3

STALEMATE

A few years after the death of Henry Christophe, a journalist from the south of Haiti traveled north to explore what was left of the vanished kingdom. Hérard Dumesle was a longtime supporter of Alexandre Pétion; he was firmly convinced that Christophe had been a tyrant and the country was well rid of him. Nonetheless, Dumesle was curious to see the ruins of the monarch’s regime. He was also interested in going to the place where the country had been born. It was in the north, after all, that the first slave uprising had begun in August 1791, there that freedom was won in 1793, there, too, that Dessalines had led his armies to final victory against the French. Dumesle sought out people who had witnessed these events and visited the key historical sites of the revolution, cultivating a kind of communion with the past. Upon returning home he wrote a narrative of his journey, one of the earliest accounts of Haiti’s national history. He was trying to understand what had gone wrong in the decades since independence, and to find inspiration for a new social order that would fulfill the revolution’s promise.1

Dumesle was born in 1784 to a free wealthy family of color in the town of Les Cayes, an important port in the south of the country. He was a voracious reader, and he spent part of the long carriage ride that took him up to the north of Haiti studying the writings of the eighteenth-century French naturalist the Comte de Buffon. It was, in a way, a curious choice for Dumesle, a man of mixed African and European descent: in his essay “Varieties of the Human Species,” Buffon expressed concern about the impact of sexual relations between blacks and whites, and he wrote about racial mixing in the French colonies of the Caribbean with both fascination and disgust. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Buffon had concluded that all humans belong to a single race, but he also believed there was a hierarchy among the members of that race: light-skinned people were of superior intelligence to dark-skinned ones. His work therefore helped to justify legal restrictions placed on free people of color in the colonies, including members of Dumesle’s own family. Dumesle, however, didn’t seem to begrudge Buffon this aspect of his work. Instead, he found inspiration in the French thinker’s descriptions of the constant changes and shifts in the natural world. Just as “flowers and fruits grow in a place once taken over by a pestilential swamp,” Dumesle proclaimed, so, too, empires “succeed and replace one another”; and soon, he effused, Haiti would conquer its own space in the ocean of the world, even as other lands would find themselves flooded and destroyed. Already, Dumesle noted—sounding a lot like Christophe himself—the country presented a powerful refutation of the “ridiculous ideas” of racial difference. “Take a look at the tableau that Haiti offers to the universe, and dare deny our intelligence.”2

While Dumesle was comfortable drawing on the thinking of the French Enlightenment, he also knew well the sufferings inflicted on his country by France’s colonial regime. If he was a follower of Buffon, he was also an heir to the insurgents who had risen up against slavery. So he made a point of visiting what he believed to be the site of the secret ceremony that had launched the 1791 slave rebellion. Dumesle probably knew that a few Frenchmen had already written about this event—including Antoine Dalmas, a Saint-Domingue plantation surgeon who described how conspiring slaves had gathered “in the middle of an uncultivated woods” near one plantation and slaughtered a black pig “as a sacrifice to the all-powerful spirit of the black race.” For Dalmas, the offering of the animal, “surrounded by objects they believe have magical power,” was proof of the barbarism of the enslaved. “The greed with which they drank its blood, the importance they attached to owning some of its bristles, which they believed would make them invincible, reveal the characteristics of the Africans.” Disparagingly, Dalmas had concluded that “it is natural that a caste this ignorant and stupid would begin the most horrible attacks with the superstitious rites of an absurd and bloodthirsty religion.”3

Dumesle, in contrast, celebrated the conspirators and wrote admiringly about the grandeur of their ceremony. In Dumesle’s telling, the slaves sacrificed not a pig but a bull, while calling on God and on the example of Spartacus to help them in their struggle for freedom. The moment was so moving for Dumesle that prose failed him, and he decided to write a poem about the event instead. In an unusual gesture for the time, he also included in the poem some text in Haitian Kreyòl: the words spoken by the man overseeing the sacrifice. Thanks to Dumesle’s account, they have become some of the most famous words in Haitian history:

Bondié qui fait soleil, qui clairé nous en haut,

Qui soulévé la mer, qui fait grondé l’orage,

Bondié la, zot tandé? Caché dans youn nuage,

Et la li gadé nous, li vouai tout ça blancs faits!

Bondié blancs mandé crime, et part nous vlé bienfets

mais dié là qui si bon, ordonnin nous vengeance;

Li va conduit bras nous, la ba nous assistance,

Jetté portrait dié blancs qui soif dlo dans gié nous,

Couté la liberté li pale coeurs nous tous.

This God who made the sun, who brings us light from above,

Who raises the sea, and who makes the storm rumble,

That God is there, do you understand? Hiding in a cloud,

He watches us, he sees all that the whites do!

The God of the whites pushes them to crime, but ours wants good deeds.

That God who is so good orders us to vengeance.

He will direct our hands, give us help.

