2

THE CITADEL

“I am informed that you have mistreated your servants,” King Henry Christophe of Haiti wrote to his nine-year-old son, Jacques-Victor-Henry, in 1813. “That is not commendable.” Christophe knew what he was talking about: he had, after all, spent much of his life as a servant. Now, however, he was the ruler of an independent kingdom, reigning from a magnificent palace called Sans-Souci. His son was known as the “Prince Royal,” and Christophe spared no expense in his education, putting him in the hands of the best tutors available. But he was disappointed with his son’s writing skills—“I noted three erasures, and several other mistakes,” he wrote disapprovingly in one letter—and concerned that the boy was not “docile” enough in following the commands of his teachers.1

Christophe felt the same way about his subjects. Like his son, they had been born as a free people in 1804. But the king believed that they needed to be educated, indeed transformed, before they could truly be independent. At stake was the future not just of Haiti, but of the entire black race. “Too long has the African race been unjustly calumniated,” Christophe wrote in 1819 to the emperor Alexander of Russia. “Too long has it been represented as deprived of intellectual faculties, as scarcely susceptible of civilization or government by regular or established laws.” By succeeding, Haiti could change that. Having freed themselves from bondage, Haitians could now disabuse the world of the “false assertions” that their masters—who “have had the impiety to degrade the finest work of the Creator, as if mankind had not one common origin”—had used to justify slavery throughout the centuries.2

Like other nations born of anticolonial revolutions, such as the United States in the late eighteenth century and the Latin American republics in the early nineteenth, Haiti struggled to gain allies and respect in a world still largely controlled by European empires. But Haiti also had an additional burden, one that Christophe clearly felt with particular force. No other country had faced such hostility, such resistance, even outright doubt about its very capacity to exist. The racist ideas that saturated the Western world at the time, coupled with the rage and fear that many slaveholders felt regarding black revolutionaries, raised the stakes immeasurably high for Haiti’s early leaders. Many of those watching them were ready and eager to see Haiti fail.

Like Dessalines before him, Christophe poured money into national defense, most famously by constructing a massive fort—La Citadelle Laferrière—in the northern mountains. The fort had a practical purpose: if the French came back, the Haitian king and his army could retreat there and safely withstand a siege. To that end, the Citadel was packed with stores of ammunition and outfitted with a rainwater collection system. But the Citadel was also a symbol. Visible from miles away, it announced the Haitians’ determination to stand firm against any possible return of the old order. Indeed, it was literally made partly out of brick and stone taken from broken-down former plantation houses.3

For Christophe’s enemies at the time, and for many who have written about him since, the Citadel was a brutal folly, one that drove him to the ultimate irony: in order to assure freedom for Haitians, he turned them into slaves again. Visitors to the construction site described workers laboring in chains, carrying rocks up the hill under the watchful eyes of armed guards. Some contemporary chronicles state that thousands, even tens of thousands, of workers perished in the process. Christophe’s defenders have sought to temper this image, claiming that the building of the Citadel was carried out as a massive public works project with rotating groups of laborers brought in from various plantations for short periods of work. Today, it seems nearly impossible to judge the truth of these competing accounts and reconstruct the precise experience of those who labored to build the Citadel. Over the last two hundred years, so many layers of history and myth have accumulated around the fort that its origins have become as inaccessible as Christophe had hoped the Citadel itself would be.4

Christophe was driven by a sense of urgency, as well as by a profound belief that it was vital to spread civilization within Haiti. In the ravaged postindependence landscape, he sought to build a resplendent new order, irrefutable proof of the justice of Haiti’s cause. His country would be as economically successful and politically respected as the European states that controlled the seas and much of the world. At the top of Christophe’s official newspaper, a quote from Voltaire summed up the regime’s aspirations: “Each people has its turn to shine on the earth.” Now it was Haiti’s turn.5

*   *   *

The officers who assassinated Dessalines in early 1806 saw their act as a second liberation. “We have broken our chains!” they proclaimed, and they promised the people of Haiti that everything was about to get better. “Soldiers, you will be paid and clothed; cultivators, you will be protected; property owners, you will be able to keep hold of your property: a wise constitution will soon establish the rights and duties of all.”6

The plot against Dessalines was led by Alexandre Pétion, the high-ranking army officer who had been exiled to France after supporting André Rigaud’s rebellion against Louverture. He had then served as a valued commander in Leclerc’s French forces before switching sides and joining the Haitian insurgents in the fight for independence. During his long military career, Pétion had distinguished himself as a fearless soldier, and within Dessalines’s military regime he became a powerful general. Dissatisfied with what he saw as Dessalines’s tyrannical rule, however, Pétion started plotting an uprising against him as early as 1805, and by the spring of 1806 he had organized several officers into a conspiracy against the increasingly unpopular emperor. Before the ambush was carried out, Pétion also made sure to contact Christophe, whose actions against the French had secured him a permanent place in the pantheon of Haitian national heroes. Christophe wrote back that the conspirators could count on him not to interfere in the assassination.7

Behind the superficial rapport between Pétion and Christophe, however, was a prickly political question: Who would take the place of the fallen emperor? Pétion, the son of a white man and a free woman of color, had numerous supporters—especially in Haiti’s western areas, around his native Port-au-Prince, as well as in the country’s southern peninsula, where there was a significant population of landowning free people of color. He was also the one who had actually organized the overthrow of Dessalines. Christophe, however, commanded a loyal following in much of the nation’s army, and he was the undisputed leader of Haiti’s north—the country’s largest and wealthiest region. After Dessalines was eliminated, Christophe seemed in many ways to be his most obvious successor.

For someone of such prominence, Christophe has a curiously clouded biography. Indeed, like Louverture, who during his life gave the impression that he had always been a slave and elided his experience on the other side of slavery, Christophe deliberately cultivated uncertainty about his early years. No one is quite sure where and when Christophe was born, or whether he was originally free or enslaved. Most historians, though, believe that he came to colonial Saint-Domingue as a cabin boy from the British island of Grenada and was set to work by a French planter who owned an inn in the northern city of Le Cap. Christophe eventually became the inn’s maître d’—a position that, by bringing him into contact with many different sectors of the colony’s elite, was in its way the ideal profession for the future leader of a fragmented land. After joining Louverture’s forces during the slave insurrection, Christophe had risen rapidly through the ranks, overseeing both military and agricultural matters in his part of the country.8

The choice between Christophe and Pétion was not the only issue preoccupying the leaders of the revolt. They were also faced with a more fundamental question: What sort of political structure was best suited to Haiti’s situation? In place of the unpopular emperor, they decided that the country should have a parliament and a president, and they sought to follow a more democratic process for establishing the new political order: residents of the various regions were invited to choose representatives who would then travel to Port-au-Prince and write a new constitution. We know little about the details of these discussions, and participation in the elections seems to have been limited to a small number of elites in the towns. Still, it was a significant step, for it laid the foundation for a constitutional regime rooted in some form of democratic politics.

