The Declaration Around the World: Haiti

By Dr. Julia Gaffield

This essay is part of a content series exploring the nations, stories, and themes included in the Museum’s special exhibition The Declaration’s Journey, presented by Griffin Catalyst, on view through Jan. 3, 2027. Click here for more information about the exhibition.  

On Jan. 1, 1804, the generals of the Haitian Revolution declared their independence from France. They announced that they had “sworn to posterity, to the whole universe, to renounce France forever, and to die rather than live under its dominion.”

They took this momentous step to protect the abolition of slavery—a feat they themselves had achieved earlier in the Revolution. The Haitian Revolution began in August 1791, with a coordinated uprising organized by enslaved men and women in the northern plains of the colony of Saint-Domingue. Saint-Domingue had been France’s most wealth-producing colony, exporting crops like sugar, coffee, cotton, and indigo. The plantations of the colony were worked by enslaved men, women, and children, under a brutal and racist slavery regime violently imposed by the French.

In 1791, enslaved men and women built on long-standing practices of resistance and initiated their revolution. After two years of warfare and diplomacy, they forced France to abolish slavery (in the colony in 1793 and in the entire French empire in 1794). Despite the onset of the French Revolution, until 1793-1794, the French Republic had emphatically supported the continuation of slavery in the colonies.

In 1802, French First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte sent an expedition to Saint-Domingue to regain control over the island and to reinstitute slavery. The threat of the return of slavery inspired the Haitian revolutionaries to turn their revolution into a war for independence.

After they forced the French troops to evacuate in late 1803, they renamed the island and introduced the world to the new country they called “Hayti.” The Haitian declaration contains three parts: the oath of the generals; a speech to the people of Haiti by the general-in-chief, Jean-Jacques Dessalines; and the nomination of Dessalines to the position of governor-general-for-life of Haiti.

The Haitian Declaration of Independence did not follow the style or format of the United States' Declaration of Independence, and in fact Dessalines is famously said to have rejected a draft of the text that one of his secretaries had modeled after the U.S. document. He concluded that the Haitian Revolution demanded a unique document, tailored to their circumstances and people.

Independence and the abolition of slavery went hand in hand in Haiti's declaration. “We must seize from the inhuman government that has for a long time kept us in the most humiliating torpor, all hope of re-enslaving us,” Dessalines told his citizens, “we must then live independent or die.”

The header of the document announced the motto of the war for independence, “Liberté ou la Mort,” which can be translated to either “Freedom or Death” or “Liberty or Death”—one emphasizing personal freedom and the other emphasizing political freedom. The motto can also be interpreted as emblematic of their willingness to die—and to kill—for their freedom and independence.

In his speech to the citizens of Haiti, Dessalines emphasized the ongoing war with France. The French troops had evacuated the western side of the island, but they had not conceded defeat and they continued waging war and claiming dominion over the entire island. “Let them shudder when they approach our coasts,” Dessalines declared, “if not from the memory of the cruelties they perpetrated there, then by the terrible resolution that we shall enter into of putting to death, anyone who is born French, and who would soil with their sacrilegious foot the territory of liberty.” The French expedition had committed heinous crimes in their attempt to reinstitute slavery over the past year and a half and Dessalines insisted that the war with the former colonizer would be “eternal.”

But Dessalines also knew the rest of the world was watching. In his speech to his citizens, he cautioned them against being “revolutionary firebrand” who would “seek glory by disturbing the tranquility of the neighboring islands.” This advice was later incorporated into Haiti’s first national constitution in 1805 as article 36 (and repeated in later constitutions), which prohibited expeditions to foreign colonies.

The only extant official copies of the Haiti's declaration are two printed documents, housed at The National Archives of the United Kingdom in London. One is an eight-page pamphlet, and the other is a large broadside. If a manuscript version with original signatures ever existed, it has not yet been identified. As far as is known, there are seven extant contemporary manuscript transcriptions of the Haitian declaration (including the one held by Duke University and now on display at the Museum of the American Revolution in The Declaration’s Journey), and one contemporary Spanish translation of the document.

The text of the Haitian declaration, however, circulated widely, and within the first weeks and months of 1804, newspapers in the United States reproduced excerpts of the text. On April 3, 1804, for example, the Philadelphia Evening Post reproduced a translation of the “discourse delivered by Gen. DESSALINES to the inhabitants of St. Domingo, previous to the declaration of the independence of that colony.” The opening lines, “It is not enough to have expelled from your country the barbarians who have stained it with blood for two centuries,” likely would have shocked readers in Philadelphia. Readers would have also learned that Dessalines asked his citizens to “Swear… to live free and independent, and to prefer death to any thing that would send again to enslave thee. In short, ever to pursue the traitors and enemies of thy independence.” 1

France continued waging war against Haiti until 1825 when it extracted a massive indemnity payment in exchange for the recognition of Haiti’s independence. The United States was the last nation in the Atlantic world to extend diplomatic recognition to Haiti, only doing so in 1862, as the nation was in the midst of civil war. And yet Haiti’s declaration was the world’s second such document to create a lasting nation state and it established the first nation in the world to permanently ban slavery.

Dr. Julia Gaffield is an associate professor of history at William & Mary. She is the author of Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution and I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom.