Gathering fourteen founding texts, this volume prints the constitutional documents produced in Saint-Domingue and Haiti between 1790 and 1860, from two colonial drafts through Louverture's charter of 1801 to the republican, imperial and royal charters of the independent state. The editors introduce each document against the politics that produced it, treating these charters as instruments of contest rather than paper formalities. Louverture read a loophole in the French constitution of 1799 very freely to justify governing the colony himself, and Bonaparte answered with an invasion. Dessalines's charter of 1805 barred white men from owning land, refused any dominant religion, and opened the way to divorce. Later charters, republican under Pétion and royal under Christophe, kept restating the abolition of slavery while shifting executive power. Texts are reproduced from official colonial printings where these survive, with variant editions noted, giving scholars a documentary base for how Haitians wrote sovereignty into law.