Its flag was based on the French tricolor, and both its
motto (Liberty or Death) and the symbols found on its coat of arms (a tree
of liberty and a liberty cap) were commonly found in Europe and North
57 Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 298. On the declaration of independence, see
also Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative.
58 Martin Munro, “Avenging History in the Former French Colonies,” Transition,
no. 99 (2008): 18–40 (quotation, 28).
59 On Haiti as a pariah state, see Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America;
Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon, eds., African Americans and the Haitian
Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents (New York, 2010). On Haiti’s
appeal to neighboring slaves, see David Patrick Geggus and David Barry Gaspar, eds.,
A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington,
Ind., 1997); Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World
(Columbia, S.C., 2001).
60 Dupont, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, 241.

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America during the revolutionary era. 61 For all its indignant accusations
levied at France, the 1804 declaration of independence was written in clas-
sical French (rather than Kreyòl or an African language) by the French-
educated, mixed-race planter Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre and was replete
with references to “liberty” and “despotism” typical of Atlantic revolution-
ary rhetoric. After independence, Dessalines also took the title of governor-
general that had been Toussaint Louverture’s in French colonial times
(he later switched to “emperor” in imitation of Napoléon Bonaparte).62
Another source of inspiration was the Native American population of the
Americas, which Dessalines referenced in the name he adopted for the new
nation (Haiti is derived from a Taino word), while his subordinates bap-
tized their units “army of the Incas” and “indigenous army.”63 The 1805
constitution provided for freedom of religion, so in parallel to the Afro-
Caribbean religion of Vodun (French Vodou, English Voodoo) a network
of Catholic French priests continued to operate after independence.64
That Haiti was a slumbering volcano that threatened to engulf the
region in the fires of slave rebellion was a common fear in the aftermath of
the Haitian Revolution. Even today, some scholars insist that Dessalines
had a messianic agenda to export emancipation overseas.65 Dessalines,
however, repeatedly and publicly promised not to undermine the internal
regime of neighboring colonies. “Let us leave our neighbors in peace under
the laws they made for themselves,” he explained in the 1804 declaration of
independence; “let us refuse to become revolutionary firebrands pretend-
ing to be legislators of the Antilles.”66 He made similar pledges in his 1805
constitution (article 36) and his diplomatic correspondence with Jamaica
and Cuba. More importantly, he held true to his word: aside from a failed
61 Philippe R. Girard, “Birth of a Nation: The Creation of the Haitian Flag and
Haiti’s French Revolutionary Heritage,” Journal of Haitian Studies 15, nos. 1–2 (Spring–
Fall 2009): 135–50.
62 “Nomination de l’empereur d’Hayiti,” Jan. [Sept.] 25, 1804, CC9/B21, Archives
Nationales.
63 Donatien de Rochambeau to Denis Decrès, Aug. 31, 1803 [13 Fructidor 11],
CC9A/34, Archives Nationales.
64 Guillaume Mauviel to Henri Grégoire, Jan. 16, 1804 [25 Nivôse 12], in Gabriel
Debien, Guillaume Mauviel, évêque constitutionnel de Saint-Domingue (1801–1805)
(Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe, 1981), 69–73.
65 On fears of Haiti in Cuba, see Ada Ferrer and [Marie Pascale Brasier-d’Iribarne],
“La société esclavagiste cubaine et la révolution haïtienne,” Annales Histoire, Sciences
Sociales 58, no. 2 (March–April 2003): 343. For the opposite view, see Ashli White,
Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore, 2010),
139. For claims that Dessalines had an expansionist agenda, see Laurent, Six études, 71;
Alain Yacou, “Le péril haïtien à Cuba: De la révolution nègre à la reconnaissance de
l’indépendance, 1791–1825,” in La révolution française et Haïti: Filiations, ruptures, nou-
velles dimensions, ed. Michel Hector (Port-au-Prince, 1995), 2: 186–99.
66 Dessalines, “Proclamation,” Jan. 1, 1804, AB/XIX/3302/15, Archives Nationales.