The representatives who gathered to work on Haiti’s new constitution were especially focused on deciding how strong the country’s executive should be. There was broad consensus on the outlines of the new system: an elected senate would appoint a president and share power with him. But there were strong differences of opinion regarding the precise role that each body should take on. The two most powerful men in the country—Pétion and Christophe—did their best to influence this debate. Christophe understood that he was the strongest candidate to take over the executive branch, and wanted to make sure he would have ample power in that role. Pétion seemed ready to accept Christophe as the next president, but was intent on containing him by granting broad powers to the Senate. Pétion had the support of most of the representatives of the south and west of the country and managed to sideline Christophe’s supporters from the north, and the new constitution fulfilled his wishes. The Senate was given control of the most crucial legislative issues: the budget, taxation, treaties, and declarations of war—in short, nearly everything having to do with the army and commerce. The executive branch was left with a largely symbolic role. Having set up the constitution in this way, the representatives then selected Christophe as the president.9

Christophe was not pleased. Before the constitution was even proclaimed, he marched his troops toward Port-au-Prince, which Pétion’s supporters had established as the country’s new capital. Pétion gathered his forces to respond. Three years into its independence, Haiti was now in a state of civil war. The armies of Christophe and Pétion battled one another throughout the country, but neither could vanquish the other. After much bloodshed, the conflict settled into a standoff, with each leader holding a part of the territory. Christophe established firm control of the northern areas around Le Cap as well as the central towns of Gonaïves and St. Marc and the rich Artibonite Valley. Pétion, meanwhile, ruled a somewhat less prosperous region that stretched westward from Port-au-Prince along Haiti’s southern peninsula. More than a decade would pass after Dessalines’s death before Haiti would be united again.10

*   *   *

On March 10, 1807, Pétion was ceremonially inaugurated as the president of the Republic of Haiti. His years as a soldier had left him with serious rheumatism, and he hobbled his way to the Senate podium on crutches. Still, once seated in the presidential chair, he delivered a spirited acceptance speech. Having been “entrusted with the happiness and destiny” of Haiti, Pétion declared, he was lucky to be able to depend on the “enlightenment,” “wisdom,” and “energy” of the Senate to help him rule. He proclaimed that his government would be run by and for the people: “May the weapons given to the people for them to defend their liberty be turned against my own breast if ever I conceive of the impious and audacious idea of attacking their rights.” His regime would, he insisted, be different from that of Dessalines—“a tyrant whose existence was an error of nature”—and from that of Christophe, who because of his “wild ambition” had plunged the country into civil war. To symbolize his commitment to an open and transparent democracy, Pétion opened up the Senate to the public, inviting them to witness the senators’ discussions.11

The political imagery of Pétion’s government emphasized its links to the revolutionary period in Haiti and France. The flag of the new republic used the same design of a red and a blue stripe that Dessalines had adopted for the insurrection army, albeit with the stripes placed horizontally rather than vertically. For the center of the flag, Pétion designed a coat of arms featuring cannon and pikes surrounding a palm tree—a testament to liberation from enslavement that recalled the “liberty trees” planted during the French and American revolutions. (That coat of arms is still used on the Haitian flag today.) The palm tree was surmounted by a Phrygian cap, the little floppy red hat originally worn by slaves in ancient Rome that was used by the sansculottes during the French Revolution to show their readiness to upend the social order. The republican allusions of the regime even extended to Pétion’s luxurious private residence, a Renaissance villa complete with a marble staircase and a large salon decorated with Haitian-made paintings of classical generals such as Hannibal and Julius Caesar.12

Below the coat of arms that Pétion designed for his republic’s flag was a motto testifying to his hope of avoiding the kinds of internal conflicts that had led to Dessalines’s downfall: “Unity is our strength.” It was an optimistic sentiment, for Pétion confronted the same tensions that had wrecked Dessalines’s regime, most notably the issue of agricultural policy. On taking power, Pétion did not immediately institute any major changes: as in prior regimes, plantation laborers were officially not allowed to leave the properties to which they were “attached” as laborers, and could be imprisoned if found to be vagabonds. Over time, however, Pétion accepted the idea that people who work for themselves have much greater incentive to work the land productively than those who do not. Accordingly, in place of the traditional models of direct management of plantation labor, he encouraged landowners to set up a sort of sharecropping system known as métayage. In this arrangement, a landowner essentially handed over the cultivation of a property to those who worked on it, surrendering day-to-day control over their tasks. In return, the laborers gave the landowner half of what they produced each year. While this annual payment still represented a burden, of course, the new setup allowed the laborers to control the rhythms of their work and gave them the choice of what crops to grow from season to season.

Pétion also helped agricultural laborers by changing and simplifying the tax system. Instead of collecting a quarter of profits from each plantation, as had been done ever since emancipation in 1793, he instituted a “territorial tax” that was levied at the ports of export. Establishing a long-running tradition, the Republic of Haiti filled its state coffers largely thanks to the tax on coffee, which was a nearly ideal export crop: it could be produced relatively easily on both small and large plots of land, and there was significant demand for it on the world market. Combined with the métayage arrangement, the new tax system provided agricultural workers with larger profit margins than they had enjoyed before, garnering Pétion much support in the countryside.13

In addition, Pétion significantly expanded the ranks of the landowners in his territory—though this was based as much on necessity as on principle. Relatively early in his regime, having difficulty paying the troops he needed in the war against Christophe, Pétion pragmatically decided to offer land to his troops instead of money. The distribution process was not egalitarian: officers got more than rank-and-file soldiers, and the state retained some control over the properties. Seeking to stall the fragmentation of plantations into small plots, Pétion outlawed the sale of parcels smaller than about 30 acres, which effectively excluded many of the poorer members of society from purchasing plots of land. His policy thus tried to steer a middle course between keeping land exclusively in the hands of a small elite and allowing the masses to take it over outright. Nevertheless, under Pétion’s rule, many former slaves in the republic were transformed into official property owners—sometimes gaining title to parts of the plantations where they had once been property themselves.14

Pétion’s regime also famously provided assistance to the anticolonial rebels who, after Napoleon’s 1808 toppling of the Spanish crown, began plotting revolutions throughout Latin America. Having established itself as the first independent nation in Latin America in 1804, Haiti offered both inspiration and practical support to these initiatives. In 1815, for example, Simón Bolívar came to Haiti after having failed in his first attempt to gain independence for New Granada. With Pétion’s help, Bolívar mounted a second expedition the following year, and he repaid Haiti’s support by making the abolition of slavery a part of his early program for independence. When that second attempt was also defeated by pro-Spanish forces, Bolívar traveled once more to what he called “the island of free men”—Haiti—to regroup. Although these early rebellions did not bear as much fruit as Pétion and others had hoped, their support for Bolívar and other Latin American revolutionaries remains a point of pride for Haitians, and one of the lasting legacies of Pétion’s regime.15

Even as he was encouraging republican revolution in Latin America, though, Pétion crafted an increasingly autocratic regime in the Republic of Haiti itself. Soon after being appointed president in 1807, he persuaded the Senate to abdicate many of its powers, rendering moot the constitutional arrangement that had provoked war with Christophe in the first place. When some senators protested, Pétion’s supporters pushed for placing the government entirely in presidential hands. By 1810, when Pétion was reelected, the Senate consisted of just five members, all of them firmly in his pocket.16

In 1816, the Republic of Haiti put into place a new constitution, with a system of legislative and executive power that in its broad outlines remains recognizable in Haiti to this day. The new constitution created a bicameral legislature, with the Senate supplemented by a Chamber of Deputies who could bring local concerns from the communes (counties) throughout Haiti to the capital in Port-au-Prince. The creation of the Chamber of Deputies was a significant advance for democratic government: the deputies were elected by universal male suffrage, with no restrictions on the right to vote (though only property owners could serve as representatives). At the same time, however, the new constitution set up a cozy and tightly controlled relationship between the legislature and the executive branch. The president was the only one who could propose a new law, and the Senate was formed exclusively from candidates nominated by the president. In turn, the president was selected by the Senate; once chosen, he was to occupy the position for life, and he had the right to nominate his successor. Thus, although Pétion’s regime nominally established a democracy in Haiti, its broader and lasting effect was the creation of a style of exclusivist, indeed oligarchical, rule constructed around extensive presidential power.17

