I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti's Fight for Freedom

Dr. Julia Gaffield returns to the Nèg Mawon Podcast with the book many of us have been waiting on for years: I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti's Fight for Freedom, the first full biography of Dessalines in English. In this video conversation, Gaffield walks us from the plantations of Cormier and the Duclos and Jasmin households to the evacuation of the French, the two declarations of independence, the empire, and the propaganda machine that has painted Dessalines as a one-dimensional "monster" for more than two centuries. Along the way she dismantles the old slurs (illiterate, African-born, savage), explains why she prefers to say she identified rather than discovered the only known official printed copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence, and makes the case for a Dessalines who was warrior and diplomat at once, a man who never governed a country that was not at war.

In this episode

• 00:00 Five years in earnest, two decades of research: why Dessalines, and why now
• 02:56 The first English-language biography, and the racist tradition that kept it from being written
• 05:44 London, 2010: identifying the only known official copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence
• 11:52 Illiterate? African-born? Taking apart the descriptors used to discredit him
• 15:30 Duclos, Jasmin, Dessalines: how an enslaved man came to carry three names
• 18:08 Creoles and Bossales: two definitions of freedom and the conflicts they seeded
• 24:26 Rochambeau as the worst kind of boss, and the news that tipped Dessalines away from France
• 27:33 "A bad slave": insubordination as the through-line of his life
• 29:02 Toya, Uncle Toussaint, cousin Joseph: the kinship network he kept for life
• 34:10 Toussaint Louverture leases the Jasmin plantation, and a complicated relationship begins
• 38:27 Dubroca's fake biography, the decapitation woodcut, and a propaganda war that reaches Tucker Carlson
• 43:03 November 29, 1803 vs. January 1, 1804: two declarations, one critical month
• 46:55 Warrior or diplomat? Dessalines, Governor Nugent, and the treaty that would not surrender sovereignty
• 54:17 The failed 1805 campaign against Santo Domingo
• 56:04 Articles 12 and 14: who could own land in the Empire of Haiti
• 58:22 What we actually know about the Haitian flag
• 1:00:37 The calendar of independence: "the first year of independence" and every era added since
• 1:03:23 Key takeaways, and a peek at a bookshelf organized by color

About the guest

Dr. Julia Gaffield is a historian of Haiti and the Atlantic world. She is the author of Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution and I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti's Fight for Freedom, and in 2010 identified the only known surviving official printed copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence in the British National Archives.