Haiti’s founders united former slaves, freedmen, and ex-slave owners against France

Evidence

On new year’s day 1804, a group of generals gathered in Saint-Domingue to create a new nation. Their leader, Jean- Jacques Dessalines, had once been a slave. So, too, had several of the men who joined him in signing their declaration of independence. … Some had been born in Africa and survived the middle passage; others, including Dessalines, had been born into slavery in the French colony. They signed their names next to those of men who had once been slave owners, including one apparently was nicknamed “the good white.” Many were men of mixed European and African descent who had been free long before the Revolution began, several of whom had fought against Dessalines in a brutal civil war a few years earlier. Now, however, they stood behind him to declare that they had forever renounced France, and would fight to the death to preserve their independence and freedom. Haiti was founded on the ashes of what had been, fifteen years before, the most profitable slave colony in the world, its birth premised on the self-evident truth that no one should be a slave. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 17