On January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines became the first head of state of the new country of Haiti. A former slave, possibly African born, unable to read or write, he took the reins of power vowing no return to slavery or French rule. Newspapers of the day hinted at the portent of the rupture: “The Negroes have substituted for St. Domingo, Haiti, the name which the island originally bore,” with that word symbolically erasing European dominion. What the rupture would entail in practice, no one knew. In France and England, in the United States, in Jamaica, Cuba, and in Haiti itself, people struggled to apprehend what Haiti’s existence would mean: A doomed experiment to wait out in anticipation of the return of Europe and slavery? A model of black capacity that abolitionists could tout? An African maroon state writ large? A new kind of power poised to extend militant antislavery across the hemisphere?

In the January 1 Declaration of Independence, which circulated widely across the Atlantic world, people of many stations listened and read for clues. In it, Haitian leaders offered a public and formal promise of nonintervention, much like the one they had delivered unofficially to Cuban authorities in the final months of 1803. The 1804 declaration announced, “Let our neighbors live in peace…let us not, as revolutionary firebrands, declare ourselves legislators of the Antilles, nor let our glory consist in troubling the peace of neighboring islands.”