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  Dessalines, Christophe, and other officers who had switched sides now faced a choice. The French were losing the war, and continuing to fight on their behalf might well be suicidal: if the rebels won, they were not going to be gentle with black officers in the uniforms of the French. In October 1802, Dessalines secretly met with Alexandre Pétion, who was guarding Le Cap for the French. Pétion and Dessalines had fought against each other a few years before, during Rigaud’s rebellion, and they came from different sectors of Saint-Domingue’s society: Dessalines a former plantation slave, Pétion a free man of color. The two of them agreed, however, to take their troops and join the rebels in the mountains. Christophe and his soldiers followed soon after. Dessalines sent a simple parting message to the French: they should “return to Europe.”28

  Facing increasingly steadfast and unified resistance, Leclerc recommended a “war of extermination” against the population of the colony. “Here is my opinion of this country,” he wrote to Napoleon in October 1802 after the defection of Dessalines. “We must destroy all the blacks of the mountains—men and women—and spare only children under twelve years of age.” He conceded that some of the blacks who lived in the plains of the colony, where its sugar plantations once thrived, might be salvageable. The French needed to kill only half of them.29

  Leclerc died of yellow fever not long afterward, and as the French found their erstwhile comrades turning against them, they responded with growing paranoia. Fearing that the ever-decreasing number of black troops who remained loyal to France might join the insurrection, Leclerc’s successor, General Donatien Rochambeau, began executing them, dumping them into the harbor with weights around their necks. He also gassed prisoners, locking them in the holds of ships and asphyxiating them with burning sulphur. But Rochambeau’s tactics only succeeded in solidifying and unifying the opposition, sending black soldiers who might have remained with the French into the arms of the rebels.* The insurgents gained other converts as well: several units of Polish troops, who had been enlisted in the French army after the occupation of their own land, now defected to Dessalines, who welcomed them.

  For a decade, France had been an ally and indeed guarantor of emancipation. Now it had become the enemy of an entire people. In May 1803, Dessalines gathered the rebel generals together at the Congress of Arcahaye, and they vowed to destroy the French presence on the island. To symbolize their oath, Dessalines created a new flag for his army. Taking the French tricolor, with its bars of red, white, and blue, he ripped the white out of the middle of it and tossed it away. The remaining red and blue bars were sewn together to make the new flag of the revolutionary movement, which would soon become the flag of independent Haiti. Over the next few months Dessalines managed to lead a diverse and fragmented army to victory, uniting the entire nation for a brief but crucial moment in the pursuit of one common goal.

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  “Dessalines is leaving the North / Come see what he is bringing,” a traditional Haitian song invites us. The song narrates the final triumph of Dessalines over the French. What is the secret to Dessalines’s victory? A ouanga nouveau, the song tells us—a kind of “new magic.” A ouanga, in Haitian Vodou, is an object that concentrates and transmits power, and it can take many forms. According to the song, Dessalines’s magic took one form in particular: as he marched to defeat the French, his power came in the shape of muskets, bullets, and “cannons to chase away the whites.”31

  And chase them away he did. Dessalines’s stunning victory in November 1803 effectively ended the French campaign in Saint-Domingue, enabling Haiti to declare its independence a few weeks later. Of the tens of thousands of French soldiers and sailors sent to the colony between 1801 and 1803, only a few thousand survived the conflict. Having set out to tame the insufficiently respectful colony, Napoleon wound up losing it altogether. Haitians understood how remarkable their victory was, and the first years of independence were filled with joyous, almost unbelieving celebrations. Officers and their wives, decked out in jewels and clothes of silk and Indian madras, went out to the countryside for barbecues set at long tables in alleys of mango trees. Young Haitians performed plays dramatizing the great moments in the war for independence. One of Dessalines’s officers always attended the shows in a large hat upon which was written, in red letters, “Haiti, the tomb of the French.”32

  Outside Haiti, however, Dessalines is usually remembered not for his heroics against the French but for his attacks on the white planters who chose to remain in the new country. His call for an end to French influence certainly had an ominous undercurrent; and while Dessalines declared “peace to our neighbors,” seeking to reassure the empires with slave colonies in the Caribbean that he had no intention of spreading insurrection, he remained (like Louverture) deeply suspicious of the French. In February 1804 he accused the planters who had stayed in Haiti of conspiring against the new regime and working to facilitate a French return. He also produced a letter from 1802, signed by many of the planters still in the country, in which they declared their support for the brutal tactics of Rochambeau. In the course of the next few weeks, roving groups of soldiers and residents acting under orders from Dessalines carried out mass killings of most of the French whites who still lived in Haiti—perhaps as many as several thousand people. In a famous proclamation, he presented the killings as both an act of self-defense and a justified act of revenge for the crimes of the past. “Yes, we have paid back these true cannibals crime for crime, outrage for outrage,” he announced. “I have saved my country. I have avenged America.”33

