Jean-Jacques Dessalines

• 1. Introduction

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  Jean-Jacques Dessalines was born into slavery on the 20th of September 1758, on a sugarcane plantation called Cormier, near Grande-Rivière-du-Nord in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. He died on the 17th of October 1806 as Emperor of a free nation, dismembered by a mob in the street. Between those two dates, he led the only slave rebellion in world history that successfully established an independent country.

  He would preside over a massacre. He would betray a mentor. He would crown himself emperor and enforce a form of labor so brutal that the newly freed population compared it to slavery. And when he was killed, a woman named Dédée Bazile gathered the pieces of his body and buried them in a churchyard.

  What drove a man born enslaved to become both a liberator and a dictator? How did the colony that generated the highest profits of any French territory become the first nation in the Americas to permanently abolish slavery? And why did Dessalines, having won everything, lose the loyalty of the very men who stood beside him?

• 2. Born into Cane

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  Jean-Jacques was born with the surname Duclos, taken by his enslaved father from their owner, a man named Henri Duclos. The names of his parents and their African homeland are unknown. Most people trafficked to Saint-Domingue came from west and central West Africa, a region drained of people across the eighteenth century to feed the colony's insatiable appetite for labor. Mortality on those plantations was so high that French colonial planters kept buying more enslaved people from Africa even as the sugar economy boomed.

  Jean-Jacques worked in the sugarcane fields and eventually rose to the rank of commandeur, which meant foreman. He stayed on Duclos's plantation until he was roughly 30 years old. Then he was sold to an affranchis, a free man of color, who also carried the name Dessalines and who assigned that name to Jean-Jacques as a matter of custom. Jean-Jacques worked for that master for about three years before gaining his freedom.

  His early military training came from a woman known either as Victoria Montou or Akbaraya Tòya. When the slave uprising swept across the Plaine-du-Nord in 1791, that region of vast sugar plantations was exactly where Dessalines lived and worked. He joined the rebellion that year, alongside thousands of others.

• 3. Under Louverture's Wing

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  In 1791 Dessalines joined the northern rebellion led by Jean François Papillon and Georges Biassou, the first action of what would grow into the Haitian Revolution. He followed Papillon into the eastern half of Hispaniola, occupied by Spain, and enlisted in the Spanish military to fight against the French colony. It was there that he met Toussaint Bréda, a mature man also born into slavery, who would later be known to history as Toussaint Louverture.

  In 1794, after France declared slavery abolished as a consequence of its own revolution, Louverture switched to the French side. Dessalines followed. He rose steadily through the ranks, reaching brigadier general by 1799, and led successful captures of Jacmel, Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, and Anse-à-Veau. He put down an insurrection in the north in 1801, one led by Louverture's own nephew, General Moyse. Dessalines became known for a take-no-prisoners approach and for burning homes and entire villages.

  All the while, pressure from Napoleon Bonaparte's government was building. Napoleon's wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais, came from a slave-owning family. White and mulatto planters had been lobbying Paris to restore slavery in Saint-Domingue, and Napoleon was committed to doing exactly that. The colony had generated the highest profits of any French territory before 1791. Louverture, who had named himself governor-for-life while still declaring loyalty to France, was on a collision course with Paris.

• 4. The Fort and the Betrayal

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  On the 11th of March 1802, Dessalines stood inside a small fort at Crête-à-Pierrot with 1,300 men. Outside, the French expeditionary force led by General Charles Leclerc had brought 18,000 attackers. To steady his troops at the start of the battle, Dessalines picked up a lit torch, held it near an open powder keg, and declared that he would blow the fort apart if the French broke through. His defenders inflicted heavy casualties on the attackers over a 20-day siege, then ran short of food and ammunition. They broke through the French lines and escaped into the Cahos Mountains with their army still largely intact.

  What happened next has shadowed Dessalines's reputation ever since. After the battle, he briefly defected from Louverture and sided with Leclerc and the mulatto commanders Alexandre Pétion and André Rigaud, who had earlier fought against Louverture. On the 22nd of May 1802, after learning that Louverture had failed to order a local rebel leader to lay down arms per a ceasefire agreement, Dessalines wrote to Leclerc denouncing Louverture's conduct as "extraordinary." For that letter, Dessalines and his wife received gifts from Jean Baptiste Brunet. On the 7th of June 1802, Brunet arrested Louverture along with about a hundred members of his inner circle and deported them to France. Louverture was imprisoned at Fort-de-Joux in Doubs. He died there on the 7th of April 1803, at the age of 59.

  When it became clear that France intended to restore slavery in Saint-Domingue, as it had already done in Guadeloupe, Dessalines and Pétion switched sides again in October 1802. By November of that year, Dessalines had become the leader of the resistance, with Pétion's blessing.

• 5. Declaring a Nation

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  Leclerc died of yellow fever, which consumed large numbers of French troops as well. His successor, Donatien de Rochambeau, used tactics brutal enough to drive former enemies together. The rebel coalition built toward a final confrontation.

