A short account of Jean-Jacques Dessalines written for a general readership in 1951, presenting him as the founder of Haitian independence and declining to soften the record. Wood traces his defection from French service after news arrived that Napoleon had restored slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique, the campaigns that ended with Rochambeau's capitulation, and the declaration at Gonaïves on 1 January 1804. The bulk of the piece concerns the regime that followed. Wood describes a country turned into an armed camp against an expected French return, a labour system that sorted citizens into soldiers and cultivators and held workers on the plantations, land decrees that voided colonial era sales and titles and struck at propertied families of colour, and the killing of the remaining French residents. Dessalines emerges as a ruler of real military gifts whose government rested on force, and whose assassination in 1806 grew out of the enemies he made.