*   *   *

Pétion’s inclinations toward an autocratic regime were more than matched by his counterpart in the north. For the first four years of his rule, Christophe had been content to be president of the region, aided by an appointed council of state. But he eventually decided that in order to deal with his enemies inside Haiti and with the hostile world that surrounded the country, he needed the power and respect granted to kings. Declaring himself king of the north of Haiti, Christophe gave himself a series of titles, proclaiming himself “Destroyer of tyranny, Regenerator and benefactor of the Haitian nation, Creator of its moral, political and military institutions.” He boasted that he was the “first monarch crowned in the New World,” and the coronation ceremony at the resplendent palace of Sans-Souci* was followed by eight days of dances and celebrations throughout the kingdom. Descriptions of the proceedings appeared in newspapers throughout Europe and the Americas.19

While Pétion’s republic took its political imagery from the Haitian and French revolutions, Christophe’s monarchy drew together a wide-ranging array of symbols from America, Africa, and Europe. Seeking to make a symbolic connection with the indigenous peoples who once inhabited Haiti, Christophe occasionally even claimed that one of his ancestors was a native Caribbean ruler. One of his favorite songs, performed often at court, was said to have been handed down from the indigenous Haitians, celebrating their fight against the Spanish colonizers and proclaiming they would “die rather than be enslaved.” At the queen’s suggestion, Christophe created a Society of Amazons, a corps of women who accompanied the queen and king on their processions. At the same time, he presented himself and his court as being linked to Africa, and his military police was known as the Royal Dahomets in reference to the great West African kingdom. An elite subgroup of about one hundred and fifty of them made up Christophe’s personal guard, the nicely named “Royal Bonbons.”20

The institutional heart of Christophe’s regime, meanwhile, was the European-style hereditary landed aristocracy, complete with heraldic crests and mottoes, that he created to administer his kingdom. Each of these counts, dukes, and barons either commanded a sector of the government or was given control of a parish of the kingdom, charged with overseeing the plantations and assuring the discipline and productivity of the laborers. The king’s nobles came from a highly diverse set of backgrounds, ranging from African-born survivors of the Middle Passage to light-skinned men who had been free during colonial times and achieved wealth and education in Saint-Domingue. Indeed, many of them had fought against one another during the conflicts of the Haitian Revolution before being united by Christophe as members of the kingdom’s ruling class.21*

Alongside the notable military commanders, Christophe’s aristocracy also included several remarkable Haitian writers, who produced an outpouring of texts that attacked European racism and articulated a vision of Haiti as a beacon of racial equality. Among them was Pompée-Valentin, the Baron de Vastey, who served as Christophe’s lead secretary. Vastey wrote several works on Haitian history and eloquently exposed the “multitude of absurdities” he found in the work of French defenders of slavery. Their refusal to grant him his humanity, Vastey wrote, had almost driven him “to the point of throwing down my pen.” “I am a man,” he proclaimed; “I feel it in the whole of my being; I possess the faculties, mental and corporeal, which mark my affinity to a divine original”; and yet he had been required to “enter into a serious refutation” of those who refused to accept that he was “their fellow.” Three of Vastey’s books were quickly translated into English, and he is recognized today as one of Haiti’s first great writers.23

Despite the individual accomplishments of Christophe’s aristocrats, however, the idea of invented black royalty has struck many commentators over the years as inherently risible. As one scholar put it, there is “a degree of embarrassment at what are seen as the faintly ridiculous monarchic trappings of the régime; hurriedly thrown together, ersatz, gaudy imitation of European cultural models.” To some extent, this ridicule is the legacy of early historians from Pétion’s Republic of Haiti. Engaging in a kind of historiographical battle that paralleled the country’s civil war, they helped create a powerful image of Christophe as a megalomaniac ruling over an aberration: a black kingdom in the New World. To this day, the history of Christophe’s regime always seems to be overtaken by the sense that his vision of a Haitian royal court was always implausible, always doomed, a kind of historical joke and interregnum.24

The durability of this view can be seen in one of the best-known accounts of Christophe’s regime, Aimé Césaire’s 1963 play La tragédie du roi Christophe. A poet, activist, and political leader from the French colony of Martinique, Césaire was fascinated by the history of Haiti and celebrated Louverture and the Haitian Revolution. When he turned to Christophe, however, Césaire presented him as a tragic figure and a bit of a buffoon and turned his court into a kind of farce. At a 1997 performance of Césaire’s play in Paris, audiences roared with laughter when the characters of the “Duke of Marmelade” and the “Duke of Limonade” were introduced. Unaware that these are simply place names in Haiti—names given by French colonists—many viewers imagine them as the product of some kind of native ignorance and overactive imagination.25

However we may judge Christophe’s regime from an aesthetic viewpoint, though, his wide-ranging and ambitious efforts aimed at creating a sustainable postemancipation state deserve more attention than historians have usually given them. Pétion, whose territory was less prosperous than Christophe’s, could not maintain a particularly strong state apparatus; accordingly, he ceded some control over crop production to the agricultural laborers themselves, and he had little involvement with foreign affairs beyond his support for Bolívar and other revolutionaries in Haiti’s vicinity. Christophe, on the other hand, actively sought to build up a strong state with a viable export economy, one that would have a major presence on the world stage. It was in support of this project that Christophe maintained—even expanded—the plantation system, keeping large plantations intact and making his handpicked group of elites into landed gentry who would keep a close eye on the agricultural work on their estates.

Christophe’s aspirations for Haiti led not just to the construction of the Citadel and other buildings but also to major initiatives in legal reform and public education, as well as a strengthening of ties with British abolitionists. Only by establishing itself as a self-sustaining, economically thriving power, Christophe believed, could Haiti finally stop being subordinate to its former colonizers and be seen by other nations as an equal.26

*   *   *

In contrast to Pétion’s relatively hands-off governing style, Christophe wanted to actively manage his subjects’ lives. He produced an extensive corpus of laws known as the “Code Henry,” which totaled nearly eight hundred pages and legislated seemingly all aspects of life in his kingdom. Some of its stipulations, for example, were aimed at environmental preservation and the establishment of food security. There were rather reasonable rules commanding property owners who wanted to set fire to their cane fields (as was commonly done at the end of harvest periods to clear the fields and enrich the soil) to first check with their neighbors, whose unharvested fields might burn as a result. There were also forward-thinking regulations meant to prevent deforestation: no one who rented a plantation, for instance, was allowed to cut down more than one-third of the trees on the property, and they were also told to avoid cutting down trees on the “summits of mountains.” Property owners themselves were not subject to such restrictions, but they were ordered to plant large numbers of breadfruit, mango, and palm trees as well as to plant and maintain “precious” banana trees, all of which could provide abundant food over the long term.27