  These killings were not, as is often said, indiscriminate massacres of all the whites in Haiti. Indeed, white North American merchants traded in Haiti undisturbed during this period; one of them even hosted a large dinner party attended by Haitian officers while the massacres were under way. Dessalines also placed some French whites whom he considered to be allies of Haiti, as well as the Polish defectors from the French army, under his protection. They had, after all, embraced the cause of independence from France. Indeed, one Frenchman—nicknamed “the good white”—was among those who signed the Haitian declaration of independence.34

  In newly independent Haiti, these protected whites became Haitian citizens, and several of them even ended up serving in high-ranking military positions under the new regime. Officially, they also stopped being white: in his 1805 constitution, Dessalines decreed that all Haitians would “henceforth only be known generically as blacks.” In so doing, he made blackness not so much an issue of color as of allegiance to the project of freedom and independence. The same constitution, however, made it clear that while some approved whites could become part of Haitian society, new ones would face severe restrictions: “No white man, regardless of nationality, may set foot in this territory as a master or landowner, nor will he ever be able to acquire any property.” In a country where most of the population had once been the literal property of whites, this stipulation—maintained almost without exception until the U.S. occupation of the country in the early twentieth century—was meant as a shield against the return of the past.35

  In his proclamations—which were disseminated throughout the Americas and translated and published in many U.S. newspapers—Dessalines wrote eloquently of the determination of Haiti’s people to create a radically new order. Haiti was going to be a beacon for the oppressed everywhere, he promised, carrying out vengeance for the brutalities of colonial rule and offering a social structure in which blacks were not only free but politically and economically empowered. The proclamations established the idea that Haiti offered a home for people of color throughout the Americas who longed for freedom and citizenship.36

  While carrying on this remarkable international media campaign, Dessalines also made diplomatic overtures to the Americans and the British in nearby Jamaica. These were the nearest and most powerful merchant powers, and the obvious entities to approach as outlets for Haiti’s agricultural products. He ran into some resistance: Britain and the Unite
d States were both committed slaveholding powers, and officials in both countries passed laws preventing Haitian merchants and sailors from visiting their shores. They feared what their slaves might learn from the Haitians and were intent on limiting the impact of what Haiti had achieved. At the same time, however, the United States and Britain were eager to profit from Caribbean commerce, and although Dessalines was unable to gain official recognition of Haitian independence from either country, he did develop trade relations with both. These were crucial for Dessalines’s regime, since the goods he acquired included large quantities of weapons and ammunition.37

  Aware of Haiti’s vulnerability and marginal status, Dessalines was determined to provide Haiti with a powerful military infrastructure that could stand up to any new invasion. Empires in the Caribbean had traditionally focused primarily on repelling naval assault, but Dessalines knew that Haiti had no navy to speak of, and little hope of building one that could face the massive armadas of the European empires. Moreover, Haiti’s military had its roots in slave insurrection and guerrilla warfare, and throughout the revolutionary wars, the insurgents had always drawn strength from their redoubts in the mountains. Even when they lost control of the towns and the plains, they were never wholly defeated in the heights, and they had beaten the French largely by successfully drawing their enemies into a series of devastating engagements in the interior. Dessalines had lived through—indeed, had led—many of these military successes. To defend Haiti, therefore, he created a string of fortifications on the mountaintops and in the interior of the country, expanding a few existing forts and building new ones. Some of these forts were placed to defend the country from incursions from Spanish Santo Domingo, then occupied by a French general with a few thousand soldiers who encouraged his troops to capture Haitians and sell them into slavery. But the forts were also meant to provide the Haitian army with a place to retreat to and withstand a siege by the French.38

  While such military projects were driven by understandable fears, they did divert a huge portion of Haiti’s already strained resources. The money, of course, could have done much good elsewhere: in the construction of schools, in the rebuilding of towns or agricultural infrastructure. The large-scale irrigation projects that had sustained Saint-Domingue’s flourishing colonial economy lay in ruins after years of warfare, and hopes of reviving sugar production required mills and boiling houses. Instead, Haiti got a string of forts that, in the end, were never used against a foreign enemy at any time in the nineteenth century. (Much later, they did briefly serve as redoubts for insurgents fighting a different foe: the United States Marines.)

  This early phase of defensive militarization also had political consequences, helping to solidify an order in which military leaders came to both embody and control the Haitian state. There was a long history to this political formation. War, after all, had brought freedom to the population in 1793, and had preserved that freedom when it was threatened in 1804. Toussaint Louverture had ruled the colony simultaneously as its top general and its political head, and Dessalines and the country’s other founders had also served as army officers. Military leaders, they believed, were the only ones capable of guiding and protecting the fragile new nation.

