New York City officials and leftist academics honor Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the leader of the Haitian Revolution, who conducted a brutal genocide of whites.

In August 2018, the New York City Council voted to designate a two-mile stretch of Rogers Avenue in Brooklyn as “Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard.”

“Jean-Jacques Dessalines is an individual whose historical importance is difficult to understate,” said New York State Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte of the man who founded Haiti on the ruins of French Saint-Domingue. Dessalines “led the first successful slave revolt in world history and, in so doing, created the first free Black Republic in the Western Hemisphere,” Bichotte said.

City Council member Jumaane Williams, who proposed the street name, called Dessalines “a revolutionary who fought for his people and overthrew an oppressive regime who [sic] brutally enslaved and persecuted the Haitian people.” He added, “Haiti and its proud people are an intrinsic part of my district and it is only right to honor that spirit with this co-naming.”

Saint-Domingue’s slaves had been emancipated by decree from France in 1793, although they were relegated to forced labor on plantations under the black Governor-General Toussaint Louverture. Dessalines was an avid enforcer of this rule and became known as a “butcher of the blacks” when he briefly defected to the French in 1802 during Napoleon’s campaign to retake the island. Dessalines ended the first attempt at republican government by the black race when he declared himself to be Emperor Jacques I. Bichotte and Williams neglected to mention such facts, which call into question Dessalines’ supposed legacy as a virtuous icon of racial justice.

In January 1804, after French forces were defeated, Dessalines, who had replaced the moderate Louverture as de facto leader of the rebels, decided to kill every white Frenchman, woman, and child in Saint-Domingue. The Haitian Declaration of Independence, written as an address by Dessalines, denounced France as a “nation of executioners.” “The difference between its cruelty and our patient moderation, its color and ours … all tell us plainly that they are not our brothers, that they never will be, and that if they find refuge among us, they will plot again to trouble and divide us.” Hence the need to “put to death anyone born French whose profane foot soils the land of liberty.”

The besieged port city of Cap Français was the Saigon and Kabul of its day. November 1803 saw refugees scramble aboard the few remaining warships providing refuge. But for many, it was too late. Historian Philippe Girard estimates that between 3,000 and 5,000 souls perished in the first four months of 1804. 

Apart from the indiscriminate slaughter, with hundreds rounded up at a time, contemporary observers recalled the use of rape as an instrument of terror. A Dominican bishop wrote that “the victims, especially the women, were treated in such a way as to desire death a thousand time[s] before they actually expired.” Another survivor witnessed a young woman who “had been but eighteen months united in wedlock” being “led into the house” by soldiers and made to watch her husband “ris[e] up in the air under a tree.” He recounted that “piercing shrieks were heard sounding through the whole square place.”

The deliberate eradication of entire communities had no parallel at the time, save for the suppression of the pro-monarchist Vendée Rebellion 10 years earlier by the Committee of Public Safety in France. It was as if the French Revolution, receding in the Metropole with the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, had reached its bloody climax in Saint-Domingue. News of the massacre dealt irreparable harm to American abolitionism, as Haiti became a grim example of black terror for white Southerners.

Overwhelming evidence points to the atrocities being planned in advance by Dessalines rather than occurring as spontaneous acts of vengeance by the Haitian populace. The Armée Indigène under Dessalines had already committed numerous war crimes in the battles against Napoleon’s forces, including an 1802 massacre at Port-Républicain.

In his seminal work The Black Jacobins, Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James hints at premeditation on Dessalines’ part: “The old slave-owners were everywhere grinning with joy at the French expedition; he would finish with everything white forever.”In May 1803, Dessalines created the first Haitian flag by tearing out the white stripe in the French flag and sowing together the blue and red, symbolizing a nation where the white race would cease to exist. 

Due to Dessalines’ illiteracy, the murderous Declaration of Independence was traditionally thought to have been authored by his French-educated secretary Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, whose hatred of France was so profound that he reportedly insisted the document be written using “the skin of a white man as a parchment, his skull as an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen.” However, historian Deborah Jensen suggests that Dessalines had direct input via transcription, given that subsequent texts attributed to him showed consistency in tone, syntax, and methods of persuasion that could not have been reproduced by multiple ghostwriters.

Dessalines, who was seen personally presiding over mass executions, later admitted his own culpability, although he showed no remorse. In an address in April 1804, he boasted that, by “render[ing] to these true cannibals war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage … I have saved my country … I have performed my duty; I enjoy my own approbation; for me that is sufficient.” He concluded saying, “‘War and death to Tyrants!’ that is my motto.” 

Nonetheless, prominent scholars of Caribbean history have refused to identify the Horrors of Saint-Domingue as genocide. Writing for The Washington Post, Julia Gaffield lists as one of the “five myths about the Haitian Revolution” that “Dessalines committed ‘White genocide’.” Reports of the killings were “exaggerated and taken out of historical context.” Elsewhere, Gaffield defends Dessalines by pointing out that he spared British, American, and other non-French civilians.

Dessalines did, in fact, spare some Europeans, saying that “a handful of whites, commendable by the religion they have always professed, and who have besides taken the oath to live with us in the woods, have experienced my clemency. I order that the sword respect them, and that they be unmolested.” On paper, Poles and Germans who defected from Napoleon’s army along with a few white women and children were spared. So were professionals and clergy.

