At a cursory glance, the independence documents of the United States, Haiti, and Nueva Granada seem fairly similar. All three, written during the “Age of Revolutions” at the turn of the 18th century, accuse their imperial power of “despotism” and “tyranny” and claim that they are acting in the name of “liberty.” But upon closer look, although these documents construct similar frameworks, their respective definitions of freedom are vastly different.

For the U.S. colonists, Great Britain was a primarily financial foe that imposed taxes and regulated trade without consent. In his Address at the Congress of Angostura, Simon Bolívar insisted that the (supposed) amalgamation of Spanish and indigenous cultures in Nueva Granada necessitated its own unique legal system. The Haitian revolution, on the other hand, was intrinsically tied to race. It was, as historian Laurent Dubois called it, “a revolution of the enslaved” (“Laurent Dubois: The Haitian Revolution”). And while slavery had vast legal and economic dimensions, of course, it was directly linked to the subjugation and explotiation of Haitian people’s racialized bodies. In Haiti, therefore, independence did not simply mean political sovereignty as it did in the U.S. and Nueva Granada; it was a physical and personal act of liberation.

These different relationships to independence are strikingly apparent in each document’s initial call to action. The U.S. Declaration of Independence, for example, explains how the “long train of abuses and usurpations” and “absolute Despotism” of the British Crown obligate the American colonists to “throw off such Government” (US 1776). At the Congress of Angostura, Simón Bolívar laments how Nueva Granada’s “role has always been strictly passive and political existence nil,” and urges the people to embark on a “quest for liberty” (Bolívar).

Writers of the Haitian declaration Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Louis Félix Mathurin Boisrond-Tonnerre, on the other hand, invoke more radical language:

We must, with one last act of national authority, forever assure the empire of liberty in the country of our birth; we must take any hope of re-enslaving us away from the inhuman government that for so long kept us in the most humiliating torpor. In the end we must live independent or die. (Dessalines and Boisrond-Tonnerre)

The Haitians, then, did not simply “throw off [their] government,” as the U.S. colonists implored. And as enslaved people whose forced labor sustained the colony’s entire economy, they did not have the same privilege as the Nueva Granada Creoles to be “passive” imperial subjects. Instead, independence was quite literally synonymous with life—the alternative was back-breaking and deadly servitude on plantations. Revolting against the existing political structure, as Dessalines and Boisrond-Tonnerre asserted, meant eliminating any possibility of more “inhuman” abuse and “humiliating torpor,” or more specifically, re-enslavement. Fighting for independence was, in short, survival.

The ways in which each document characterizes imperial power further reflects these intimacies—or lack thereof—with independence. The U.S. Declaration of Independence calls the control of the British Crown “destructive,” “unwarrantable,” even “tyran[nical]” and “despoti[c]” (US 1776). It enumerates the sundry transgressions of King George III’s administration, which has forbidden,” “refused,” “obstructed,” “impos[ed],” “suspend[ed],” and “constrain[ed]” the American colonists from various legal, political, and economic ventures (US 1776).

The British, in other words, seemed to have a merely irritating and inconvenient presence in the colonists’ lives—albeit overbearing and intrusive. After all, the Crown operated in a largely bureaucratic realm, preventing its American subjects from openly trading, taxing, and legislating as they wished. And this overseas supervision was particularly egregious to the American authors of the Declaration of Independence because it presented a major obstacle to their primary goal: accruing wealth. Siphoning funds to an island across the sea ultimately hurt the pecuniary prospects of affluent American colonists. Historian Laurent Dubois, in fact, summarily describes the American Revolution as an example of a planter class escaping the “bonds...of the imperial economy” (“Laurent Dubois: The Haitian Revolution”). This economic motive for freedom sharply contrasts with the life-or-death stakes of Haitian independence, the outcome of which would be deeply felt in the bodies of its Afro-descended people.