An even more important—and more sensitive—set of regulations dealt with the management of plantation workers. Like his predecessors, Christophe was faced with the problem of building an economy based on free labor in a land entirely constructed around slavery. In response, the Code Henry put particular emphasis on the need to balance the responsibilities of laborers with those of landowners, laying out the “reciprocal obligations” of three groups: property owners, tenant farmers, and field workers. The property owners, among them Christophe’s nobles, made up the smallest and most powerful group. Next down the ladder were the tenant farmers, known as fermiers; these were those who—through military service or other routes—had been able to gain access to rented land, which gave them a measure of independence. The field workers, or agriculteurs, on the other hand, were always “attached” to a particular plantation, where they were required to stay. Like laborers under Louverture, the agriculteurs were paid for their work with one-quarter of their plantation’s yearly production, to be divided among themselves.28

Unless they practiced some other profession, every agriculteur in Christophe’s kindgom was ordered to work on a plantation. “The law punishes men who are lazy or vagabonds; all individuals must make themselves useful to society,” Christophe decreed. Any agricultural worker who “left the plantation where they have chosen to live, in order to take refuge, without a valid reason, on another plantation, in the towns, cities, or in any other place where their residence is outlawed” would be considered a vagabond and punished accordingly. Begging was “severely prohibited,” and all “lazy people, beggars,” and “women of bad character” would also be considered vagabonds. When caught, they were to be “sent back to their plantations”; if they were not already “attached” to a plantation, they would be placed on one by the authorities. What’s more, the laborers were not allowed to leave the plantations during “work days” unless their manager requested for them a special permit from the local “lieutenant of the king.” The Code Henry does suggest that agriculteurs had some choice in selecting which plantation they were “attached” to, though it provided no mechanism for them to later move from one to another. Having chosen a plantation, they were ordered to stay there, and in practice many probably toiled in the fields where they had once been enslaved.29

The Code Henry did not set out rules for the agriculteurs alone, however; it also carefully regulated the activities of property owners and tenant farmers. Plantation owners, for example, were required to provide health care for their workers, ordered to pay all expenses of doctors’ visits and medicine. They were supposed to have not one but two hospitals on their property: the first a general care facility, the second—to be located some distance away from workers’ houses—for those with contagious diseases. These were remarkably enlightened and progressive stipulations for the period, though it is difficult to know to what extent they were actually enforced. (The French Code Noir, which governed plantation life in colonial times, had similar provisions that commanded masters to provide health care and food to their slaves, but masters rarely did.) Still, even if the paternalistic and somewhat bucolic vision of plantation relations offered by the Code Henry did not quite match the reality of daily life as it was experienced by the agriculteurs, the detailed attempt to balance responsibilities of workers and landowners reflects Christophe’s desire to maintain the plantation structure while providing the laborers with a certain level of protection and care.30

Indeed, some stipulations in Christophe’s code show remarkable concern for the particular conditions of agricultural workers. “It is expressly outlawed,” reads one article, “for property owners and tenant farmers of coffee plantations to have their products carried, either to the parish towns or to the ports, on the heads of the agricultural workers.” The landowners and tenant farmers were ordered, instead, to provide the “animals necessary for the transport of the products of their plantations.” This legislation might seem like intense micromanagement, but in all likelihood it represents the trace of some complaint by agriculteurs about the difficulty of carrying baskets of coffee to distant markets. Christophe’s annual Festival of Agriculture, during which agriculteurs were invited to a celebration at Sans-Souci palace, might even have given the laborers a chance to speak to the king about plantation problems directly.31

The popular notion of the “tragedy” of Christophe—the vision of him as a cruel ruler who effectively reenslaved the population of Haiti—thus oversimplifies a much more complex reality. To be properly appreciated, the Code Henry needs to be read and understood in its broader historical context: that of nineteenth-century law in Europe and the Americas. This was a time when many countries, including Britain and France, also had tough stipulations against vagrancy and various laws giving employers significant control over their workers. For all their limitations, Christophe’s regulations gave the agriculteurs some rights and methods of recourse: if landowners violated provisions of the Code, laborers could complain about their treatment to the royal authorities. Most strikingly, because Christophe’s regime was not constructed around a racial hierarchy—people of African descent controlled and occupied essentially all levels of the system—escape from the plantation was a real possibility for a significant part of the population. Through service in the army or the administration, as well as through renting their own land, agricultural workers had steady access to mechanisms through which they could alter their situation.

For all these reasons, the Code Henry impressed, and indeed seduced, many contemporaries. The naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, a veteran of Captain Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific and cofounder of the abolitionist African Institution, declared, “It is worthy to be written in gold; nothing I have ever seen which was written for the same purposes by white men is worthy to be compared to it.” Many abolitionists hoped that Christophe’s regime would serve to refute the racist theories of their opponents and prove that—despite the arguments of proslavery forces—emancipation did not necessarily mean the end of prosperity in the Caribbean. Christophe, in turn, actively reached out to international allies, hoping they would help him build a new world in Haiti.32

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“Without a doubt,” the prominent French priest and abolitionist the Abbé Grégoire wrote in 1815, “the most difficult problem to resolve would be how to appropriate all the advantages of European civilization, without including the vicious and hideous parts.” Europe, he went on, had “done much for the spirit,” but it had also “perverted reason” and “neglected … the education of the heart.” Grégoire was writing about Africa, but he elegantly captured the dilemma facing the Haitian leadership: they looked to Europe for models of governance even as they ruled over a land that had experienced the worst of what the “perverted reason” of European empire had to offer.33

Many Haitians deeply admired Grégoire, who had been at the forefront of the battle for the rights of free people of color early in the revolution, and had given his strong support to Haitian independence. His 1808 work De la littérature des nègres presented an impassioned and richly documented defense of the capacities of blacks; Christophe ordered fifty copies of the book and published excerpts from it in his newspaper. Grégoire, however, was politically uncomfortable with Christophe’s regime: he considered Christophe’s elaborate ceremonies a waste of money, and he was appalled by Christophe’s adoption of a monarchical system, arguing that a “nobility of paper” was just as absurd as the “nobility of skin color” that the white masters had enforced in Saint-Domingue. Even if the ex-slaves of the country didn’t have much education, Grégoire insisted, that did not mean they lacked the capacity to elect their own leaders. Grégoire was happy to work with Pétion’s republic, and he continued to be a steadfast supporter of “free Haiti” overall, but his antimonarchical views—shaped by the French Revolution—ultimately made it impossible for Christophe to rely on his support.34

No one else in France seemed particularly eager to help Christophe either. And Christophe, for his part, also had a deeply personal reason for wanting to avoid dealing with the French: he had lost a son to them. Late in 1801, Christophe had decided to follow the example of Toussaint Louverture—who had sent his two sons to France to be educated—and began making plans to send his firstborn, Ferdinand, to school in Paris. After the Leclerc expedition arrived in early 1802 and Christophe burned Le Cap and started fighting against the French, of course, this no longer seemed like a good idea. But when he surrendered a few months later, Christophe went ahead with the project. The decision is puzzling, and Christophe was clearly uneasy about it. “If you had our skin,” he confided in a white French general, “you would perhaps not share my confidence in sending my only son” to be “raised in France.” But perhaps Christophe believed at the time that ultimately France would triumph in Saint-Domingue, and he and his son would then both be in a better position if Ferdinand had a Parisian education. It was a dangerous gamble, though, essentially making Ferdinand both student and hostage.35

For his first few months in Paris, Ferdinand was treated well. When news arrived that his father had once again turned against the French, however, he was transferred to a state orphanage and told he would learn to be a shoemaker. Ferdinand refused: he had come to Paris, he complained, “to get a fine education, not to be a cobbler.” The teachers who had now become his jailers replied that he was nothing more than “a little brigand, the son of a bigger brigand who was massacring all the whites in Saint-Domingue.” Ferdinand was beaten in the orphanage so badly that he eventually died from his injuries. His fate was covered up by the authorities, and Christophe never publicly mentioned Ferdinand again.36

It is not surprising, then, that instead of trying to repair his relations with Grégoire or perhaps connect with other potentially sympathetic Frenchmen, Christophe looked to France’s great enemy, Britain. The king spoke English well; he liked the British, whom he saw as embodying the virtues of hard work and discipline, and he believed that his subjects liked them too. The ongoing war between Britain and France served Haiti particularly well since it kept their former colonizers largely tied up militarily, lessening the chance that they would try to reconquer their lost territory. Christophe (like Pétion in the south) cultivated the valuable trade with the nearby British colony of Jamaica, and ships shuttled back and forth constantly between the two islands.