In practice, Dessalines’ agents who spared lives often did so to benefit themselves. One resident of Cap Français, for instance, reported that a former slave approached his mistress offering protection should she give one of her three daughters in marriage. She refused and was killed with two of her daughters. The surviving daughter resisted the man’s advances, so he hanged her “by the throat on an iron hook in the market place, where the lovely, innocent, unfortunate victim slowly expired.” 

Marlene Daut goes a step further. She claims in an article for Lapham’s Quarterly that Dessalines killed only “a few hundred white soldiers and colonists.” Leslie Alexander cites this rather nondescript figure word for word in her book Fear of a Black Republic as evidence of Dessalines’ supposed moderation. 

Daut’s source is a single blog post by Gaffield in which she translated an October 1804 census report showing the town of Gros Morne had more than 600 white residents. Gaffield posted on the same site a letter from February 1804 signed by Dessalines’ secretary “B. Aimé” and addressed to the now-defunct Philadelphia Gazette. Quoted at length by Alexander to vindicate Dessalines, the letter purports to show the “Secret Deliberations of the government of the Island of Haiti” permitted the killing of only those “individuals who have contributed either by their guilty writings or their sanguinary accusations” to the persecution of blacks by the French.

If true, the high number of whites is indeed unusual, considering that months had passed since the presumed conclusion of the Horrors, and that Gros Morne is just over 20 miles from Gonaïves, the city where Dessalines declared Haiti’s independence. But upon closer inspection, all but 30 turned out to be women, children, widows, or skilled laborers. This is consistent with Dessalines’ exemptions, although the conspicuous absence of most white men suggests that here, too, he was anything but merciful. 

In any case, Gros Morne does not refute the well-documented atrocities that unfolded throughout Haiti during this period. Gaffield herself gives the relatively conservative estimate of 1,000 to 2,000 deaths. There is also no guarantee that the Gros Morne survivors were not harmed after the census was taken. Dessalines was known to have used the census to arrest and extort whites on pain of death. Peter Chazotte, a Frenchman in the southern port city of Jérémie, recalled a proclamation being issued on March 8, 1804: 

By order of the Governor-General of the Island of St. Domingo: all white male inhabitants of whatever nation or country they may be natives, are commanded to appear tomorrow, the 9th of March, at eight in the morning, at the Place of Arms, for the Government to take a census of their number. At nine o’clock, domiciliary visits shall be made by armed patrols, throughout the town, and every white man found concealed in any place, shall instantly be put to death in front of the place of his concealment.

When the summoned white men assembled on the 9th, Dessalines accused them of refusing to fund his armies and demanded the merchants pay him “twelve hundred dollars for the privilege of being acknowledged and protected as merchants.” Chazotte escaped by passing as an American. That night, 

four hundred wretched innocent white men who, on this afternoon, had given up all they possessed to save their lives, now stripped of all their clothes, their arms fastened behind their backs, and tied two by two with cords, headed by black sapeurs, with large axes on their shoulders, and accompanied by a black regiment with bayonets and swords in their hands, were seen marching, or, to speak more properly, were seen dragged along, through the place, lighted by numerous torches. 

This ominous action took place in front of Dessalines’ headquarters.

The accounts of Chazotte and many others defy Dessalines’ claim that he only targeted political enemies. As he became an international pariah, Dessalines felt a need to defend his conduct. As early as June 1803, he wrote to President Thomas Jefferson explaining that Haiti was simply “following the example of the wisest nations” that had “thrown off the yoke of tyranny” even though “our countryside is already purged of their sight.” One need only guess who Dessalines meant by “their.” 

The February 1804 letter to the Philadelphia Gazette cited by Daut and Alexander as proof of the limited scope of Dessalines’ massacres was part of a public relations campaign. After all, the letter warned that “evil disposed persons … will not fail to charge us with causing an indiscriminate destruction of the whites.” Taking at face value this press release from Dessalines’ government recalls how The New York Times journalist Walter Duranty represented the Soviet government’s position in his notorious whitewashing of the 1932 famines in Ukraine.

Not all progressive historians engage in the blatant denialism of Gaffield, Daut, and Alexander, although acknowledgement of the Horrors comes with a caveat. C.L.R. James confesses in The Black Jacobins that “The population, stirred to fear at the nearness of the counter-revolution, killed all with every possible brutality.” All the same, “the black labourers of San Domingo had had provocation enough from the whites to justify the massacre of three times their number,” as French general Charles Leclerc had “resolved on a war of extermination.”

Admittedly, the overwrought Leclerc did write to Napoleon: 

We must destroy all the Negroes in the mountains, men and women, keeping only infants less than twelve years old; we must also destroy half those of the plain, and leave in the colony not a single man of color who has worn an epaulette. Without this the colony will never be quiet.

While there are no records of the French government ever heeding such pleas, French conduct throughout the war in Saint-Domingue was undeniably brutal. Mass drownings of black prisoners were a common sight.

Academics today seem proud to voice racial hatred against whites. In a Yale University lecture titled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” psychiatrist Aruna Khilanani said she felt “guiltless” about her “fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step.” “Whiteness is going to have an end date,” said one professor Brittney Cooper, “we gotta take these m*****f*****s out.”

While the sincerity of these outbursts may be questioned, what is less open to dispute is the wisdom of naming Brooklyn’s “Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard” for Haiti’s brutal genocide of whites.

(Correction: an earlier version of this article incorrectly stated in the fourth paragraph that Louverture, rather than Dessalines, declared himself Emperor Jacques I.)