Declaring Independence

The moving public spectacle of the inauguration of the first black president of the United States in January of 2009 prompted many Haitians and friends of Haiti to think back to the ascension of the first black leader in a New World nation, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, in January of 1804. The coming to power of Dessalines coincided with the celebration of the new nation's independence through a formal declaration of independence. Thomas Jefferson described the U.S. Declaration of Independence as “an instrument pregnant with […] the fate of the world,” and it was in Haiti, as David Armitage has noted, that the declaration of independence as a genre began its trajectory from a single nation's document to a “global history” of “imitations and analogues.”

Haiti's own Declaration of Independence or “Acte d'indépendance” is hardly fully described as an “imitation” or “analogue,” however; it is entirely different from the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and stands as one of the most remarkable monuments of black Atlantic textual history. Furthermore, it was only one of a series of major independence documents released by the Haitian government in the independence era. This chapter argues that the Haitian independence documents also stand as a remarkable monument of American literary history, because Dessalines had, precisely, targeted America as a larger media sphere for his new sovereign speech acts. Americans across the cities and small towns of the eastern seaboard were a rapt audience— whether fascinated or horrified—for the literary self-construction of the new black nation's independence in 1804 and 1805.