Opening a forum on Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Dubois asks why the founder of Haiti has drawn so much less study than Toussaint Louverture. Dessalines won the war of independence, issued the declaration of 1804, and wrecked Bonaparte's plans for Louisiana, yet contemporaries cast him as a man of action and violence with no ideas behind it, and that portrait has proved durable. Against it Dubois sets recent work showing a deliberate author who built and circulated a political voice across the Atlantic world. He declines to smooth the contradictions: the ruler who guaranteed freedom concentrated power in his own hands, held plantations, and kept ordinary Haitians out of government. François Duvalier later claimed his mantle and changed the national colours to prove it. The essay ends with Vodou songs in which Dessalines appears as liberator and as destroyer alike, a memory more layered than any statue.