  On the 18th of November 1803, black and mulatto forces under Dessalines and Pétion attacked the fort of Vertières, held by Rochambeau, near Cap-Français in the north. Rochambeau surrendered the following day. On the 4th of December 1803, the last remaining French colonial forces surrendered to Dessalines. On the 1st of January 1804, from the city of Gonaïves, Dessalines declared independence and renamed the territory "Ayiti," drawing on the indigenous Taíno name for the island.

  He had been named Général-Chef de l'Armée Indigène on the 18th of May 1803. He served as Governor-General from the 30th of November 1803. On the 22nd of September 1804, the generals of the Haitian Revolutionary army proclaimed him Emperor. He was crowned Emperor Jacques I on the 6th of October in the city of Le Cap. On the 20th of May 1805, the imperial constitution named him emperor for life with the right to designate his own successor.

  Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité Bonheur, whom he had married in a ceremony witnessed by Louverture himself at St-Marc Church in Léogane, was named empress under that same constitution. She has been credited with creating the soup joumou, or Pumpkin Independence Soup, now recognized as a UNESCO Patrimoine. She outlived him by many decades, dying at the age of 100.

• 6. The Massacre and the Constitution

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  Between February and April 1804, Dessalines ordered the killing of the remaining French colonists in Haiti. The death toll reached between 3,000 and 5,000 people, with thousands more forced into exile. After spending roughly 30 years enslaved and witnessing the atrocities of colonial rule, Dessalines did not trust the remaining colonists. Some historians point to the fear of a French reinvasion and the reimposition of slavery as a driving motive.

  Dessalines carved out specific exceptions. He spared the Polish Legionnaires who had defected from the French side, and the Germans who had not participated in the slave trade. He granted them full citizenship and, in a deliberate legal act, classified them as black.

  The Haitian Constitution of 1805 formalized what the massacre had enacted by force. It declared Haiti an all-black nation. White colonists were forbidden from owning property or land. Any property that had belonged to white colonists was declared, in the Constitution's own words, confiscated by incontestable right to the benefit of the state. The same document confirmed the abolition of slavery, making Haiti the first country in the Americas to permanently end the institution.

• 7. Empire and Its Enemies

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  Dessalines's economic vision drew on the colonial plantation model he had inherited. The historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot described his labor system as caporalisme agraire, or agrarian militarism. Every black Haitian was required to work either as a soldier or as a plantation laborer, continuing to produce the cash crops that had been the foundation of the colonial economy. His forces enforced that requirement so strictly that some of the newly freed population felt as if they had been re-enslaved.

  Tensions ran along lines that predated independence. The nouveaux libres, the roughly 80 percent of the population freed by the revolution, resented a system that felt familiar. The anciens libres, those freed before the revolution and often of mixed race, were angered by Dessalines's plans to redistribute land away from them to the nouveaux. High-ranking military officers grew restless.

  Dessalines also reached beyond Haiti's borders. In 1805, after his coronation, he invaded the eastern part of Hispaniola and advanced as far as Santo Domingo before retreating when a French naval squadron appeared. For administration, he relied heavily on the light-skinned gens de couleur libres who had been educated by their white plantation-owner families, because he needed literate officials and managers. He also tried to ease racial tensions through a marriage alliance, offering one of his daughters to Pétion, who was the most prominent mulatto leader. Pétion declined, citing the claim that she was already involved with Chancy, a nephew of Toussaint Louverture.

  The tensions never eased. His nephew Raymond, son of his brother Louis, would later become a senior figure in the government of King Henry I and was killed by revolutionaries at Cap-Henri on the 10th of October 1820, fourteen years after the emperor himself.

• 8. Death and What Remained

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  A conspiracy formed within Dessalines's own administration. Alexandre Pétion and Étienne-Élie Gérin were among those involved. In August 1806, Haitians in the south rose in insurrection. Dessalines rode north of Port-au-Prince to suppress the rebellion, and on the 17th of October 1806, at a place called Larnage, now known as Pont-Rouge, he was killed.

  The circumstances are disputed. One account has him shot, stabbed, stripped, and mutilated before his corpse was carried to Port-au-Prince, where crowds stoned it until it resembled, in the words of one report, "scraps" and "shapeless remains." Another account places his death after a meeting at Pétion's house on Rue l'Enterrement. A third describes an ambush. A fourth says he was shot, then struck on the head with a sabre, then stabbed three times with a dagger while a crowd shouted that the tyrant was killed. Most accounts agree that a mob dismembered the body in a public square.

  A vivandière named Dédée Bazile gathered what was left and buried it in the Cimetière intérieur of Church Ste-Anne. The tomb was raised by the wife of Balthazar Inginac, with the inscription: Ci-git Dessalines, mort à 48 ans. His body was later moved to the Autel de la Patrie in the Champs-de-Mars, where it rests alongside Pétion's. His assassination did not resolve the conflicts it was meant to end. Pétion and Henri Christophe divided Haiti between them, and civil war followed.

  By the early twentieth century, reassessment had begun. The national anthem of Haiti, "La Dessalinienne," written in 1903, carries his name. His grandson Florvil Hyppolite served as president of Haiti from 1889 to 1896. A monument stands at Pont-Rouge, where the Emperor fell.