Independence lets the country define itself for the first time

Gaffield uses the declaration of independence as the pivot of her argument about the four constitutions. Where Louverture had been willing to keep a connection with France, Dessalines set out to remove every trace of a white or French presence, and she cites the campaign that followed, running from Cayes through Jeremie, Port-au-Prince, Arcahaie, Saint-Marc and Gonaives to Cap-Francais, with orders that no French person of any age or sex be spared apart from a small number of physicians, clergy and other professionals judged useful. She connects this directly to the collapse in the white population recorded in the 1826 statistics. Independence, in her framing, gave political leaders the chance to define the nation on their own terms, and the constitutions that follow are the record of them trying. She argues that the constitutions which follow should be read as competing attempts to name a single imagined community rather than as records of a fixed racial divide.

In October 1803 Captain General Louis Thomas Villaret-Joyeuse set up a special tribunal in Martinique to try three offences together: poisoning, arson, and running away by stealing canoes. It sat between the first and second British occupations of the island, in the middle of the Napoleonic wars, and it built on the precedent of 1753, when the colony had first given poison cases their own rules. The tribunal travelled, its members were government officials and prominent local slaveholders, and the executions, usually burning at the stake, took place on the spot as soon as a trial ended. There was no appeal. Within two years Villaret-Joyeuse was reporting that the blight of poisonings was in retreat thanks to the court. The trials ran on until the British landed in February 1809, and the incoming British governor kept both the tribunal and the leading part local slaveholders played in it.

Toussaint Louverture was taken in Brunet's ambush on 7 June 1802. Brunet's aide de camp went straight to the general's house and emptied it of money, jewellery and papers. Of everything the family owned, Suzanne Louverture saved a single object, her husband's watch, engraved with the words that his virtue had opened every heart to him, his initials beneath, and a second line saying that he never knew the prejudice of colour. At the same hour a battalion commander named Pesquidon reached the property where she was living. She saw her son Isaac being brought in between two lines of soldiers, ran to him and asked where his father was. Pesquidon told her she would be given an escort so that she could join her husband. She agreed at once and left with her sons and with Louise Chancy, Toussaint's niece. The people of Ennery crowded the house begging the soldiers not to kill her or her children.

The proclamation appeared first in Poulson's Daily Advertiser and in the Aurora General Advertiser, then in the Philadelphia Gazette the following evening. The article reconstructs the diffusion from digitised newspaper archives and prints the chain: New York and Philadelphia on 6 and 7 January, Trenton and Newark on the ninth, Washington on the twelfth, then Newburyport, Wilmington, Providence, Richmond, Salem, Boston, Charleston, Portland, Hudson, Northampton, Sparta in Georgia, Peacham in Vermont and Nashville by 22 February. Editors read it as a declaration of independence and said so. The mechanism this exposes is a deliberate media strategy rather than passive circulation, since Dessalines's government repeatedly asked American editors to print its texts and once instructed that a decree be printed, posted and forwarded directly to the Congress of the United States.