But while the British government happily let their merchants trade with Haiti, they refused to recognize Haiti’s independence, or even to dignify Haiti’s representatives with the formalities extended to other diplomats. Like officials in the United States, British functionaries worked hard to prevent Haitians from actually spending any time in British territory. Britain had abolished the slave trade in 1807, but they maintained slavery itself in their colonies for three decades after Haitian independence; and to deal on equal terms with Haiti, they assumed, would send a message to their own population that an antislavery revolt was acceptable.

Knowing that he couldn’t depend on open support from the British government, Christophe instead sought to cultivate ties with British abolitionists, whom he admired for their successful campaign against the slave trade and their eloquent attacks on racism. He found particular allies in two of Britain’s most prominent antislavery activists, William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson. Unlike Grégoire, Clarkson and Wilberforce were not uncomfortable with the idea of a monarchy, and they immediately responded to Christophe’s offer of friendship. They used their personal contacts and intimate knowledge of European politics to give Haiti’s king advice on how to deal with Europe’s political leaders. When Clarkson suggested to Christophe that he write to the emperor of Russia, for instance, Christophe hesitated: Could he really just write to the emperor without an introduction? But Clarkson took care of the necessary formalities and transmitted the letter, in which Christophe called on Alexander to support Haitian independence and to oppose the slave trade. Clarkson later functioned as goodwill ambassador for Christophe in Europe, trying to get Haitian independence finally recognized. Of course, there was a limit to how much someone like Clarkson could do. As a writer who described himself as a “friend of Christophe” later noted, the king was perhaps liable to forget that the “philanthropists of Britain,” like those elsewhere, didn’t have access to “the treasury and the armed forces.”37

Still, the abolitionists did assist Christophe as much as they could. One of their key initiatives involved helping Christophe to develop an extensive education infrastructure, which was admired by many contemporaries outside the country. Christophe’s interest in education was of long standing: as far back as 1805, he had strongly criticized Dessalines for his neglect of teachers, angrily proclaiming that this lack of support for schools exposed Dessalines as “a barbarian with no idea of civilization, incapable of regenerating the nation … merely a brutal soldier, happy only when surrounded by bayonets.” On taking power in 1807, Christophe declared that public education was—“after religion and liberty”—the most “precious” thing for any population, and that it would be “venerated” under his regime.38

It took most of a decade for Christophe to establish his education projects, and he was perhaps ultimately spurred on by a competitive urge: in 1816, Pétion recruited three teachers from France and created a prestigious secondary school, the Lycée de Port-au-Prince, which offered instruction in Latin, French, English, mathematics, navigation, history, music, and fencing. (Later renamed the Lycée Pétion, the school remains one of the elite institutions in Haiti, occupying, in the words of one historian, “the same place in the imagination of Haitians that Harvard does in that of Americans.”) Not to be outdone, Christophe asked Clarkson and Wilberforce to send teachers to the Kingdom of Haiti, and he established an ambitious system of public education that stretched from primary schools to university-level classes. He created a special chamber to oversee the educational system, launched plans to create textbooks designed specifically for Haitian students, inaugurated schools for women, and installed teachers in all of his military’s barracks, hoping in this way to educate his soldiers during their idle moments.39

The scope of Christophe’s educational initiatives soon far outstripped Pétion’s efforts. Between 1816 and 1820, thirteen schools were functioning in the Kingdom of Haiti. It is estimated that as many as 72,000 students attended school at some point during Christophe’s regime, which would have meant that nearly all the children in the kingdom received some public instruction. Christophe believed that Haitians would be better off if they learned to speak English rather than French, and a significant amount of the instruction focused on teaching that language at the primary level. In higher education, meanwhile, one of Christophe’s most lasting contributions was the creation of a chair of medicine in Le Cap, where a Scotsman named Duncan Stewart taught anatomy, disease treatment, and surgery. Stewart’s school was so successful that it was one of the few institutions to survive Christophe’s reign, for after his overthrow, the new president maintained Stewart in his post—though a “simulacrum” of an inauguration was held in order to make it seem that the new regime had actually created the post.40

*   *   *

Not all of the assistance from Christophe’s British friends worked out quite so well. Hoping to increase the productivity of his kingdom’s plantations—and thus gather more money for building his forts, palaces, and schools—Christophe reached out to his abolitionist allies for technical advice on agricultural matters. Wilberforce was enthusiastic about the notion, becoming the first of many outsiders over the decades to support the idea that foreign expertise could help Haiti’s farmers and laborers become more efficient. He sent two plows to Haiti for demonstration purposes, along with two British plowmen to operate them. Clarkson was only a little more reticent, his main concern being that the transmission of technical knowledge might run up against linguistic difficulties. “I confess I cannot see how common ploughmen, who can only speak English, can instruct the Haytians, who can only speak French,” he wrote. What was needed, he went on, was “some middle man between the two, some very superior farmer, who should be able to speak French and English, and who should go about from farm to farm and explain to the Haytian farmer what the British ploughman wishes to communicate to him.” The plowman could then teach the Haitians the “most judicious application of husbandry to the soil, and in various other departments connected with that science.”41

We can imagine the slightly quizzical response of the residents in the north of Haiti as they encountered these foreign experts and their plows. As a contemporary account relates it, one of the plowmen had quite good luck: he was set up on a piece of land that been “prepared before his arrival,” and with the assistance of the plow the plot was “cultivated with a great saving of manual labor, and produced a most abundant crop.” The other Englishman, however, was placed further from Cap Haïtien, on a piece of land that needed to be cleared before it could be tilled. As a result, he needed “the assistance of a great number of laborers, in order to clear it of weeds, bushes, and cane roots before he could introduce his plough.” He was, it seems, working on the ruins of an old sugarcane plantation, which was perhaps why the soil proved to be “less fertile” than the plot farmed by his countryman—the intensive cultivation of cane having tapped out the land—and the use of the plow “gained nothing in point of labour, and nothing in produce.” Beset by difficulties and illness, tasked with carrying out an undertaking which was “likely to be the occasion of constant trouble and vexation,” the second plowman often “lamented ever having quitted England.” If he wondered what he was doing in Haiti, those who worked with him—heirs to a range of agricultural techniques that layered different crops on small plots, developed over generations to maximize productivity and minimize soil exhaustion—probably wondered the same thing.42

