A year ago, Duke graduate student Julia Gaffield
received international media attention for finding the only known printed copy
of Haiti’s
Declaration of Independence, a document that had been missing for decades.
Last month, while continuing research for
her doctoral dissertation, Gaffield returned to the British National Archives
in London and found yet another printed copy of Haiti’s Declaration of
Independence, dated January 1804.
The document is in a different format from
her first discovery -- one large poster-sized page instead of an 8-page
pamphlet. Gaffield said that due to its size, the document had been removed
from a bound volume and re-catalogued in a map collection so it could lie flat
without any folds.
When Haiti declared its independence from
France in 1804, leaders posted poster-sized proclamations in public areas and
word-of-mouth would have carried the information further, Gaffield said. The 8-page
pamphlet, on the other hand, seems to have been produced for an audience like the
British government in Jamaica, she said.
Gaffield found the large page in the
archives’ admiralty records, while researching the relationship some British
islands had with Haiti following the Haitian Revolution. A cover letter with
the document indicates Sir John Thomas Duckworth, the British commander in
Jamaica, sent the document from Port Royal, Jamaica, to the Commissioners of
the Admiralty in London in March 1804.
“The British National Archives have such an
enormous collection and the documents aren’t always where you’d expect them to
be, but that is half the fun,” Gaffield said. “I am sure that I haven’t found
everything and the fact that historical research is endless and an ongoing
process is what makes it really exciting. Different researchers contribute
documents and interpretations and these pieces of the puzzle come together to
create a more coherent picture.”
Gaffield’s research was funded by the Atlantic
History Seminar at Harvard University and the Franklin
Humanities Dissertation Working Group at Duke University.