On this date we remember Haiti’s founder General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who was killed after becoming the first world leader in the Americas to permanently abolish slavery.

BY MARLENE L. DAUT, PH.D · UPDATED OCTOBER 17, 2023

After more than two hundred years of French slavery and colonial rule, Haiti broke free and emerged as the first nation to outlaw slavery and the slave trade in 1804. On the anniversary of the death of Haiti’s revolutionary founder, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, ESSENCE wants to make sure you know how he used all his might to destroy slavery and cement Haitian independence.

In 1758, Dessalines was born to an enslaved mother in Grande-Rivière-du-Nord in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (today Haiti). After being tortured by his enslavers for thirty-three years, Dessalines participated in the Revolution (1791-1803) that brought slavery in the colony to a standstill. Eventually joining the famous revolutionary and formerly enslaved Toussaint Louverture, together, they and the other revolutionaries forced France to officially abolish slavery. As free men, Dessalines and Louverture then rose through the ranks to become generals in the French military at war, by turns, with Spain and Great Britain.

After Napoléon Bonaparte overthrew the French government to become First Consul of France, he made it his mission to reinstate slavery. He sent his brother-in-law to the island for that purpose with 60,000 French troops, and he instructed them to get rid of Louverture, Dessalines, and the other revolutionary leaders. The French arrested and deported Louverture in June 1802, but the revolutionaries persisted.

Dessalines successfully unified the Black population to create the armée indigène or indigenous army, who changed their motto from “Liberty or Death!” to “Independence or Death!” The Indigenous Army definitively defeated French troops at the Battle of Vertièreson November 18, 1803.