  Named Haiti’s head of state by an assembly of generals, Dessalines organized his new government around military structures. He justified the concentration of power in his hands by presenting himself as a symbol and guarantor of the liberty of Haiti. Indeed, the country’s independence declaration itself had been written as a message from Dessalines to his countrymen: “Remember that I sacrificed everything to rally to your defense,” he commanded, “family, children, fortune, and now am rich only in your liberty.” He emphasized that he had struck fear into the hearts of slave owners everywhere: “My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery. Despots and tyrants curse the day I was born.” But in the same breath he also warned the people of Haiti that those who refused the laws “which the spirit guarding your fate dictates to me for your own good” would deserve, and receive, the treatment that was appropriate for an “ungrateful people.” The first document of Haitian independence thus contained a kind of threat, an assertion that the leader (aided by higher powers) knew best what the people needed and that they must submit to the new order or suffer the consequences. In 1805, Dessalines, seeking to secure respect from European nations, crowned himself emperor of Haiti and issued an imperial constitution that concentrated all political power in his own hands. His state council was made up of army generals, and his decrees and legislation were written by a small group of secretaries who were likewise drawn from the military staff.39

  In retrospect these developments might seem inevitable, the result of both institutional inertia and external pressures. But Haiti’s early leaders could have chosen a different path, organizing a constitutional convention and an election rather than simply creating a state out of the military. It would certainly have been difficult—in part because, unlike the British colonies in North America, French Saint-Domingue possessed few institutions that could serve as foundations for a democratic order. The slaves, of course, had had no say in how the plantations were run, and even the tiny minority of free people had little input into the governance of the colony: almost all the power was concentrated in the hands of officials appointed by the king. Still, Dessalines and other postindependence leaders could have drawn inspiration from the Haitian Revolution, which had been a profoundly democratic social movement. Insurgent bands had met, debated, and organized, and starting in 1793 there were several elections that sent representatives to serve in the French parliament. Thanks to these and to the plantation assemblies that were so popular under Louverture, many ex-slaves thus already had at least some experience with democratic processes before Dessalines came to power.

  One potential obstacle to democratic participation was the fact that only a small minority of Haitians could read and write, and most of them spoke only Kreyòl rather than French, the language of the government ever since the founding of Saint-Domingue. But Haiti wasn’t the only place in which much of the population was illiterate in this period, and there were ways around the problem. Indeed, throughout the revolution, French administrators—starting with Sonthonax and Polverel—had issued proclamations in Kreyòl, which could be posted and read aloud by a literate individual to others. The leaders of independent Haiti could have opted for a similar strategy for mobilizing popular participation, but they chose not to do what even Napoleon had done for the population: translate official government announcements into the language of the governed. Perhaps they felt they didn’t need to, confident that Haitians would trust them to defend their best interests. Perhaps they believed that the larger population was simply incapable of participating in an election, or that—given the massive problems faced by the new country—there was simply no time to set one up. Whatever their reasoning, the early years of independence represented a lost opportunity to channel the mass engagement of the revolution into a truly democratic order.

  Widespread political participation, of course, would have opened the way for a profound challenge to the agricultural policies set up by Louverture and largely maintained by Dessalines. At the moment of independence, after all, most of the population was already clearly invested in the “counter-plantation” model, while Dessalines and other members of the elite were determined to keep the plantations alive. Like Louverture before him, Dessalines used the army to enforce his agricultural policies, preventing laborers from leaving the plantations. For most Haitians, his regime represented continuity with the oppressive labor practices of the past rather than a significant break with them.

  Dessalines also followed Louverture’s lead when it came to dealing with issues of land. Haiti was full of abandoned plantations; and while some Haitians who were related to departed French planters tried to use these family ties to assert ownership over the planters’ old holdings, special commissions set up by Dessalines to examine the applications re
jected most such claims. Instead, the commissions placed the estates in the hands of the militarily controlled state, helping make it the country’s largest landowner. Dessalines could thus have carried out a distribution of land to the general population, fulfilling the broad yearning for a full dismantling of the plantation system. But although there are hints that near the end of his regime he was considering some such experiment with land reform, during his time in power he never embarked on that path. Like Louverture before him, Dessalines seems to have been convinced that keeping large properties intact was essential for maintaining the export-oriented agricultural system—an ideology that put him on the same side as the wealthy landowners, who also wanted to retain and expand their sizable holdings. The debate, such as it was, revolved only around the question of which group of elites would profit from Haiti’s new order—not what that order would look like.40

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  Today, Dessalines is widely and justifiably venerated for his role in leading Haiti to independence. But the mythology surrounding him tends to obscure the internal conflicts within the revolutionary movement. The victory of 1804, after all, had been possible only because some fighters—unlike Dessalines—had never joined the French but had continued to resist even at the lowest point of the conflict. Dessalines and his defenders argued that his time fighting for the French was just a necessary ploy, providing him with the opportunity to gather weapons and soldiers for the final push for independence. Still, some of the insurgents—including Sans-Souci, an African-born officer who had held much of the north in 1802 against French attacks led by Dessalines and Christophe—were not sure why they should suddenly take orders from these fickle generals. Eventually, Christophe summoned Sans-Souci to a meeting, saying they needed to discuss the matter. It was an ambush: Sans-Souci was killed, and his troops were brought under Christophe’s command. Though in many ways Sans-Souci was one of the crucial heroes of the Haitian Revolution, he remains largely forgotten to this day.41