The negroes again rose, and the soldiers were by this time so weakened by yellow fever, which even carried off the Governor, that little could be done against the rebels. Yet everything possible was attempted. Bloodhounds were brought from Cuba to worry the rebels to death; they were shot and taken into the sea to be drowned in strings. Dessalines had now become their leader, and on the 29th of November, 1803, he with Christophe and Clervaux, the other rebel chiefs, issued the St. Domingo declaration of independence. Restored to their primitive dignity the black and coloured people proclaimed their rights, and swore never to yield them to any power on earth. "The frightful veil of prejudice is torn to pieces, and is so for ever; woe be to whomsoever would dare again to put together its bloody tatters." The landholders were not forbidden to return if they renounced their old errors and acknowledged the justice of the cause for which the blacks had been spilling their blood for twelve years. As for those who affected to believe themselves destined by Heaven to be masters and tyrants, if they came it would be to meet chains or to be quickly expelled. They had sworn not to listen to clemency for those who dared to speak of the restoration of slavery. Nothing was too costly a sacrifice for liberty, and every means was lawful to employ against those who wished to suppress it. Were they to cause rivers and torrents of blood to flow--were they to fire half the globe to maintain it--they would be innocent before the tribunal of Providence.
This declaration was followed on the 30th of March, 1804, by an address of Dessalines, in which he said that everything that reminded them of France also reminded them of the cruelties of Frenchmen. There still remained, he said, Frenchmen on their island--creatures, alas! of their indulgence; when would they be tired of breathing the same air? Their cruelty, when compared with the patient moderation of the blacks--their difference in colour--everything said that they were not brothers, and would never become so. If they continued to find an asylum, troubles and dissensions would be sure to continue. "Citizens, inhabitants of Hayti, men, women, girls, children, cast your eyes upon each point of the island! Seek in it, you, your wives; you, your husbands; you, your sisters!" Their ashes were in the grave, and they had not avenged their deaths. Let the blacks learn that they had done nothing if they did not give the nations a terrible but just example of the vengeance of a brave people, who had recovered liberty, and were jealous to maintain it.