As 1805 slipped into 1806, the law of nations was proving inhospitable to new black nations; sovereign Haiti was being reframed as an eternal rogue colony. When Dessalines attempted to build Haiti's economic, military, and cultural strength through international trade, demographic development, and publication of state documents, increasingly the wider world received the new nation not as the triumph of right and a stunning innovation, but as an inherent subversion of the racialized power hierarchies that were the basis of Euro-American prosperity. Could a former colony survive as the first free black nation in an international sphere without seeking political safe havens and partners in trade, not just among slave-holding and/or colonized states that normally depended on racial segregation, but among fellow anticolonial states—anticolonial states that were not yet in existence? The specter of Haitian transnational subversion, of a Haitian attempt not just to declare independence but also to spread it to other nearby populations, was alarmingly plausible to European colonists and metropoles. It is also what is most difficult to trace in terms of actual evidence; unlike the philosophically stunning narratives Dessalines was disseminating throughout the U.S., this is a text one must read between the lines.