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invasion of Santo Domingo in 1805 (meant to dislodge the last remnants of
the Leclerc expedition from Hispaniola), he never tried to attack his neigh-
bors or promote slave revolts overseas. He even ordered the strategic port of
Môle Saint-Nicolas, from which he could have raided Cuba and Jamaica,
razed to the ground.67
Such isolationism may contradict Dessalines’s revolutionary image, but
it was consistent with his commercial and military interests. To paraphrase
Joseph Stalin, Dessalines preferred to ensure the success of revolution in
one country by allowing his Atlantic and Caribbean neighbors to go on
undisturbed. Overseas expeditions were unlikely to succeed, given British
mastery of the seas; better then to emphasize the moderation of his regime
so as to reassure U.S. and British merchants and ensure the continued sup-
port of the British navy in future wars against France. Nonintervention
sharply diverged with the revolutionary activism that had characterized
French colonial agents during the Directory, but it was in line with the poli-
cies of Louverture, who in 1799 had leaked French plans for a slave rebellion
in Jamaica to the British so as to ingratiate himself with a crucial ally.68
Dessalines’s equanimity encouraged British authorities in Jamaica to
conduct lengthy diplomatic talks after the declaration of independence. The
British-Haitian negotiations were mentioned succinctly in a sparsely foot-
noted article by Maurice A. Lubin on Dessalines’s diplomacy, but they have
never been systematically analyzed despite the availability of extensive docu-
mentation in the National Archives of the United Kingdom. As previously
mentioned, a first Jamaican mission had failed to reach a trade agreement
with Dessalines in the fall of 1803 because of his refusal to give away enclaves
on Haitian soil. But interisland smuggling flourished nonetheless; Dessalines
remained in contact with Jamaica’s governor, George Nugent; and Jamaican
authorities continued to view a possible alliance as strategically desirable. Most
importantly, the British home government, after hearing from Dessalines of
the first phase of negotiations, concluded that Nugent’s demands for Haitian
territory had been excessive and that priority should be given to furthering
mercantile interests; with this objective in mind, it sent a new envoy, Edward
Corbet, with orders to sign a commercial treaty on easier terms.69
67 For nonintervention pledges, see Geffrard to Kindelán, Sept. 14, 1803 [27 Fruc-
tidor 11], in Franco, Documentos para la historia de Haití, 152–54; “Conventions à arrêter
entre son excellence le gouverneur de la Jamaïque et son excellence le gouverneur général
de l’isle d’Haïti,” ca. Jan. 25, 1804, CO 137/111, NA. On the destruction of Môle, see
Dessalines to Corbet, Jan. 16, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.
68 On the Directory’s activism, see Philippe Girard, “Rêves d’Empire: French Rev-
olutionary Doctrine and Military Interventions in the Southern United States and the
Caribbean, 1789–1809,” Louisiana History 48, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 389–412. On the failed
invasion of Jamaica, see G. Debien and P. Pluchon, “Un plan d’invasion de la Jamaique
en 1789 et la politique anglo-américaine de Toussaint-Louverture,” Revue de la Societé
haïtienne d’histoire, de géographie et de géologie 36, no. 119 (July 1978): 3–72.
69 For Maurice A. Lubin’s article, see Lubin, “Les premiers rapports de la nation
haïtienne avec l’étranger,” Journal of Inter-American Studies 10, no. 2 (April 1968):

