The inauguration of the first Black president of the United States in January 2009 sent many Haitians, and many friends of Haiti, thinking back to another January. In 1804 Jean-Jacques Dessalines became the first Black leader of a nation in the New World, and Jenson's chapter takes that echo as its opening.

Dessalines came to power just as the new country marked its independence with a formal declaration. Jenson sets that document beside the American one, which Jefferson described as an instrument carrying within it the fate of the world, and turns from there to what David Armitage has observed about Haiti's place in the history of such declarations.