The treacherous killing of Toussaint did not conquer Hayti.  In 1802 and 1803 some forty thousand French soldiers died of war and fever.  A new colored leader, Dessalines, arose and all the eight thousand remaining French surrendered to the blockading British fleet.

The effect of all this was far-reaching.  Napoleon gave up his dream of American empire and sold Louisiana for a song.  “Thus, all of Indian Territory, all of Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa and Wyoming and Montana and the Dakotas, and most of Colorado and Minnesota, and all of Washington and Oregon states, came to us as the indirect work of a despised Negro.  Praise, if you will, the work of a Robert Livingstone or a Jefferson, but to-day let us not forget our debt to Toussaint L’Ouverture, who was indirectly the means of America’s expansion by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803."[84]

With the freedom of Hayti in 1801 came a century of struggle to fit the people for the freedom they had won.  They were yet slaves, crushed by a cruel servitude, without education or religious instruction.  The Haytian leaders united upon Dessalines to maintain the independence of the republic.  Dessalines, like Toussaint and his lieutenant Christophe, was noted in slavery days for his severity toward his fellows and the discipline which he insisted on.  He had other characteristics of African chieftains.  “There were seasons when he broke through his natural sullenness and showed himself open, affable, and even generous.  His vanity was excessive and manifested itself in singular perversities."[85] He was a man of great personal bravery and succeeded in maintaining the independence of Hayti, which had already cost the Frenchmen fifty thousand lives.

On January 1, 1804, at the place whence Toussaint had been treacherously seized and sent to France, the independence of Hayti was declared by the military leaders.  Dessalines was made governor-general for life and afterward proclaimed himself emperor.  This was not an act of grandiloquence and mimicry.  “It is truer to say that in it both Dessalines and later Christophe were actuated by a clear insight into the social history and peculiarities of their people.  There was nothing in the constitution which did not have its companion in Africa, where the organization of society was despotic, with elective hereditary chiefs, royal families, polygamic marriages, councils, and regencies."[86]

The population was divided into soldiers and laborers.  The territory was parceled out to chiefs, and the laborers were bound to the soil and worked under rigorous inspection; part of the products were reserved for their support, and the rest went to the chiefs, the king, the general government, and the army.  The army was under stern discipline and military service was compulsory.  Women did much of the agricultural labor.  Under Toussaint the administration of this system was committed to Dessalines, who carried it out with rigor; it was afterward followed by Christophe.  The latter even imported four thousand Negroes from Africa, from whom he formed a national guard for patrolling the land.  These regulations brought back for a time a large part of the former prosperity of the island.