I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom Julia Gaffield Publisher: Yale University Press (June 17, 2025)
Hardcover: 352 pages
ISBN: 9780300255478
A moving and humane portrait of the abolitionist revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who led Haiti’s fight for independence from French colonial rule
“My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery,” declared Jean-Jacques Dessalines as he announced the independence of Haiti, the most radical nation-state during the Age of Revolution and the first country ever to permanently outlaw slavery. Enslaved for the first thirty years of his life, Dessalines (c. 1758–1806) joined the revolution that abolished slavery within the French colony. Then he became a general in the colonial army of the new French Republic. When it was discovered that France once again supported slavery, Dessalines declared war on his former allies. Fighting under the slogan “Liberty or Death,” his army forced the French to evacuate in late 1803. At the start of the new year, Dessalines declared independence from France and became the leader of a free Haiti.
A hero to Haitians for centuries, Dessalines is portrayed abroad as barbarous and violent. Yet this caricature derives not from facts—as Julia Gaffield demonstrates with extensive new research—but from the fears of contemporary enslavers. Showcasing the man behind the myths, Gaffield reveals Dessalines’s deep suffering, warm friendships, and unwavering commitment to destroying slavery, racism, and colonialism, and his bold insistence on his people’s right to liberty and equality.
Author
Julia Gaffield is associate professor of history at William & Mary. She is the author of Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution. She lives in Williamsburg, VA.
As usual a politically correct vision even sounding "woke" who doesn't face the hard fact that Haïti was built contrary she writes on racism and on an occulted denied genocide against French whites inhabitants of Saint Domingue, not to mention posterior racial wars with blacks against mulattos, but more popular is a the usual and established fairy tale of the first free republic of slaves victorious against Napoleon the enslaver who would be seriously revised...
Decree of February 22, 1804 ordered military leaders to arrest and put to death all whites, with the exception of priests, doctors, surgeons, pharmacists and other French people practicing arts or trades likely to be useful to the population, as well as Poles (deserters) and Germans (settlers installed in the Northwest before the Revolution)
at the end of april 1804 3000 to 5000 French whites men women and children were exterminated
recently learnt that the Haitian Republic under président Boyer (1818-1843) had no problem to go to Louisiana to sell the captives taken on seized slaves ships quite far from the idealized vision of Haïti welcoming 6000 afroamericans fleeing the United States
deux poids deux mesures