A close reading of Toussaint Louverture's 1801 constitution for Saint Domingue, treated here as a serious and neglected contribution to political thought. Where the French and American declarations pronounce on humanity everywhere while confining protection to citizens, the 1801 text makes the inhabitant its bearer of rights, extending entitlement to everyone present in the colony whatever their birthplace or origin. Fischer builds the case from the document's deliberate misquotation of the 1789 declaration: the famous clause about men born and remaining free becomes a sequence of birth, life and death, cutting rights loose from birthright and ruling out gradual emancipation schemes and indenture alike. The revised wording registers the experience of enslavement, with its forced transport and constant proximity to death. Readings that dismiss the constitution as tyrannical or planter-serving miss how the expectations of the formerly enslaved shaped its language, and excluding Haiti distorts the history of universal rights.