Jean-Jacques Dessalines

Jean-Jacques Duclos was born around 1758, most likely in the Cormier region of Saint-Domingue. He was enslaved on the Duclos plantation, then sold to a free Black landowner named Dessalines whose name he took. He joined the rebellion in August 1791, served under Toussaint Louverture throughout the 1790s, and rose to the rank of general.

When Toussaint was captured by French treachery and deported in June 1802, Dessalines initially submitted to the French invasion. He returned to the rebellion in October 1802 with the conviction that the French — under Napoleon's instruction to restore slavery — would never permit a Black Haiti to exist. He took command of the revolutionary armies.

He defeated the French expeditionary force decisively at the Battle of Vertières on the eighteenth of November 1803. The French commander Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur, viscount of Rochambeau, surrendered nine days later. The French withdrew from Saint-Domingue.

On the first of January 1804, in Gonaïves, Dessalines proclaimed the independence of Haiti — the first Black republic in modern history, the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere, and the only successful slave revolution the world has ever known. He drafted the Haitian Declaration of Independence in conjunction with Boisrond Tonnerre. He became Governor-General for Life, and in October 1804 proclaimed himself Emperor Jacques I.

His two-year reign was uncompromising: he ordered the execution of the remaining French planters and the redistribution of plantations to formerly enslaved Haitians. He was assassinated by his own generals at Pont Rouge near Port-au-Prince on the seventeenth of October 1806, age forty-eight.

He is honored here as the general who completed Toussaint's work and founded the first Black republic.