Jean-Jacques Dessalines, “Liberty or Death: Proclamation, 28 April 1804”
Dessalines led Haiti as the first head of the independent state, and the editors' headnote sketches how he got there. Embittered as a young man by the extreme brutality visited on enslaved people in what was then a French colony, he rose to command after the French betrayed and seized Toussaint L'Ouverture.
Having declared the country independent in 1804, he ordered the mass killing of French settlers, in which between three and five thousand people of every age and sex died. That September, generals of the revolution proclaimed him Emperor Jacques I. He was assassinated. The text introduced by this headnote is his proclamation of 28 April 1804.
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, “Liberty or Death: Proclamation, 28 April 1804”. (2020). In [Book title, editors and publisher not recorded] (pp. 147-150). https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvsn3nn9.19
Incomplete: no author recorded; book title, editors and publisher not recorded. Check the source before citing.