While these agricultural experiments were going on, Clarkson also liberally gave Christophe a great deal of advice—much of which sounds eerily familiar—about how to broadly reform Haiti’s social organization. What Haiti really needed, he told Christophe, was a middle class. Where might they find one? In the United States, Clarkson suggested, among the “persons of colour” who were free and owned some property. The advantage to Haiti of such immigration, he explained, would be that such settlers would come with wealth, and could therefore provide that “connecting medium between the rich and the poor and which is the great cause of prosperity in Europe, but which cannot at present have been raised up in your Majesty’s dominions.” The movement in favor of the emigration of free African Americans out of the United States was gaining steam—Liberia would be created in 1822—and Clarkson put Christophe in contact with Prince Saunders, an African American from Massachusetts who came to Haiti to explore the possibility of bringing settlers there. Saunders was fascinated by Haiti’s promise, and in 1818 he published in Boston a glowing description of Christophe’s kingdom and a commentary on its laws.43

Clarkson admitted that some American emigrants might have some trouble adjusting to Haiti. For one thing, being “free men” in the United States, they were “accustomed to go where they pleased in search of their livelihood without any questions being asked them or without any hindrance by the Government. No passports are ever necessary there.” That was not the case under Christophe’s regime, which policed movement assiduously: plantation laborers were, after all, required to stay on their plantations and could not move freely about looking for work. Immigrants might also, Clarkson acknowledged, miss the “advantage” of “being tried by a jury of their own citizens” if they were accused of a crime. Of course, African Americans might gladly have accepted these trade-offs to live in a country that, for all its problems, was at least free from the constant threat and exercise of white supremacy.44

Christophe was enthusiastic about the plans for emigration from North America, and he committed to funding the journeys of immigrants, but his reign came to an end before he could see the project through. In general, his kingdom was noted for being largely hospitable to foreign traders, investors, and tourists; many British and North American visitors came to his court and admired Sans-Souci and the Citadel. One nation, however, was not impressed: France. Indeed, the French government continued to insist that Christophe’s kingdom and Pétion’s republic were not, in fact, independent countries at all.

*   *   *

More than a decade after the defeat of Leclerc’s forces, many exiled planters from Saint-Domingue still hoped to reverse what had happened and persistently lobbied for a new mission to reconquer the former colony. A number of them held powerful positions in the French government, and their pressure led France to officially insist that it still had a claim over Haiti. Other European nations, in turn, refused to extend recognition to Haiti until the former colonial power did so. Indeed, when Britain and France were negotiating an end to their conflict at the Congress of Vienna, the French signed an additional secret agreement with Britain specifically regarding Haiti. The British promised that they would not interfere if the French attacked their former colony; in return, France formally accepted Britain’s right to trade with Haiti.45

It was an astounding gesture—what right, after all, did France have to determine whether anyone traded with Haiti?—but it summed up the prevailing attitude at the time. Haiti’s declaration of independence was regarded by a surprising number of Frenchmen as just a temporary setback. Some of the former planters laid out detailed military plans for taking back the colony, arguing that the disaster of the Leclerc expedition was a fluke, or else the result of mistakes that could be avoided by the next commander. Others focused on asking for increased financial restitution. The exiled planters had received some state assistance since they had fled Saint-Domingue during the revolution, but they wanted more. They demanded to be paid back for all the property the revolution had taken from them, including that most precious of property of all: the human beings, once enslaved, who had now become citizens of Haiti.

Some of the former colonists who aspired to return as masters were conservative royalists, committed not only to the old order of slavery but also to the structures of Old Regime France. For them, the Haitian Revolution was an example of the excesses of the French Revolution; Haiti, in their eyes, was the “last province of France still under the control of the Jacobins,” and one that should fall to the counterrevolution like all the other parts of France. They added, furthermore, that all European empires had a clear interest in uniting to crush Haiti—“whose existence, let us be frank, is shameful for all colonial governments.” “No one will accept, in the middle of the Caribbean, a foyer of revolt, a hideout for pirates and brigands, a school for revolution,” one former planter declared. Another argued that the Haitian state was an illegal entity, since it had been founded by slaves and the law had always forbidden slaves to own any property. For those who believed, as these planters did, that “slavery is inherent to the black race,” Haiti was an aberration, unnatural and untenable.46

Several writers unabashedly dreamed of genocide. An aristocrat who had served as an officer in Saint-Domingue during the revolution said that the only solution would be to take over Haiti and exterminate all males over six years old who lived there. A former colonist responded that this would not go far enough: it would also be necessary to kill all the women, since they could “whisper into the souls of their children the same spirit of revolt” that had animated the men. Haitians had to be completely erased from history in order to protect white supremacy and the colonial order. It was simply intolerable that “three hundred thousand Africans” had “stolen from thirty million Frenchmen the most beautiful and useful of their possessions.”47

Other exiled planters, however, were a bit more strategic in their thinking. They granted that there was no going back to the old order. The revolution had forever destroyed the “kind of magic” that had “made it so that three or four whites could sleep in complete security, with their doors open, on a property on which there were four or five hundred blacks.” All the Haitians now knew how easy it was to “ruin and slaughter” the whites, and they weren’t going to forget it. There was, however, an example of possible compromise: the relative peace of Louverture’s regime, when white planters had conceded political power to a black leader and consented to new labor structures while holding on to their property. When Napoleon attacked Louverture, some former colonists argued bitterly, he had destroyed a system that might ultimately have worked for the benefit of the planters and the French empire. (Napoleon himself had in fact concluded the same thing, admitting on his deathbed that targeting Louverture had been one of the great mistakes of his career.) Perhaps, some former planters imagined, a deal could be worked out with Haiti’s new elites: the “mulatto” class of the island could serve in Louverture’s place, as allies and intermediaries for rebuilding the plantation order. Together, the former planters and the “mulatto” elites could develop a new form of colonial rule in Haiti, possibly making it into a French protectorate.48

This notion got a more serious hearing in government circles than talk of military conquest. Most in the French military had little desire to go through a replay of the Leclerc expedition. They remembered all too well how Haiti had swallowed up tens of thousands of Napoleon’s best troops. Clarkson, who visited France on Christophe’s behalf, reported back that anyone in French government circles who proposed reconquering Saint-Domingue by force “would be considered to be mad.” “Ridicule has generally accompanied the mention of any expedition to Hayti,” Clarkson noted. Indeed, “as hopeless and disastrous as the Expedition of Leclerc” had become a byword in the military to describe something considered a particularly bad plan.49

French officials did believe, however, that the threat of force could be used as a bargaining tool to extract concessions from Haiti’s leaders. In 1814, the French minister of the colonies, Pierre-Victor Malouet—a onetime governor of the colony of Saint-Domingue—sent envoys to Haiti to begin negotiations with Pétion and Christophe. The delegation began by proposing to Pétion that he place Haiti back under the control of France. He categorically refused the return of any form of French sovereignty, but he made his own counteroffer to the French, one that would come to haunt Haiti for a long time. What if the Haitian state paid an indemnity to France, Pétion asked, which they could use to pay damages to former French planters? Having won its independence through revolt, Haiti could effectively now buy recognition of that independence once and for all.50

Perhaps, in making this proposal, Pétion was remembering how slaves had sometimes bought liberty from their masters. It is also possible that he genuinely had some sympathy for the plight of planters who had lost property in Saint-Domingue: after all, though he had participated in the final defeat of the French, Pétion had also initially served as part of the Leclerc expedition. An indemnity was an elegant way of solving the problem of political recognition: the country would remain free and independent, but those who had been victims of its revolution would receive some form of compensation. Once recognized, Haiti would have a much clearer political and diplomatic status, as well as an easier time exporting its products. Pétion probably considered that, on balance, Haiti would benefit from the deal.