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Corbet reached Port-au-Prince in early January 1804, immediately
after Haiti’s formal declaration of independence. As instructed, he quickly
dropped British demands for Môle Saint-Nicolas and instead focused on
obtaining restrictions on Haitian trade so as to favor British commerce
and ensure that no Haitian ship could venture menacingly far from home
waters. Dessalines complained that such restrictions were unacceptable for
a sovereign nation such as Haiti, but an agreement seemed within reach
as Corbet left for Jamaica in late January to seek Nugent’s approval for
Dessalines’s requested changes.70
For security reasons Nugent refused to budge on commercial restric-
tions, so Corbet’s second visit, to Jérémie in February 1804, was incon-
clusive. Dessalines, displaying a keen sense of his country’s international
standing, insisted on getting its full sovereign rights as a free and equal
commercial partner recognized and refused to conform to British trade
restrictions. Corbet also complained that many British merchants and cap-
tains of the Royal Navy—including the mixed-race captain of HMS Tartar
who brought him to Haiti—were actively selling guns and gunpowder to
the Haitians, giving Dessalines no incentive to make concessions for a com-
mercial treaty when contraband goods were so easily available. Corbet left
empty-handed and with a growing sense that the lives of Jérémie’s whites
were imperiled (they were indeed killed immediately after his departure).71
In April Governor Nugent tried one last time to salvage a treaty when
he sent Rear Admiral James Richard Dacres to Cap Haïtien with a letter
to Dessalines.72 But his hopes for success had ebbed considerably due to
277–305, esp. 284–86. On the diplomacy of Dessalines, see also Gabriel Debien,
“Les missions de Joseph Bunel de Blancamp,” ca. 1980, dossier 426, 73J73, Archives
Départementales de la Gironde, Bordeaux. On the failure of the Cathcart and Walker
mission, see George Nugent to Robert Hobart, Oct. 8, 1803, CO 137/110, NA. On
Dessalines’s and Nugent’s willingness to resume negotiations, see Dessalines to Nugent,
Nov. 6, 1803, CO 137/110, ibid.; John T. Duckworth to Evan Nepean, Nov. 12, 1803,
ADM 1/253, ibid. For the British government’s instructions, see Hobart to Nugent, Dec.
10, 1803, CO 137/110, ibid. See also Hobart to Nugent, Apr. 7, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.
70 On Edward Corbet’s first mission, see George Nugent to Robert Hobart, Jan. 14,
1804, CO 137/111, NA; Corbet to Dessalines, Jan. 15, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.; Dessalines
to Corbet, Jan. 16, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.; Corbet to Nugent, Jan. 25, 1804, CO 137/111,
ibid; Dessalines to Nugent, Jan. 20, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.
71 On the second Corbet mission, see George Nugent to Dessalines, Jan. 31, 1804,
CO 137/111, ibid.; Edward Corbet to Dessalines, Feb. 10, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid; Cor-
bet to Nugent, Feb. 29, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid. On British contraband, see Corbet to
Nugent, Jan. 25, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.; Corbet to John Perkins, Feb. 6, 1804, CO
137/111, ibid.; Corbet to Nugent, Feb. 16, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.; Nugent to John Sul-
livan, Mar. 8, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid. On the massacre of the French of Jérémie, see Cor-
bet to Nugent, Feb. 29, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.; Perkins to John T. Duckworth, Apr. 8,
1804, ADM 1/254, ibid.; Corbet to Nugent, May 13, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.
72 Nugent to Dessalines, Mar. 8, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.

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continued British contraband and reports of Dessalines’s “cruelties” against
whites.73 Dacres arrived shortly after the massacre of the whites of Cap
Haïtien, leading Nugent to call off further negotiations with Dessalines,
whom he now described for the first time in racist terms (“this great
baboon”).74 For his part Dessalines explained that as a true head of state he
would henceforth negotiate directly with London rather than with its colo-
nial minions.75
Despite the massacre, commercial and strategic necessities continued
to compete with racial fears as the defining feature of British-Haitian rela-
tions during the ensuing months. In the summer of 1804, the British gov-
ernment agreed to yield to most of Dessalines’s requests as long as some
commercial advantage could be obtained (the massacre of Haiti’s whites,
though known in Britain, was barely mentioned in passing). Most impor-
tantly, in response to Dessalines’s demand that Britain formally recognize
Haiti’s independence, the British government observed that a commercial
treaty would amount to de facto recognition in its eyes. But the govern-
ment again delegated the actual negotiations to the governor of Jamaica,
who personally refused to go any further due to his own anger over the
massacre of Haiti’s white population. In 1806 there was renewed interest
on the part of Dessalines and Britain in resuming negotiations on a trade
treaty, but Dessalines’s assassination later that year meant that nothing
came of it. Immediate international recognition of Haiti’s existence, usually
presented as unthinkable until the 1825 treaty with France, was thus within
reach under Dessalines: it was favored by Britain’s home government and
was only rejected due to local opposition in Jamaica, where horror over
Dessalines’s racial policies loomed larger.76
73 Nugent to Sullivan, Mar. 8, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid. (quotation). See also Nugent
to Robert Hobart, Mar. 10, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.
74 George Nugent to Robert Hobart, June 10, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid. (quotation).
On the Dacres mission, see James Richard Dacres to John T. Duckworth, May 15, 1804,
ADM 1/254, ibid.
75 Dessalines to George Nugent, May 13, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.; Dacres to
Duckworth, May 15, 1804, ADM 1/254, ibid.
76 On the British government’s new instructions, see [Robert Hobart] to George
Nugent, June 7, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.; [British government in London] to [Nugent],
ca. June 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.; [Hobart] to Nugent, Aug. 4, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.;
[John Jeffreys Pratt, 2d Earl Camden] to Nugent, August 1804, CO 137/112, ibid. On
Nugent’s refusal to resume negotiations, see Nugent to Pratt, Aug. 29, 1804, CO 137/112,
ibid. On renewed interest in a treaty in 1806, see Dessalines to John Downie, Aug. 15,
1806, War Office (WO) 1/75, ibid.; Robert Sutherland to William Faulkner, Oct. 1,
1806, WO 1/75, ibid. On the recognition issue, see Charles H. Wesley, “The Struggle for
the Recognition of Haiti and Liberia as Independent Republics,” Journal of Negro His-
tory 2, no. 4 (October 1917): 369–83; Tim Matthewson, “Jefferson and the Nonrecogni-
tion of Haiti,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 140, no. 1 (March 1996):
22–48.