What’s more, while Haitian independence sought to abolish racial hierarchies, the American colonists’ profit-seeking independence was actually contingent upon its very existence and expansion. By 1775, one year before the U.S. Declaration of Independence was written, an estimated number of 70,624 enslaved Africans disembarked in the American colonies (“Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade - Estimates”). Upper-class planters sanctioned and secured this system of slavery by fabricating white racial superiority—and thereby ensuring that they would be the sole beneficiaries of this unpaid labor. The Haitians, on the other hand—while having a different history and sociopolitical context—were on the bottom of a similarly manufactured racial hierarchy. Their freedom was predicated on dismantling these power structures, and in doing so, liberating their bodies from enslavement. The U.S. Declaration of Independence, then, was a kind of antithesis to that of the Haitians.

Nueva Granada’s plight for sovereignty also lacks the somatic stakes of the Haitian revolution. The Spanish were not necessarily welcome in the region, considered “invaders” who had “robbed” the people of their freedom (Bolívar). But their trespass was mainly legal; Bolívar believed that European law was causing Nueva Granada to be “engaged in a dual conflict” of identity (Bolívar). He even admitted to their relative nonaggression, noting that their control was mostly ideological and that they “ruled more by deceit than by force” (Bolívar).

But this observation seems to contradict the following sentence, in which Bolívar laments that the Spanish has put Nueva Granada “in a state lower than slavery” (Bolívar). This statement becomes deeply problematic when considering the lived experiences of millions of Afro-descended people in Nueva Granada, Haiti, and the rest of Latin America who were enduring the horrific conditions of actual slavery. Slavery—“lower than slavery,” even—in Nueva Granada Creole society was the lack of an adequate legal system. Slavery in Haiti, on the other hand, was a real, physical, and painful reality. And in comparing these two perspectives, one can clearly see the immensely unequal stakes of both independence movements.

The imperial French in Haiti were not nearly as benign as the Spanish in Nueva Granada and British in the American colonies. According to the declaration, the French were “barbarous” and their “name still haunt[ed] [the] land.” They were “executioners” and “assassins,” “vultures” who hunted enslaved people as prey (Dessalines and Boisrond-Tonnerre). Dessalines and Boisrond-Tonnerre wrote with striking imagery that the French were “tigers still dripping” with the blood of their Haitian victims (Dessalines and Boisrond-Tonnerre). They were not simply pesky tax collectors or inveigling invaders as they were in the United States and Nueva Granada—they were murderers. Their presence was felt deeply within the physical bodies of the Haitian people, who were the ones being brutally haunted, hunted, and assassinated.

And the Haitian Declaration of Independence is rife with more of this corporeal diction. The word “blood” or “bloodied” appears seven times, “die,” “dying,” or “death” appears seven times as well, and “breath” or “breathing” appears five times throughout the document (Dessalines and Boisrond-Tonnerre). Of course, the declaration was written after a gruesome war that claimed thousands of lives. In various counterattacks, the French “repeatedly slaughtered the old and infirm, along with women and children captured when they overran insurgent camps” (Dubois 279). When the declaration was written in 1804, this violence was likely still fresh in the Haitian people’s minds. But the repetition of words like “blood” and “death” also speaks to the intimate relationship the Haitians had with freedom. Their bodily sacrifice was made for the sake of bodily emancipation. Surely, blood and death were part of the revolution. But the aftermath was “breath,” the ability to live freely and exist autonomously.

In short, the Haitian Declaration of Independence carved out a definition of freedom that was radically different from that of the U.S. or Nueva Granada—one that was life-giving, that ensured the deeply physical liberation of enslaved bodies. To the American colonists and Creoles of Nueva Granada, by contrast, achieving freedom was a purely political and economic endeavor. But even though the Haitian revolution took place centuries ago, the intimacy of its independence can be connected back to contemporary anti-racist movements. As we live through a national reckoning with police brutality, how do the perspectives of non-Black Americans change when we see this violence not only as a political issue permeating our news channels and social media feeds, but as a deeply personal one—the difference between breath and death for Black Americans.