He recalled all his surviving troops of the 40,000 who left, only 8,000 made it back, and then he sold Thomas Jefferson, Louisiana. And that is how former slaves in Haiti gave America all of this. On January 1st, 1804, Dessalines, who had defeated the French, declared the island of San Domingo independent and renamed it Haiti, which is what the island had been called by native inhabitants before the arrival of Columbus. The Haitian Declaration of Independence was a rejection of France and to a certain degree of European racism and colonialism. It also affirmed, to quote from the book Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, a broad definition of the new country as a refuge for enslaved peoples of all kinds. So why is this little island so important that we would devote an entire episode to it? First, Haiti was the second free and independent nation-state in the Americas.