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Though the four sequences of negotiations in 1803–4 did not lead to
an actual treaty, Dessalines’s diplomacy with Britain was not an unmiti-
gated failure. An important objective of his was to find an outlet for Haiti’s
exports (particularly coffee) and to secure a source of war goods. Despite
the lack of a formal trade agreement, British merchants visited Haiti
throughout Dessalines’s reign, helping to fulfill Haiti’s commercial needs.77
Actual recognition proved beyond his reach, but the existence of diplomatic
channels allowed Dessalines to make some headway on more practical
issues such as the repatriation of exiled black Haitians.
Dessalines’s efforts to repopulate Haiti were the most intriguing
aspect of his negotiations with Britain. The Haitian Revolution had been
so bloody that British envoy Corbet estimated the surviving population at
150,000 people of color (the true figure was closer to 300,000, according to
other sources—still a 50 percent drop from prerevolutionary figures). For
Dessalines the demographic shortfall was worrisome as the lack of workers
made it difficult to recruit soldiers for his army and hampered the recovery
of the plantation sector. A related problem was the black rank and file’s
continued opposition to forced plantation labor, which Dessalines main-
tained in the “new” Haiti. Many reluctant cultivators absconded to the
mountains or Santo Domingo, leading Dessalines to threaten any emigrant
with the death penalty. Repopulating Haiti was thus one of Dessalines’s
foremost goals, one that natural growth was unlikely to achieve when in
colonial times the disease-plagued colony had never been able to sustain its
population by natural means, let alone increase it, and planters had had to
import tens of thousands of African slaves each year to replenish their dwin-
dling labor force.78
Just like prerevolutionary planters and Louverture, Dessalines looked to
the outside world to meet his labor needs. He first asked Governor Nugent
to send back all Haitian people of color present in Jamaica, a request
Nugent promptly fulfilled, both as a gesture of goodwill and to alleviate
extreme overcrowding on board British pontoon ships. The one source
of friction was that the British only sent back free people of color in their
custody (about 170 in all), not the black servants who had followed French
planters into exile and whose number Dessalines estimated at three to four
thousand. These (willingly or not) eventually accompanied their masters as
77 Robert Sutherland to William Faulkner, Oct. 8, 1806, WO 1/75, NA.
78 For estimates of Haiti’s population, see Corbet to Nugent, Jan. 25, 1804, CO
137/111, ibid.; Corbet to Nugent, Feb. 16, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.; Mackenzie, Notes on
Haiti, 2: 110–20. For the ban on emigration, see May 20, 1805, constitution, article 7, in
Louis Joseph Janvier, Les constitutions d’Haïti (1801–1885) (Paris, 1886), 31. On the pre-
revolutionary slave trade, see David Geggus, “The French Slave Trade: An Overview,”
WMQ 58, no. 1 (January 2001): 119–38.

