Leclerc knew he could not defeat Louverture’s army with such vastly depleted forces, and so resorted to deception. He called Louverture to a private meeting—and when the governor-general arrived, Leclerc had him seized and shipped back to France, where he would die in a prison in the French Alps in 1803. However, Leclerc met his end before Louverture did, succumbing to the same yellow fever that devastated his army. Unfortunately for the former slaves, Leclerc’s successor was the bloodthirsty Donatien Rochambeau, under whom blacks and mulattos were massacred in droves, but Rochambeau was matched by Louverture’s successor Dessalines. Rochambeau’s brutality notwithstanding, though, he was still stuck with Leclerc’s sick and starving 7,000 troops; when Bonaparte, who at this point considered Saint Domingue (and the rest of his entanglements in the Western hemisphere) a lost cause, denied Rochambeau’s request for reinforcements, Rochambeau evacuated back to France.
On January 1, 1804, Dessalines declared Haiti—as the former colony was renamed—officially independent from France, and ordered the death of almost every French colonist remaining in Haiti. Thousands of people were murdered in the final wave of massacres of the revolution, and in 1805 Dessalines became leader of the new country. His constitution of 1805 declared that all Haitians would now be simply referred to as noirs, with no further distinctions, was an attempt to disintegrate the longstanding division between the former slaves who had gained elite status in the military and the mixed-race gens de couleur, but the idealism of the constitution was not reflected in the population. After declaring himself Emperor Jacques I, Dessalines was assassinated and Henry Christophe, a former envoy of Louverture’s, was elected in his stead, but the political system eventually disintegrated, leading to different kings or presidents in different regions of Haiti and continued violence and murder between warring factions of citizens. The population had been halved by all the conflict, and plantations and towns destroyed. Haiti was independent but ravaged. 
It cannot be said that the Haitian revolution was straightforwardly unsuccessful. In 1990, Haiti was subject to gross imperialism under France and ninety percent of its population was enslaved and brutalized; in 1805, Haiti and its citizens were both emancipated. But in the sense that the revolution was undertaken by Louverture and the other rebel slaves in order to facilitate well-being for Haitians that was more than symbolic, the revolution failed. It did not live up to its ideals. After the murder of the French landowners under Dessalines, Louverture’s plantation citizenship model dissolved, but no reliable source of income for Haitians sprang up in its place. The economy was in shambles. Haiti endured a series of military dictators and to this day remains one of the poorest countries in the world. 
But it didn’t. Freedom is the most admirable possible goal but in Haiti it was not enough.