When Agostino Franco de Medina, another of the French envoys, came to meet with Christophe, however, he got a rather different response. Christophe had Medina arrested and searched, uncovering a set of private instructions from Malouet. The king found these so shocking, in both tone and content, that he ordered Medina executed. To justify the act, he published the papers that Medina had carried—a move that effectively embarrassed not only the French but also Pétion for having been willing to deal with them. As Medina’s documents made clear, Malouet envisioned bringing not only colonialism back to Haiti, but also slavery, or something close to it.51

In his instructions to Medina, Malouet never referred to Haiti, instead calling the territory Saint-Domingue and acting as if it were still part of the French kingdom. The French king, Malouet declared, was determined to make the “insurgents of Saint-Domingue” accept his sovereignty over their land. But while the king was ready to use force if necessary, he was also prepared to grant “concessions and advantages” to those who “promptly” offered him the “obeisance” he was owed. His envoys were told to seek out leaders who were “educated and enlightened,” notably Pétion, and come to an agreement with them. Such leaders, Malouet predicted, would understand the fundamental truth: there would be no “tranquility and prosperity” in Haiti unless the “mass of blacks” were “returned to and maintained in the state of slavery, or at least a kind of submission similar to that which they were in before the troubles.” The envoys were given some leeway in determining precisely how to assure this “submission” of the laboring population; but their goal, the instructions made clear, was to get as close to the “old colonial order of things” as possible.52

The documents which Christophe found on Medina blustered that the French king would never be cowed by the “exaggerated pretentions” of Haiti’s leaders and would “make the full extent of his power felt if his favors are refused.” Given that French armies had in fact been decisively defeated by Haitian troops, the tone was both bullying and a little deluded, which may be why Malouet labored to make the threat sound serious. There was “no doubt,” he wrote, “that if the King of France wanted to send all his forces bearing down on a group of rebel subjects who make up barely one hundredth of the people of his kingdom, who have neither within them or among them the great military, moral, or material resources that Europe has, who will receive no support from outside,” he could “reduce them, even if that means exterminating them.” Haitians undoubtedly heard echoes here of the rhetoric of Leclerc and Rochambeau. Back in 1804, in justifying his killings of French planters, Dessalines had argued that the French would always consider themselves to be lords and masters of the country. Malouet’s instructions confirmed such suspicions.53

Malouet’s vision for the future of Haiti built on the idea—common in many accounts of the Haitian Revolution at the time—that if only the French government had made concessions to the free people of color when they demanded equal rights in the early 1790s, the colony would have been able to avoid, or at least contain, the insurrection of the slaves. Malouet wanted a replay, and this time France would get it right. Once they took back control of their former territory, the French government would offer a small number of leaders—including Pétion, whose skin color was almost white—“complete assimilation” with whites, along with honors and money. Somewhat darker-skinned people would receive nearly the same political rights, just with “a few exceptions” that would place them a bit “below” the whites. And so on down the ladder: the darker the skin, the fewer the rights. The majority of the population—not only “the blacks who are working on plantations” but also “those who have escaped this condition”—would be “attached to the soil and returned to their former masters.” And, just for good measure, the island was to be “purged” of all those rebellious blacks who were too dangerous to place on the plantations, for fear they would lead new insurrections. Finally, the new order would severely restrict the possibilities for emancipation, so as to avoid the creation of a new class of free people.54

Christophe had, in the previous years, created an entire state and aristocracy based on racial equality. Malouet, seeking to curry favor with Christophe’s enemies to the south, proposed instead a reconstructed, even perfected, colonial order based on an intricate racial hierarchy. Christophe’s arrest and execution of Medina exposed the plan, and the French king was forced to disavow Malouet’s instructions, claiming that his minister had overstepped his bounds and that the documents didn’t in fact express the vision of the French government. The first round of negotiations thus ended in a kind of victory for Haiti: from then on, the French no longer proposed any kind of return to the former colonial system. But they didn’t give up trying to assert some form of control.

In 1816, the French sent new envoys to Haiti to reopen negotiations. The plan was to co-opt a portion of the Haitian leadership by offering them military positions and honors in the French army: the envoys arrived with twelve Crosses of the Legion of Honor and ten of the Order of Saint-Louis. In return for such titles, Haitian rulers were asked to place their country under the protection of France. Pétion, having been shamed by Christophe’s actions the first time around, refused strongly, and publicly. In a printed proclamation “to the people and the army” of Haiti, he declared that there was no Haitian whose “soul is tepid enough” to accept anything but complete recognition of independence. Nature, he noted, had made Haitians “equal to other men,” and if the French tried to take back the country, they would find only “ashes mingled with blood, iron, and an avenging climate.” Christophe, for his part, refused even to receive this second set of envoys, so the negotiations once again went nowhere.55

Clarkson was disappointed that neither France nor England was acknowledging Haitian independence, and he eventually even suggested that Christophe should adopt Pétion’s idea and pay an indemnity to France in return for recognition—though only if the amount were “reasonable and moderate” and could be paid “without any great sacrifice.” Christophe found the idea of paying an indemnity to France unthinkable, but he did ask the English abolitionist to lobby the former colonial power on Haiti’s behalf. Clarkson should begin, Christophe said, by trying to make the French government appreciate the history from Haiti’s point of view. “The Haitian people, after shedding rivers of their finest blood, set themselves up sixteen years ago as a sovereign state, free and independent. Exercising its natural rights, the nation proclaimed its Independence before all men by its solemn Declaration of the 1st of January, 1804.” The country based its claim to independence on the very “natural rights” which the French had enshrined in their own revolution. The old colonial order was “overthrown, destroyed from top to bottom”—it would not be resurrected. “A new and enlightened generation is replacing the former population; ideas, morals, customs, and even the habits of the people have undergone a total change … The last vestiges of that odious system have disappeared from the soil of Haiti.” All that remained to complete this just and beneficial transformation was for France and other countries to formally acknowledge the irreversible facts.56

Through Clarkson, Christophe urged France to act with “justice and humanity” and to officially recognize what was clear to “every reasonable observer”: the colonial power had made independence “inevitable” through its brutality, and now this independence could “in no possible way be destroyed.” France’s refusal to accept Haiti’s autonomy had caused “astonishment, grief and regret.” But the king of France could fix matters by offering immediate recognition. In return, Haiti would grant France trade privileges, giving it preferential access to markets and lower tariffs than other countries, though Christophe preemptively specified that he would not offer to France any kind of “exclusive right.”57

As for the question of an indemnity, the document given to Clarkson burst with disbelief at the idea that France might ask Haiti to pay in return for political recognition. What, after all, were the colonists seeking to be reimbursed for? The most valuable aspect of their property had been their slaves: the people who were now free citizens of Haiti. “Is it possible that they wish to be recompensed for the loss of our persons? Is it conceivable that Haitians who have escaped torture and massacre at the hands of these men, Haitians who have conquered their own country by the force of their arms and at the cost of their blood, that these same free Haitians should now purchase their property and persons once again with money paid to their former oppressors?” As Christophe put it, “the ex-colonists are our natural and implacable enemies; they tortured us while it was in their power to do so, and they never cease to seek an opportunity to renew their torture.” No true Haitian could consider paying an indemnity to them. “It is not possible; it is not for one moment to be considered. Free men could never accept such a condition without covering themselves with infamy!”58