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they left Jamaica to settle more permanently in Cuba and the United States.
Dessalines accordingly offered all U.S. merchants willing to bring back
black Haitians stranded in the United States a forty-gourde reward, a policy
directly borrowed from Louverture, who had made a similar offer in 1801.79
The last step Dessalines took to boost the Haitian population and
regrow the plantation sector was a standard one in the Atlantic world
of the time but one wholly at odds with present-day perceptions of his
political profile. On January 17, 1804, while meeting Corbet during his
first visit to Haiti, Dessalines suddenly asked whether British slave trad-
ers in Jamaica would be willing to sell some of their human cargo in Haiti
(where imported slaves would presumably have worked under the semifree
cultivator status). Corbet, startled by a proposal that did not feature in his
instructions and did not fit his understanding of Dessalines’s worldview,
could offer no response. But Dessalines formally requested that a clause
promoting the slave trade be included in the proposed treaty of commerce,
then brought up the matter again—twice—during Corbet’s second mission
in February. The proposal was passed on to Nugent and ultimately to the
British government, both of whom rejected it because they preferred not
to strengthen Dessalines’s regime with potential soldiers but also because
British policy was rapidly moving toward an overall abolition of the slave
trade. One is thus faced with the unusual case of a slave-owning Britain
objecting to slave imports into Haiti, a request that had been put forward
by the ex-slave Dessalines. No existing framework of interpretation can
make sense of this turn of events. Only by analyzing Dessalines as a planter
and a statesman shaped by the economic practices of his age can one com-
prehend his policies (Louverture himself had encouraged Jamaican slave
traders to head to Saint Domingue’s shores).80
In 1804, while the contentious trade negotiations with Britain were
ongoing, Dessalines also appealed to the United States through unofficial
79 On the repatriation, see Dessalines to Nugent, Nov. 6, 1803, CO 137/110, NA;
Dessalines to John T. Duckworth, Feb. 12, 1804, ADM 1/254, ibid.; Duckworth to
Evan Nepean, Mar. 9, 1804, ADM 1/254, ibid. On overcrowding, see Nugent to Robert
Hobart, Dec. 19, 1803, CO 137/110, ibid. On the fate of the black servants, see Dessa-
lines to Nugent, May 13, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.; Nugent to Dessalines, Nov. 27, 1803,
CO 137/110, ibid. On the repatriation offers to U.S. merchants, see Louverture to Louis-
André Pichon, July 3, 1801, CC9A/28, Archives Nationales; Dessalines, “Arrêté,” Jan. 14,
1804, AB/XIX/3302/15, ibid.
80 On Dessalines’s overtures to slave traders, see Corbet to Nugent, Jan. 25, 1804,
CO 137/111, ibid.; “Conventions à arrêter,” ca. Jan. 25, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.; Des-
salines to Corbet, Feb. 26 and 27, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid. On Nugent’s opposition,
see Corbet to Dessalines, Feb. 10, 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.; Nugent to Pratt, Aug. 30,
1804, CO 137/112, ibid. On Britain’s opposition, see [British government in London]
to [Nugent], ca. June 1804, CO 137/111, ibid.; [Pratt] to Nugent, Aug. 1 and ca. August
1804, CO 137/112, ibid. On Louverture’s earlier overtures, see Nugent to William Cav-
endish, 3d Duke of Portland, Sept. 5, 1801, CO 137/106, ibid.

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channels, hoping to diversify his trading partners (Haitians “very much fear
the British lion,” a U.S. intermediary wrote).81 U.S. policies toward the
Haitian Revolution, particularly Jefferson’s, have received much attention
over the years. Diplomatic works written in the 1940s analyzed Jefferson’s
policies as earnest attempts to defend U.S. interests, but in the 1990s, as
part of a general revisionist onslaught, scholars began depicting him as
a racist foe of Haiti while more generally analyzing U.S. embargo laws
against Haiti passed in 1805–6 as examples of a centuries-long international
shunning of the black republic. In recent years a postrevisionist school
has emerged to argue that Jefferson’s views of Haiti were actually char-
acterized by great ambiguity, but scholars of both persuasions share one
characteristic: they tend to be English-language presidential scholars who
focus heavily on U.S. politics while ignoring individual choices made by
U.S. merchants and Dessalines’s own policies.82 When these are taken into
account, U.S.-Haitian relations appear to have been driven more by histori-
cal precedent and international market forces than by Jefferson’s antipathy
or U.S. sectional disputes. The (very weak) U.S. embargo notwithstanding,
commercial engagement was the norm after independence, as it had been
before and during the Haitian Revolution, underscoring the continuity in
Atlantic trading networks as Haiti emerged from the colonial era.
As shown by old-style diplomatic historians and current postrevision-
ists, Jefferson’s policies regarding Dessalines and Haiti were quite conflicted
due to the multiplicity of interests at stake. He was concerned about slave
revolt but also cognizant of U.S. commercial interests and eager to obtain
French support for the purchase of Florida, leaving him uncertain, by
his own admission, which side he should support.83 In practice he rarely
mentioned Haiti, even Dessalines’s controversial 1804 massacre, in public.
81 Davis to James Madison, Oct. 1, 1804, 208 MI/2, Archives Nationales (quota-
tion). See also Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, 240, 249; Debien, “Les missions de Joseph
Bunel,” ca. 1980, dossier 426, 73J73, Archives Départementales de la Gironde.
82 For older works, see Ludwell Lee Montague, Haiti and the United States, 1714–
1938 (Durham, N.C., 1940); Rayford W. Logan, Diplomatic Relations of the United States
with Haiti, 1776–1891 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1941). On the revisionist school, see Tim
Matthewson, “Jefferson and Haiti,” Journal of Southern History 61, no. 2 (May 1995):
209–48; Matthewson, A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations during
the Early Republic (Westport, Conn., 2003); Garry Wills, “Negro President”: Jefferson
and the Slave Power (Boston, 2003); Robin Blackburn, “Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of
the Democratic Revolution,” WMQ 63, no. 4 (October 2006): 643–74, esp. 659. On
the embargo, see Greg Dunkel, “U.S. Embargoes against Haiti—From 1806 to 2003,”
in Haiti: A Slave Revolution: 200 Years after 1804, ed. Pat Chin et al. (New York, 2004),
103–6. On the postrevisionist school, see Brown, Toussaint’s Clause; Scherr, Thomas Jef-
ferson’s Haitian Policy.
83 Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine, Jan. 15, 1805, Thomas Jefferson Papers, ser.
1, General Correspondence, 1651–1827, Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss
/mtj.mtjbib014245.

