This officially ended the only slave rebellion in world history which successfully resulted in establishing an independent nation. In the process, Dessalines became arguably the most successful military commander in the struggle against Napoleonic France. Dessalines then promulgated the Declaration of Independence in 1804, and declared himself emperor. On 1 January 1804, from the city of Gonaïves, Dessalines officially declared the former colony's independence and renamed it ""Ayiti"" after the indigenous Taíno name. He had served as Governor-General of Saint-Domingue since 30 November 1803. After the declaration of independence, Dessalines named himself Governor-General-for-life of Haiti and served in that role until 22 September 1804, when he was proclaimed later Emperor of Haiti by the Generals of the Haitian Revolution Army. He was crowned Emperor Jacques I in a coronation ceremony on 6 October in the city of Le Cap. On 20 May 1805, his government released the Imperial Constitution, naming Jean-Jacques Dessalines emperor for life with the right to name his successor. In declaring Haiti an independent country, Dessalines also abolished slavery in the new country. Thus, Haiti became the first country in the Americas to permanently abolish slavery. Dessalines tried hard to keep the sugar industry and plantations running and producing without slavery. Born into slavery and having worked under white masters for 30 years, as well as having seen many atrocities by all peoples, Dessalines did not trust the white French people. Between February and April 1804, he had the white Haitian minority killed by ordering the 1804 Haiti Massacre. Dessalines declared Haiti an all-black nation and forbade whites from owning property or land there. The remaining French forces meanwhile had fled to the Spanish side of the island and had holed themselves up in Santo Domingo. Dessalines and Christophe went after them at the head of 20,000 men. The Spanish side was a colony of fewer than 175,000 souls. The French force numbered perhaps 500 and the local colonial militia had no more than 1000 men. The armed Haitian juggernaut advanced sweeping everything in its path. In the town of Moca, one of the places that fell to Christophe, 40 children were beheaded; altogether more than 600 perished or were taken away in captivity as spoils of war, according to the eyewitness Gaspar de Arredondo y Pichardo. Dessalines enforced a harsh regimen of plantation labor, described by the historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot as "caporalisme agraire" (agrarian militarism).