Liberty or Death: The Post-Independence Proclamations and Massacres of Haiti’s Dessalines

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The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) transformed the French Caribbean slave colony of Saint-Domingue into the independent black-led nation of Haiti. The Revolution began on August 1791, on Saint-Domingue’s northern plain, with a massive slave rebellion. The enslaved rebels burned sugar plantations and forced whites to take refuge in the city of Le Cap (Cap-Haitien).

Unable to defeat the black rebels, the French Republic eventually abolished slavery and formed an alliance with the ex-slave general Toussaint Louverture. Louverture would develop into the savior of the French Republic in Saint-Domingue, defeating the British, Spanish, and French royalists in the colony.

He went on to develop into Governor-General of Saint-Domingue, but his reign was short-lived. In 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte sent an expeditionary force under his brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc, to depose Louverture and restore slavery in the French colonies. Louverture and his loyal lieutenants, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe, resisted the French invaders, but surrendered after a couple of months. Louverture was arrested and deported to Europe, where he died soon afterward, imprisoned.

Even with Louverture gone, armed resistance to the French continued. Dessalines and Christophe, who had to begin with agreed to fight for Leclerc, eventually defected back to the insurgent army. Dessalines was appointed commander-in-chief by the rebels.

The insurgency and defections of black troops grew as rumors that the French planned to re-establish slavery spread. These rumors were fuelled by news from Guadeloupe. In that other French Caribbean colony, a man of color named Louis Delgrès (or Delgresse) put up decided resistance to Napoleon’s armies, committing suicide by blowing himself slightly than surrendering. The captured followers of Delgrès, deported to Saint-Domingue, helped to spread rumors that the French had already re-established slavery in Guadeloupe.

In Saint-Domingue, the insurgency grew, as blacks and people of color flocked to the rebel banner and defected from the French army. Dessalines presided over the final defeat of the French army under Leclerc’s successor, the vicomte de Rochambeau, at Vertières in November 1803.

In the last months of the war, the conflict took on an increasingly brutal character. Leclerc began to suspect all of his black and mixed-race soldiers and officers of disloyalty, and had them all arrested and executed. Leclerc went on to suggest that a number of the colony’s black population would should be wiped out and replaced with new African imports with the intention to restore slavery.

After Leclerc died towards the end of 1802, his successor, Rochambeau, carried out even more sadistic massacres against the colony’s blacks and people of color. This violence helped to unite the colony’s mixed and black population against the French.

After the French defeat, Dessalines declared independence on 1 January 1804. In the months that followed, Dessalines carried out a series of notorious massacres of the country’s remaining whites. In his proclamations, he justified these killings by accusing the whites of complicity in the earlier massacres carried out by Leclerc and Rochambeau, and arguing that the whites could reinforce French attempts to reconquer Haiti. The massacres were also an attempt to unite the nation’s mixed-race and black populations.

The main target of these massacres were French colonists, especially men. Foreign non-French white merchants, such as Americans and Britons, were sparred. Some European soldiers who had defected to rebels right through the war, as well as a couple of white widows under Dessalines’ protection, were also exempted from the killings.

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