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Before and after Haiti’s independence, his policy was to recognize France’s
legal right to ban sales of war goods in a rebel colony while refusing to do
anything concrete to help enforce this ban. He played a limited role in the
passage in the U.S. Congress of the partial embargo laws of 1805 and 1806,
which were mostly meant as symbolic gestures to appease France, riddled
with loopholes and largely unenforced.
In the absence of strong federal guidance, it was U.S. merchants who
decided whether to isolate Haiti, and in their eyes Haiti’s racial and politi-
cal profile was far less important than market opportunities, namely abun-
dant, low-priced coffee and a steady demand for gunpowder.84 “We know
we have no right to trade there,” Baltimore merchants told a U.S. senator,
“but the Profit is tempting.”85 A Philadelphia merchant recounted his fears
on reaching the southern city of Jacmel in the midst of the massacre of its
white population, but those fears did not stop him from declaring the trip
a “glorious time” on account of the money he had made trading coffee
there.86 Trade links between the United States and Haiti, multiple sources
show, remained active after independence, despite the 1804 massacre and
the 1805–6 U.S. laws. The trade was an open secret: the United States,
even though it had not recognized Haiti’s independence to avoid antago-
nizing France, had a commercial agent in Port-au-Prince. In the long run,
it was not the short-lived and weak U.S. embargo (1805–9) but Haiti’s eco-
nomic stagnation that, by limiting profit opportunities, diminished Haiti’s
relative share in the United States’ overall foreign trade.87
As accounts by U.S. merchants make very clear, trade with Haiti
could not have taken place without the acquiescence of Dessalines, whose
policies were thus far more relevant to the actuality of U.S.-Haitian
trade relations than Jefferson’s. His agenda, unfortunately, tends to be
misinterpreted; Arthur Scherr’s recent book on U.S.-Haitian relations
84 James Alexander Dun, “‘What avenues of commerce, will you, Americans, not
explore!’ Commercial Philadelphia’s Vantage onto the Early Haitian Revolution,” WMQ
62, no. 3 (July 2005): 473–504, esp. 475.
85 Samuel Smith to James Madison, May 17, 1804, in David B. Mattern et al., eds.,
The Papers of James Madison: Secretary of State Series (Charlottesville, Va., 2005), 7: 226,
quoted in Scherr, Thomas Jefferson’s Haitian Policy, 393.
86 Jacob Ritter, “Autobiography,” Mar. 12, 1836, pp. 38–43, (Phi) Am.1305, Historical
Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
87 On continued commerce to Haiti right after independence, see Davis to Madi-
son, Oct. 1, 1804, 208 MI/2, Archives Nationales; Edward Corbet to George Nugent,
June 5, 1804, CO 137/111, NA; Napoléon Bonaparte to Charles de Talleyrand, Aug. 10,
1804 [22 Thermidor 12], 215AP/1, dossier 1, Archives Nationales; Brown, Toussaint’s
Clause, 264, 276, 293; Scherr, Thomas Jefferson’s Haitian Policy, 447–73. On the U.S.
commercial agent, see Scherr, Thomas Jefferson’s Haitian Policy, 379. On the Haitian
trade’s long-term decline as a share of U.S. trade, see Montague, Haiti and the United
States, 47; Brown, Toussaint’s Clause, 293.

