I've got needs over here. Best wishes, John Green. So continued defeat and the death of his troops eventually convinced Napoleon to give up his dreams of an American empire and cut his losses. 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.