Jean Jacque Dessalines was an exceptional leader and one of the greatest military generals that ever lived. The story of his life and early beginnings are told by the woman who raised him, Agbaraya Toya, or aunt Toya. Aunt Toya, who was a military warrier in Dahomey, was captured and sold in Saint-Domingue. According to aunt Toya, she fled the plantation to form an army to fight for freedom when she stumbled upon a pregnant woman who helped deliver a baby boy on September 20, 1758. The two women did not speak the same language. From what ant Toya could gather, the woman fled the plantation to give birth in the mountains so that her child would be born in freedom. Sadly, shortly after giving birth, the woman died, and aunt Toya had to abandon her plans to fight for freedom to immediately raise this baby. She headed back to the plantation with the baby.
Throughout the years, Aunt Toya and the boy were separated and brought by different people, but unexplained life circumstances would always bring them back together again. When he was five, she though him how to study plants and learned Dahomean teachings and philosophy. By 15, he mastered fighting and learned healing properties as well as geography and topography. She always told him that one day you would bring us freedom. The boy grew up to be strong, defiant, and a rebel on the plantation who often received severe punishment and mistreatment. After observing him being punished, a free Blackman named Jean-Baptiste Dessalines purchased the boy's freedom. He was given so many names, from Roger to Romulus to Jean and Jacques. He took the first name Jean Jacques and Dessalines, the man's last name who gave him freedom.
He would join Toussaint's army and quickly climbed the ranks as aunt Toya already trained him. He spoke Creole, Yuroba, and French but intentionally chose to speak Creole publically to promote it. As ranking commander in Toussaint's army, Dessalines won many battles and had both men and women in his army when Toussaint was arrested and sent to France, where he was left to die. Dessalines, who was second in command, became the general. He met his wife Marie Claire Heureuse Felicite Bonheur in the late 1790s, and she taught him how to read and write. They would later marry in 1800.
Dessalines was a strategist who calculated every battle. Trained in Dahomean warfare, he understood nature, topography and used land knowledge to his advantage. He was a herbalist and healer but was also known to be bold and did not like care for the white slave masters, nor was he willing to allow slavery to be reinstituted. After winning the decisive battle of Vertiere on November 18, 1803, Dessalines officially proclaimed Saint-Domingues's freedom from France on January 1, 1804, and called the new country Hayti. He would be the Emperor of Hayti from 1805-1806.
