The declaration asks for liberty and never uses the word sovereignty

Gaffield notes that the French word for sovereignty appears nowhere in the founding text. What Dessalines and his generals claimed instead was liberty, to be secured from the dominion of France, with Haiti described as a nation proud of having recovered its liberty and Dessalines as the protector of that liberty. Since slavery in the colony had been abolished a decade earlier, she argues the word is doing political rather than personal work, in the same way American revolutionaries had described British rule as slavery. The aim was what Armitage calls international legal sovereignty, a place on the list of free nations, and independence and sovereignty are joined rather than distinguished. She also records what the document did not do: it did not condemn slavery as an institution across the Atlantic, because the new state intended to trade with the British, American, Dutch and Danish slave systems.

Jean-Francois and Georges Biassou led the enslaved insurgents of northern Saint-Domingue in the early 1790s and granted liberty to people who served under them. On 8 November 1804 General Louis Ferrand wrote to his subordinate Peralta and cancelled all of it. He insisted that neither man had ever held the right to liberate anybody, so every French black or coloured person freed by either of them held no valid claim to freedom and was to be treated as a slave. In the same letter he made one exception. Former Spanish slaves who had received their liberty from the King of Spain for service in colonial armies would keep it. The distinction turns on whose signature counts. A monarch could make a free person out of an enslaved one. A black general at the head of an army could not, whatever paper he issued and whatever the person had done to earn it. Many people in Santo Domingo held their freedom on exactly that kind of paper.

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.

When Bonaparte received news of the 1801 constitution he sent a large military mission under his brother-in-law to restore metropolitan control and to co-opt, expel or eliminate Louverture and the generals under his command. After three months of fighting, known as the three months war, Louverture surrendered, was trapped and deported to France, and died in prison at Fort de Joux. The editors state the causal chain without hedging: promulgating the constitution provoked the events that finally led to the creation of the Haitian state and to the drafting of its first national constitution. Resistance to the French army continued after the deportation, and under Dessalines the country won an independence formally declared on the first of January 1804. The editors also record what the constitution had formalised in the meantime, describing it as extending a structure of governance already essentially in place under his rule.