It was a powerful statement, and a potent brief against the French approach to Haiti. But it was also, as Clarkson soon found out, impossible to deliver the message. As the abolitionist later explained to Christophe, he found himself caught up in a rather absurd dilemma. If he presented the French cabinet with Christophe’s letter that named Clarkson as an official envoy for the Kingdom of Haiti, then, in the act of receiving the letter, the cabinet “would be acknowledging the Independence of Hayti at the very outset.” The French government could not, it seems, even begin discussions about a treaty with “your Majesty as King of Hayti, because if the King of France were to allow your present title at [the] opening of the negotiation, he would be to all intents and purposes acknowledging your Independence.” The envoys sent by France to Christophe and Pétion had skirted this issue by always using the name “Saint-Domingue,” refusing to officially admit Haiti’s existence in any of their documents. But now, negotiation seemed impossible, and Clarkson rapidly realized he was at a dead end.59

Frustrated, Clarkson wrote to Christophe that there seemed to be only two options. Christophe could acknowledge the French king as his “nominal sovereign” and secure “very favorable terms” for a trade treaty, or he could insist on an acknowledgment of independence—in which case, Clarkson noted prophetically, the French would “make you pay very dearly for it.” It was, Clarkson suggested, perhaps better to wait. But Christophe was running out of time.60

*   *   *

In 1818, lightning struck the Citadel. The massive ammunition depot in the fort caught fire and exploded, destroying much of the building and killing many soldiers, along with Christophe’s brother-in-law. It must have seemed a particularly potent omen. Christophe had poured his energy and that of his subjects into erecting the massive structure. But those who worked on it resented the cost and coercion involved, and many were clearly wondering what these projects were really worth. For a time, many of Christophe’s subjects had found value in his regime: they were, we can imagine, impressed by and proud of his palaces, and reassured by the fortifications built to prevent the return of the French. But the kingdom stood on relatively weak political foundations. A number of Christophe’s nobles had found their own ambitions frustrated, and were displeased by his tight control. Furthermore, the king’s ambitious projects all depended on the willingness of his subjects to carry out plantation labor that supported the state. Nearly a decade into the experiment, many of the workers had grown tired of the inequalities and excesses of the system. In the end, it took only a stroke to bring it down.61

Attending mass in the town of Limonade in August 1820, Christophe suddenly fell ill. Though he was immediately attended by Dr. Stewart—the Scotsman who held the chair of medicine Christophe had set up in Le Cap—the stroke left him partly debilitated. Christophe’s weakness emboldened members of his regime who were increasingly unhappy with his rule, and within a few months, several officers organized a conspiracy. Soldiers in Le Cap rallied in the streets, chanting: “Long live liberty! Long live independence! Down with the tyrant! Down with Christophe!” They quickly gained converts, and Christophe soon faced an insurrection among his troops. When he sent envoys to try to negotiate with the leaders of the rebellion, they responded that the people “had broken the chains of slavery” and “would no longer have a king.” As more and more soldiers joined the revolt, even Christophe’s bodyguards turned against him. Surrounded, Christophe shot himself in the heart. His wife and daughters carried his body up the long road to the Citadel and buried him in the center of the fort.62

The women in Christophe’s immediate family were allowed to leave the country. They went to Britain, where they stayed with Clarkson for several months. “A more delightful family never entered a person’s house,” the abolitionist wrote. “Their dispositions are so amiable, their tempers under such complete subjugation, and their minds so enlightened, that it is a pleasure to live with such people.” But Christophe’s son Jacques-Victor-Henry was not so lucky: now sixteen, he was bayoneted to death by the rebels, along with the Baron de Vastey and several other members of the aristocracy of the kingdom of the north. Having lost his first son to the French, Christophe now lost another—the one he had named his heir—to his own subjects.63

Pétion had died two years before, in 1818, and had been succeeded by a longtime supporter, Jean-Pierre Boyer. After Christophe’s death, Boyer’s troops quickly took control of the north of Haiti, ending the schism in the country. The soldiers (together with some of Christophe’s own former subjects) looted the Sans-Souci palace, though its walls and gardens would remain intact until 1842, when an earthquake brought down much of the building. The Citadel stands proudly to this day, watching over the plain. But what else was left behind by Christophe’s regime? His efforts to impress outsiders with the grandeur of his regime bore some fruit, for he gained many admirers abroad. But the institutions he created—not only his royalty, but also his schools and universities—largely disappeared with him. Prince Saunders lamented in a letter to Thomas Clarkson that the schools and academies had been destroyed by the “unprincipled barbarians” who had overthrown Christophe. Wilberforce pleaded with Boyer to maintain the education system, but except for Dr. Stewart’s medical school, the new ruler did not do so.64

Pétion’s regime ultimately proved the more viable: the political order that he established laid the foundation for most of the Haitian governments that followed throughout the nineteenth century. But the differences between Pétion and Christophe are often misunderstood. Their conflict is frequently thought of as being rooted in skin color: the fact that Christophe was black and Pétion lighter-skinned makes it a little too easy to see the clash between them as a battle between “blacks” and “mulattoes,” and because Boyer was also light-skinned, the Republic of Haiti is often considered to be the beginning of a long-standing political and cultural dominance on the part of a “mulatto elite” in Haitian life. But while Pétion’s republic certainly channeled the aspirations of light-skinned elites, the political reality was significantly muddier than the oversimplified racial explanation would have it. Indeed, while they had different skin tones, Pétion and Christophe in fact shared quite similar roots. They both grew up in modest circumstances in midlevel urban professions. Despite his origins as a servant, and perhaps a slave, Christophe had long inhabited a world that was very different from that of most of the slaves toiling on sugar plantations. He had close ties with many free men of color, and quite a few of them became key members of his aristocracy. Overall, in giving privileged positions to free men of color—who were often literate and fluent in French, while the majority of the population spoke only Kreyòl and could not read or write—the regimes of Christophe and Pétion were more alike than different.65

The two regimes also resembled each other to a surprising extent when it came to their vision of the state itself. While Pétion ruled over a nominal republic that had the trappings of a democratic order and Christophe created a monarchy, both systems revolved around a famous general who anchored his power in a handpicked governing coalition. Both regimes were largely politically exclusive, creating and maintaining a relatively small group of leadership elites while doing little to provide for democratic participation by a larger segment of the population. Throughout their lives, both Pétion and Christophe remained convinced that it was the rulers who would civilize the population, not the other way around.66

The biggest difference between Pétion and Christophe—the one with the greatest impact on what was to follow—turned out to have much less to do with racial divisions or political structures than with their divergent attitudes toward government control of land. Because Christophe controlled a richer agricultural area and thus could afford a more powerful state apparatus, he was able to hold fast to the notion that Haiti needed large plantations in order to succeed, and he kept land ownership confined to his favored elites. He was, however, the last ruler in the country to successfully oversee a regime based on that colonial-era agricultural model. Pétion’s poorer and less powerful state had led him to a more liberal system of land distribution, which essentially dismantled the plantation system in the south and west of the country; as one of his contemporaries put it, Pétion “republicanized the soil.” His successors, in turn, quickly found that they had little choice but to continue those policies. The majority of Haitians were less concerned with how foreign governments saw their country than with defending their access to land: the only thing, they knew, that would provide them with real autonomy, dignity, and freedom. Two decades after independence, former slaves and their children—the first generation born in freedom—were steadily laying claim to their own territory within the nation. And they made clear that in their mind, there was no turning back.67