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under Jefferson, almost entirely based on U.S. sources, quickly dismisses
Dessalines as a “fanatical, megalomaniacal emperor and dictator . . . who
exterminated [Haiti’s] remaining white population.” 88 But Dessalines’s
willingness to maintain commercial ties with white slave-owning powers
such as Britain and the United States, even as he killed off much of Haiti’s
white population, showed that, like Jefferson, he was a complex man who
pursued several policy objectives concurrently. As a slave rebel and revolu-
tionary leader, he sought vengeance on white French planters, but he did
not allow his racial agenda to undermine the economic goals he had set for
his new regime. The spring 1804 massacre pointedly excluded practitioners
of specific trades such as surgeons and priests; it also spared mixed-race
descendants of French colonists and all non-French whites, particularly
Polish veterans of the Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc expedition and U.S. and
British merchants present in Haitian ports. In fact, the massacres so spe-
cifically targeted French planters that one could analyze them not as a race-
based genocide but as an economic pogrom meant to take over the victims’
plantations for the benefit of black and mixed-race officers in Dessalines’s
army.
If one looks at Dessalines’s Haiti within a legalistic framework—as is
always tempting for historians reliant on the written record—Haiti was a
black republic where, according to the 1805 constitution, all citizens were
black (article 14), white men of most nations could not own land (article
12), and all property belonging to Frenchmen was confiscated (General
Dispositions 12 and 13). But in practice a number of white Frenchmen con-
tinued to live in or trade with Haiti after the 1804 massacre, either because
their professions were deemed irreplaceable or because they nominally
claimed U.S. or Swedish citizenship or exploited personal ties dating back
to the colonial or revolutionary era. Dessalines himself, in an otherwise vio-
lently Francophobic proclamation issued after the 1804 massacre, noted that
he had spared some white Frenchmen known for their fidelity to the rebel
cause. Jean-Paul Caze, a merchant from Cap Haïtien who had been perse-
cuted by Leclerc because of his closeness to Louverture, was mentioned as
living in Haiti in an 1805 letter written by Dessalines’s minister of finance;
that letter was addressed to Antoine Laussat, another French merchant mis-
treated by Leclerc and now making a living in Philadelphia by exporting
goods to France’s rebellious colony.89
88 Scherr, Thomas Jefferson’s Haitian Policy, 7.
89 On whites in Haiti, see Dessalines, “Proclamation,” Apr. 28, 1804, AB/
XIX/3302/15, Archives Nationales; Madiou, Histoire d’Haiti, 3: 121; Lubin, Journal of
Inter-American Studies 10: 292–94; Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the
Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, N.C., 2004), 232. On Jean-Paul
Caze, see André Vernet to Antoine Laussat, June 15, 1805, folder “André Vernet,” box 1,
Haiti Misc. Collection, Sc MG 119, Schomburg Center; Caze to Laussat, Mar. 19, 1807,

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The most intriguing of Haiti’s white citizens was Joseph Bunel de
Blancamp, a French merchant who had served as Louverture’s ambassador
to the United States in 1798 and had suffered imprisonment and spoliation
at Leclerc’s hands. After he was freed in 1803, Bunel headed for the United
States, where he immediately offered his commercial and diplomatic services
to Dessalines. The letter must have struck a chord, because in the spring of
1804 Bunel arranged for weapons shipments to Haiti, and in August 1804 he
personally headed for Haiti on a trading venture. He was concerned about
his safety in light of the recent massacre of his countrymen, but within six
hours of Bunel’s landing in Gonaïves Dessalines rushed to welcome him in
person and bought his cargo on the spot.90 Bunel chartered three other ships
in ensuing months and, despite his French background, had “more influence
on his own than all the Americans.”91 Bunel was employed as Haiti’s dip-
lomatic attaché during Dessalines’s 1804 negotiations with Jamaica and the
United States and, according to some sources, also served as U.S. envoy.92
His was a singular career that goes against everything we thought we knew
about Dessalines.
In an 1804 proclamation delivered after most white Frenchmen had

been massacred, Jean-Jacques Dessalines portrayed himself as an enemy
of European colonialism who had “saved his country and avenged
America. . . . Shiver in fear, tyrants, usurpers, scourges of the New World!”
According to him, his policies toward slavery’s apologists and French
planters were so singularly radical that he was “unlike [his] predecessor,
the ex-general Louverture.”93 The distinction has dominated assessments
of his personality ever since; according to the existing scholarship, he was
more radical, violent, racially aware, nationalistic, and xenophobic than
Louverture, which depending on the author might be either good or bad.
But Dessalines, who had served under Louverture for ten years before
assuming command of the rebel army, was actually his intellectual and politi-
cal heir, and more generally the product of a century of French colonial rule
folder 11, Bunel Papers, (Phi)1811, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Laussat was the
brother of the French governor of Louisiana.
90 On Joseph Bunel de Blancamp, see Philippe R. Girard, “Trading Races: Joseph
and Marie Bunel, a Diplomat and a Merchant in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue and
Philadelphia,” Journal of the Early Republic 30, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 351–76.
91 Financial account, ca. 1805, folder 8, Bunel Papers, (Phi)1811.
92 On Jamaica, see Henry Christophe to Joseph Bunel, Nov. 6, 1804, folder 22,
ibid. On the United States, see Pichon to [Talleyrand], Mar. 20, 1804, in Debien, “Les
missions de Joseph Bunel,” ca. 1980, dossier 426, 73J73, Archives Départementales de la
Gironde. On Bunel as a U.S. envoy, see Ardouin, Études, 6: 108.
93 Dessalines, “Proclamation,” Apr. 28, 1804, AB/XIX/3302/15, Archives Nationales.

