"It is not enough to have expelled the barbarians who have bloodied our land for two centuries; it is not enough to have restrained those ever-evolving factions that one after another mocked the specter of liberty that France dangled before you. We must, with one last act of national authority, forever ensure liberty's reign in the country of our birth; we must take any hope of re-enslaving us away from the inhuman government that for so long kept us in the most humiliating torpor. In the end we must live independent or die. Independence or death... let these sacred words unite us and let them be the signal of battle and of our reunion."

Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haitian Declaration of Independence, Gonaïves, 1 January 1804. Dessalines was the military commander who had led the final campaign against Napoleon's forces. The original document was lost; this version survives through contemporary newspaper accounts and copies.