"I Have Avenged America" — Proclamation of April 28, 1804

On April 28, 1804, Dessalines issued this proclamation to the inhabitants of Haiti justifying the massacres of French colonists that had taken place in the weeks prior. The speech invokes the atrocities of the Leclerc and Rochambeau expeditions as provocation and frames the killings as an act of self-defense and vengeance for the enslaved people of the Americas. It has become one of the most debated texts of the Haitian Revolution, central to historiographical arguments about revolutionary violence, sovereignty, and the meaning of Haitian independence.