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in Saint Domingue. Like Louverture, he maintained the cultivator system
and embraced an export-based plantation model based on Haiti’s commer-
cial integration in Atlantic trading networks and imported African labor.
Like Louverture, he pledged not to undermine neighboring slave systems
and opened diplomatic channels to Jamaica as well as (with less success) the
United States and Cuba. Like Louverture, though to a lesser extent, he occa-
sionally relied on white associates such as Joseph Bunel de Blancamp, who
were all too willing to support the regimes of revolutionary leaders whose
policies—free trade, political autonomy, and plantation labor—mirrored
those espoused by white planters in the run-up to the Haitian Revolution.94
Dessalines’s record immediately prior to and after Haiti’s independence
thus forces us to reevaluate one of Haiti’s most celebrated founding fathers
as a more conservative and multifaceted figure than is usually assumed—or,
to use Ira Berlin’s term, as a latter-day “Atlantic Creole.”95 Far from being
the bloodthirsty brute found in contemporary French accounts or the single-
minded advocate of independence and racial pride described in some nation-
alist Haitian works, he was a cautious, sly, pragmatic individual who sought
to safeguard his political and economic interests and settle personal scores
while advancing his long-term ideological agenda, bringing Haiti’s planta-
tion system back to its prerevolutionary apex, and safeguarding Haiti’s sov-
ereignty. Such goals and practices showed him to be an inner-directed agent,
contrary to the stereotype of the meek, easily influenced black slave that had
long dominated in Saint Domingue. Taken together, these various episodes
call for a thorough reappraisal of Dessalines’s life and ideas so as to place
him squarely within the Atlantic political, economic, and cultural model in
which he had grown up.
The Haitian Revolution, Franklin W. Knight wrote in 2000, was “a
unique case in the history of the Americas: a thorough revolution that
resulted in a complete metamorphosis in the social, political, intellectual,
and economic life of the colony.” The independence of a black state gov-
erned by ex-slaves was indeed an important landmark, but Dessalines’s
record as governor-general (later emperor) of Haiti belies millennial assess-
ments such as Knight’s, since he strove to keep Haiti’s economic structure
intact, albeit in the hands of black and mixed-race leaders and without
the formal slavery that France had abolished in 1794. Knight’s follow-up
comment that “the Haitian model of state formation drove xenophobic
fear into the hearts of all whites from Boston to Buenos Aires” must also
be qualified, given the willingness of many whites, both merchants and
94 “Décret de l’Assemblée Générale de la partie française de Saint-Domingue,” May

28, 1790, Fisher Collection, folder 1A.
95 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North
America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 17–39.

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political authorities, to engage the new republic.96 Haiti in the early years
of its independence, as Dessalines’s manifold interactions with his Atlantic
partners show, was far less isolated diplomatically and economically than
is usually assumed. This reappraisal may cause chagrin among those who
like to hold up Haiti as an unadulterated example of black radicalism, but
they should instead appreciate that Haitians, rather than conforming to the
model expected of them (that of barbaric ex-slaves bent on shedding white
blood), proved to be self-driven individuals who chose to create a nation
that combined economic and diplomatic pragmatism with the ideals of the
revolutionary era.
96 Franklin W. Knight, “The Haitian Revolution,” American Historical Review 105,
no. 1 (February 2000): 103–15 (quotations, 105).

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Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal

Author(s): Philippe R. Girard

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J EAN-JACQUES Dessalines, slave, revolutionary, and first leader of

William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 69, no. 3, July 2012

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Though assessments of Dessalines’s record vary immensely, most are

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(public estates) and leased to well-connected officers such as Louverture

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Concerned by Toussaint Louverture’s increasingly autonomous

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Armed resistance to the French expedition’s presence resumed in June–

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supporters, particularly the congos, to reject his authority. Dessalines also

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Jean-Jacques Dessalines and his officers declared independence after the

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more formally on January 1, 1804. The second declaration of independence

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In an 1804 proclamation delivered after most white Frenchmen had

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94 “Décret de l’Assemblée Générale de la partie française de Saint-Domingue,” May

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