I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom

Although a hero to Haitians for centuries, Jean-Jacques Dessalines is practically unknown abroad. And yet, in an age when the American and French Revolutions remade the Atlantic world, it was Dessalines that was the founding father of the most radical nation-state of the age. Unlike his contemporaries in France and the Americas that claimed to fight for freedom, he was fully committed to destroying slavery, racism, and colonialism. Dessalines’s commitment to abolition was probably because he had personally experienced the inhumanity of these doctrines. In less than five decades, Dessalines went from insubordinate “slave,” to revolutionary, to French republican general, to founding father, and finally, to his death at the hands of political rivals. And he did so by boldly insisting on his own and his peoples’ right to liberty and equality. His life—and Haiti’s very existence—exposes the lie in Enlightenment values that, even while celebrating universal rights, excluded Black people and expanded slavery. Unsurprisingly, he and his fellow revolutionaries did not allow themselves to be limited by these European platitudes. If Dessalines was indeed the bearer of the modern ideals of freedom and equality, why isn’t he remembered for his role in the Age of Revolution, in the history of anti-colonialism, and the history of the abolition of slavery? In fact, not only is he not remember as such, but, instead, people go to great lengths to tear him down. This paper explores Dessalines’s revolutionary life and his multi-layered legacy and memory in the Atlantic world.