On 1 January 1804, at Gonaïves, Dessalines and his generals proclaimed the independence of their country. They rejected the colonial name Saint-Domingue and chose Haiti, from Ayiti, a Taíno name for the island, often translated as “land of mountains.” The choice honored the island's Indigenous people, destroyed by the first European conquerors, and broke symbolically with France.

The Act of Independence

The declaration vowed that the people would never again live under French rule or slavery, and that they would rather die than lose their freedom. Haiti became the first nation in the Americas to abolish slavery permanently and the first modern state founded by formerly enslaved people. Dessalines was named governor-general for life.

The massacre of 1804

Independence was followed by violence that remains one of the most debated episodes of the revolution. In the early months of 1804, Dessalines ordered the killing of most of the remaining French white population. Estimates of the dead range from about three thousand to five thousand. Some groups were spared, including Polish soldiers who had deserted the French army and joined the revolutionaries, some Germans, doctors and priests.

How should this be judged? Some historians explain it as revenge for the atrocities of Rochambeau and generations of slavery, and as a brutal effort to prevent a French return by eliminating potential collaborators. Others stress that it killed many civilians, including women and children, and that no context justifies the murder of people for their race. For the critics of Haiti abroad, the massacre became propaganda, used for decades to argue that freedom for Black people meant bloodshed. A fair account recognizes both the context and the crime.

Emperor Jacques I

Later in 1804, Dessalines declared himself Emperor Jacques I. His 1805 constitution declared that all Haitians, whatever their color, would be known as Black, rejecting the color distinctions of colonial society. It also barred white men, with some exceptions, from owning property in Haiti, a measure meant to prevent a return of colonial power. Dessalines enforced plantation labor harshly, as Toussaint had, and tried to take back land claimed by some of the elite. In October 1806, he was assassinated in an ambush by officers who opposed him.

A divided country

After Dessalines's death, Haiti split in two. In the north, Henri Christophe ruled first as president and from 1811 as King Henri I, with a nobility of his own creation. He built the palace of Sans-Souci and the enormous mountaintop fortress known as the Citadelle Laferrière, meant to defend against a French return, now a World Heritage Site. In the south and west, Alexandre Pétion led a republic. Pétion distributed land in small plots to many soldiers and farmers, making him popular but reducing export income.

The country was reunited in 1820 under Pétion's successor, Jean-Pierre Boyer, who also took control of the eastern part of the island from 1822 to 1844, when the Dominican Republic declared its independence.

Haiti and Latin American independence

Haiti also aided freedom elsewhere. In 1815 to 1816, when the South American revolutionary Simón Bolívar was defeated and in exile, Pétion gave him weapons, ships and soldiers. Pétion asked one thing in return: that Bolívar free the enslaved in the lands he liberated. Bolívar declared emancipation for enslaved people who joined his forces, though full abolition in the new South American nations came only gradually over the following decades.

A free peasantry

Over time, despite efforts by Haiti's rulers to maintain plantation agriculture, many Haitians achieved what they had wanted since 1791: small farms of their own. Haiti became a nation largely of independent peasant farmers, growing food and some coffee. This was a real form of freedom, but it reduced the exports that could fund the state, and Haiti's elite and its rural majority remained divided by wealth, language and power, divisions that shaped the country's later history.

Worked example: building a nation after war

Imagine you are an adviser to Haiti's leaders in 1804. Make a list of the challenges the new nation faces.

• Security. France has not recognized independence and may return. Slaveholding powers nearby, including Britain and Spain, fear the example of Haiti.
• Economy. Plantations are destroyed; many skilled workers are dead; trade partners are hostile.
• Land. Former slaves want small farms; the state wants export crops to pay for defense.
• Divisions. Tensions persist between Black former slaves and the formerly free people of color, between north and south, and between rulers and rural farmers.
• Legitimacy. No major power will recognize the new nation, limiting its ability to trade and borrow.

Most new nations face some of these problems. Haiti faced all of them at once, as the world's first Black republic in a world dominated by slaveholding empires. Its leaders made harsh choices, some of them unjust. Judging those choices fairly requires keeping in view both what they did and the pressures under which they acted.