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Jean-Jacques Dessalines was born a slave in 1758 on the Vye Kay coffee plantation at Cormiers, owned by his first master, the white colonist Duclos, in the northern parish of Grande-Rivière. It was later acquired by a free black creole, Philippe Jasmin Désir, son-in-law to Toussaint Louverture. In 1779, according to a notarial deed, Toussaint took a lease on the coffee plantation along with its 13 slaves, including Jean-Jacques. After Désir’s death in 1784, Marie-Marthe Martine, his widow and the daughter of Toussaint Louverture, married Janvier Dessalines, a veteran of the siege of Savannah in the U.S. War of Independence. He gave his surname to Jean-Jacques and a trade as carpenter. On the Vye Kay plantation the two future leaders of the Haitian Revolution had established their first contact and relations. According to several testimonies, Dessalines was rebellious and often ran away as a maroon, leaving his body covered with scars left from corporal punishments.
Dessalines the insurgent
When the slave insurrection broke out in August 1791, Dessalines joined the ranks of Georges Biassou, one of the insurgent leaders, and took part as soldier in the first battles against slavery. As the insurrection gained momentum, he rose through the ranks and became, like Toussaint, a lieutenant of Biassou and then of Jean-François, the latter claiming the title of supreme leader. By 1792, Dessalines sided with Toussaint, who began to discreetly distance himself from the two leaders to be able to pursue his own path toward general emancipation. In early 1793, with republican France at war with Spain and England, the troops of Jean-François and Biassou, including those of Toussaint, rallied to fight on the side of Spain. They seized several towns in the northeastern parishes of Saint Domingue while the English occupied strategic ports along the colony’s western and southern coastline. As other Black insurrections ignited throughout the colony, the survival of Saint Domingue for France was in peril. The civil commissioners, Sonthonax and Polverel, proclaimed general emancipation in a bid to rally the Blacks to the side of France and thereby to the defense of their freedom. In May 1794, with news arriving of the decree passed by the National Convention on February 4 abolishing slavery throughout the French empire, Toussaint abandoned Spain to fight for France, taking with him his officers, including Dessalines, his first lieutenant.
Dessalines and the War in the South
From this point on, Dessalines’s career was tied to that of Toussaint, whose prominence continued to reach new heights. Dessalines’s military exploits were impressive as he fought the British occupying forces and then in the civil war that broke out in 1799 between Toussaint and his rival, André Rigaud, the leader of the dominant mulatto faction in the South and parts of the West. The outcome of the war would determine the future direction of the colony, either as an autonomous Black state under the supreme governance of Toussaint Louverture, or as a colony under that of Rigaud and his partisans subject to the authority of France. In 1800, due largely to Dessalines’s military feats, Rigaud and his army were defeated. Toussaint proclaimed a general amnesty with the notable exception of Rigaud and Alexandre Pétion, who both leave for France on Toussaint’s orders and accusations of treason and rebellion against his authority. As governor-general and commander in chief of the colonial army (some 20,000 strong), Toussaint promoted Dessalines to the rank of division general. It was also during the war that Dessalines met and married Marie-Claire Félicité Bonheur, future Empress of Haiti in 1805. Despite Toussaint’s desire to draw a curtain over the past, his amnesty was broken. Hundreds of prisoners, officers and soldiers were executed on his orders, while Dessalines took it upon himself to save certain ones, including Bazelais and Gérin, that would play a crucial role in the war of independence. Yet as agricultural inspector for the South, Dessalines could be merciless in his treatment of plantation workers who, subjected to the harsh works codes of Louverture, showed the slightest sign of insubordination.
