Duke Student Julia Gaffield
A 26-year old Duke graduate student stumbles upon a rare copy — and possibly the only copy — of Haiti’s Declaration of Independence in a London library.
While researching for her doctoral dissertation at the British National Archives in London, Julia Gaffield found what historians say is the only printed copy of the island nation’s declaration.
The eight-page pamphlet dates 1804, it includes a two-page prologue and the declaration. According to experts, it’s only the second declaration of its kind in the world. The first was the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
Researchers have spent decades trying to locate the document but it’s been unnoticed in the British archives. There is not a lot of documentation left from the early period of Haitian history.
Professors at Duke speculate Haiti’s first independent leader sent the declaration to the British. It holds great historical importance to people in both Haiti and in Britain. If you take a look at the document here, it gives an insight into the first successful slave rebellion we know of. There was extreme political and physical oppression of slaves at the time, eventually leading to the revolt against French rule. The revolution started in 1791 and continued until the island, including Santo Domingo, was declared a republic under the name of Haiti in 1804.
“I wasn’t specifically looking for it, but I had an eye out for it because I knew it was missing,” Gaffield says in a release. “We figured there was an original somewhere, but didn’t know if it still existed.”