Haitian and foreign accounts alike have credited Boisrond-Tonnerre with writing the 1804 act of independence, drafting it through a single night at Dessalines's order. Jenson doubts the story on textual and practical grounds and restores Dessalines to the center of it.

No signed original survives, and the machinery Madiou describes, simultaneous publication across the new state on New Year's Day, did not exist; no Haitian newspaper is confirmed to have been printing in early 1804. What is now read as one document was more likely several texts composed over the first weeks of the year, later gathered and backdated to give independence a founding moment.

The earlier proclamation Dessalines issued in November 1803 with Christophe and Clervaux circulated widely in the United States, where it was taken for a declaration. Across these texts Jenson finds a consistent ferocity of image and address that she identifies as his own.