The Leclerc expedition
The consequences of the civil war in the South ultimately will have weakened rather than strengthened the consolidation of Toussaint’s and Dessalines’ forces vis-à-vis the metropole. The arrival in early 1802 of the French expedition with 22,000 regular troops and thirty some warships led by General Charles-Victor Leclerc, Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, would alter the situation. Bonaparte had given Leclerc precise instructions to restore the colony under French control. Should they resist, Leclerc was to wage an implacable war against Toussaint and his generals as well as all Black and colored officers ever having worn an epaulette. The restoration of slavery and the pre-1792 racial order was the underlying mission. Ever since the civil war Dessalines had harbored no illusion as to the France’s true intentions and anticipated there would be yet another, more important, war ahead—one against France herself. It began in February 1802, with Leclerc’s landing. In March, Dessalines and his troops confronted French forces with sustained resistance for three weeks defending the strategic fort of Crête-à-Pierrot. Lacking munitions and reserves but inspired by Dessalines’ exhortation that this war would be a war for independence, his troops evacuated across enemy lines ten times their number during the night. Yet by May, Christophe, Toussaint’s general in command at Cap Français, joined the ranks of Leclerc, who then offered Toussaint an honorable retirement and allowed his officers to maintain their grades. In June, Toussaint was invited to a parley with French division general, Jean-Baptiste Brunet, who had him shackled, put under arrest and deported to France. With Toussaint’s departure came the defection of other ranking officers, including Dessalines, who, under Leclerc’s auspices, waged a fierce war against the insurgent masses and their leaders, mostly African-born, who had risen in their thousands once news arrived that summer of the restoration of slavery in Guadeloupe. The greater the popular resistance, the greater were the atrocities committed by the French army. In the South, colored and Black military were placed in the holds of boats filled with sulphur—the first gas chambers in the modern history of warfare. In October 1802, Dessalines and Pétion, whom Bonapart had sent to accompany the expeditionary forces, abandoned the ranks of Leclerc and organized an indigenous army under Dessalines’ supreme command. The independent African leaders, notably Sans Souci in the North and Lamour Dérance, a former partisan of Rigaud in the West, having been relentlessly tracked down by Christophe and Dessalines, refused to submit to Dessalines’ authority and were both assassinated. Finally on November 18, 1803, the victory of the indigenous army at Vertières ended the French expedition. On the 19th, Donatien Rochambeau, Leclerc’s successor, capitulated.
The reign of Dessalines
On January 1st, 1804, Haiti proclaimed independence and consecrated it in a solemn act presented and signed by Dessalines and 36 generals and officers of the Indigenous Army, as well as Boisrond-Tonnerre, author of Haiti’s Act of Independence. In it they vowed to forever renounce France, never again to live under French domination, and to fight to the death to preserve independence. But they also promised “peace to our neighbors.” The revolutionaries adopted the name of Hayti—as the island known by the Tainos, its first inhabitants that were extinguished by conquering Spaniards in the 15th century—to designate the new country and henceforth avenge centuries of European colonization. With independence, the revolution needed to be consolidated and the foundational institutions of a new Black state created. Security guarantees and the protection of its citizens against any threat to their liberty had to be addressed. The presence of an active force of some 2,000 French troops commanded by General Ferrand in the eastern part of the island, where Ferrand had restored slavery, posed a palpable threat. On February 29, 1804, in one of his first acts, Dessalines ordered the arrest, and in April the massacre, of all remaining French persons suspected of having taken part in the atrocities ordered by Leclerc and Rochambeau. The exact number of victims remains uncertain but could have reached at least 2,000. Those whites deemed useful to the country—priests, doctors, skilled workers and others, as well as Polish soldiers that deserted the French army to fight alongside the Haitians for independence, were spared. The elimination of the white plantation owners brought with it issues concerning property ownership and exposed the divisions of class and color inherent to the colonial regime. Dessalines ordered the termination of all plantation leases, claiming in justification: “Ever since we have thrown out the colonists, their sons are claiming their properties; the Blacks, whose fathers are in Africa, will have nothing. . . .” Henceforth, the state alone would administer the vast national domain. In February 1804, Dessalines renounced his title of governor-general to accept that of emperor and on October 8th was crowned Jacques I of Hayti. On May 20, 1805, he promulgated a constitution that created the Empire of Hayti, confirmed his role as emperor, and set up a council of state composed of generals and his secretary, Boisrond-Tonnerre. Slavery was forever abolished, but the plantation system was maintained. The large estates were distributed mainly to the military and the cultivators subjected to a regime of militarized agriculture and virtual serfdom. The administration of the country, the army, foreign relations and trade, as well as the economy, were in Dessalines’ exclusive domain. Moreover, proprietary ownership of land was prohibited to any white man regardless of nationality (art.12), with the exception of naturalized Poles and Germans (art. 13). Finally, to end all distinctions of color inherited from the racialized colonial era and lay the basis for a common Haitian identity, “all Haitians shall be known by the generic denomination of Black” (art. 14).
End of regime: Dessalines assassinated
Dessalines’ regime was brief. His land distribution policy, dictatorial governance, control over foreign trade and agrarian management all antagonized high-ranking members of the oligarchy in the West and South, particularly Pétion and Gérin (along with the discreet complicity of Christophe, among others), who prepared a revolt to overthrow the regime. On October 17, 1806, en route to crush the revolt, Dessalines was ambushed and assassinated at Pont-Rouge near Port-au-Prince, his body mutilated and dismembered. His remains were collected in a sac by a poor woman known as Désirée la Folle to be buried. They were transferred to the museum of the Haitian National Pantheon to commemorate and restore honor to the hero of independence. Among the pantheon of loas in Haitian vodou, Dessalines is the only ‘founding father’ who is venerated.
Published in April 2025