Throw away the image of the God of the whites who thirsts for our tears,

Listen to the liberty that speaks in all our hearts.4

Dumesle provided no name for the man who spoke the powerful words he printed, but subsequent historians have attributed the speech to Boukman, the most important early leader of the slave insurrection. Boukman left no written records, but he is now remembered for this rousing call to revolution, a sanctification of the uprising as holy duty, and revered as a kind of founding ancestor for Vodou itself.*

There is a certain irony in the fact that Boukman owes his legend to the writings of Hérard Dumesle, a man from a radically different background. A well-educated, light-skinned descendant of landowning free people of color, Dumesle was part of a group often depicted in harsh terms by those who write about Haitian history—a group long seen as a Francophile neocolonial oligarchy whose members used their privileged status as descendants of whites to establish themselves as independent Haiti’s new elite. But while there is, no doubt, a certain truth to this portrait, the situation was always more complicated. Dumesle, like many other Haitian intellectuals before and since, realized that it was also, in a sense, Boukman who had created him. Though Dumesle celebrated the accomplishments of Alexandre Pétion and other light-skinned elites, he emphasized the uprising of the enslaved as the core of Haiti’s historical experience. He understood that Haiti was at a historical crossroads after the fall of Christophe, and that the various political aspirations that had divided the country in its first decades had to be reconciled somehow. Over the course of the next decades, Dumesle would come to believe that Haiti’s institutions had failed to deliver on the democratic promises of its founding revolution, and that the only way forward involved overthrowing the country’s established political order. The young political activists whom he inspired, many of them born after Haiti’s independence, would be the first Haitian generation to battle their elders for control of the direction of the state—though far from the last.

*   *   *

From 1818 to 1843—a remarkable twenty-seven years—Haiti was governed by president Jean-Pierre Boyer. Indeed, for much of that time, Boyer ruled over not just Haiti, but the entire island of Hispaniola. In November 1821, insurgents in Spanish Santo Domingo had risen up, seeking separation from Spain. They were inspired by the battles for independence in mainland Latin America and by the example of their island neighbor: some of them called the new nation “Spanish Haiti.” As they fought against Spain, the insurgents lobbied Boyer for help. His response, driven in part by fear that an independent Santo Domingo might become a launching pad for new attempts by the French to reconquer Haiti, was to occupy the Spanish side of the island and proclaim it part of his dominion.6

The early years of Boyer’s rule brought remarkable political stability to Haiti, which drew a stream of migrants to the country. In an echo of Christophe’s plans, the Haitian government subsidized the travel of six thousand African Americans in the mid-1820s. By some accounts, the total number of immigrants during this period was as high as thirteen thousand. Part of a broader, and highly controversial, movement among African Americans that saw emigration from the United States as the best hope for true freedom and equality, these settlers were given tracts of land in different parts of Haiti as well as in occupied Santo Domingo. Perhaps a third of the arrivals, disappointed by what they found, quickly returned home, but most of them seem to have stayed and became citizens. They found work as farmers and artisans, and soon blended into the general population.7

As these migrants would learn, however, Boyer’s regime—while welcoming—also had a marked authoritarian side. Indeed, Boyer’s very stable rule was predicated on tight control over political life in Haiti. The 1816 constitution under which he took power made him president for life and gave him wide-ranging powers. The legislative structure, originally developed by Pétion, was carefully designed to provide a little democracy but not too much. Haitians were given the opportunity to elect their representatives for the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the bicameral legislature; but the role of these representatives was severely limited. The Chamber of Deputies was subservient to the Senate, and the senators were chosen exclusively from candidates nominated directly by the president. The senators did have some power, and could contest the president’s decisions; but since their appointment was dependent on presidential approval, the highest political reaches were inaccessible to those who were not part of the president’s network. In a sense, while the setup superficially resembled those of the United States and other nineteenth-century democracies, it ultimately confirmed the military-style political structures established under the regimes of Dessalines, Christophe, and Pétion: nearly all the political power was concentrated in one man’s hands, without any meaningful opportunity for democratic opposition or protest.8

The French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher, who visited Haiti during the later years of Boyer’s regime, claimed that literally every decision, whether major or minor, seemed to be made directly by the president. Boyer, he wrote, was a “veritable dictator,” more an “autocrat of all of Haiti’s provinces” than a president. “He is infallible; he is the Republic, and even Louis XIV couldn’t say with more exactitude: ‘The state is me.’” Boyer was in charge of appointing people to every position: even professionals such as lawyers and notaries were considered to be “public servants” and therefore depended on his approval to practice. Schoelcher particularly lambasted Boyer for his cynicism as a ruler. The problem was not, he insisted, that Boyer was unable to do better, nor—as so many proslavery thinkers argued at the time—that Haiti’s population simply didn’t have the capacity for economic development and self-government. Rather, Schoelcher wrote, the president and his supporters were clearly committed to “corrupting” Haiti’s political order, and to keeping the population trapped in poverty and ignorance, because that was how they could most easily stay in power.9

Schoelcher pointed out that, in sharp contrast to Christophe, Boyer did almost nothing to encourage education in the country. His government funded only ten schools, each with about one hundred students and one teacher, for a population of at least 700,000. Boyer was, the abolitionist declared harshly, as little interested in providing education for his nation as the slave owners had been in educating their slaves. Indeed, his attitude went beyond simple indifference: when a landowner near Port-au-Prince had opened up a privately funded school for local students, he was pressured into closing it down. Boyer, it was said, had once declared that “to sow education is to sow revolution.” Although the story is perhaps apocryphal, Schoelcher concluded that the president’s policy was indeed quite calculated—and tragic. Having freed themselves from slavery, Schoelcher wrote, the “glorious” people of Haiti had given to their executive the task of bringing the country toward “civilization,” but they had been “betrayed” by their leader. “The people did everything a people could do. Shame on those in power, not on the people.” In Schoelcher’s view, asking a population deprived of schooling to make progress was like asking a man whose arms had been cut off to work in the fields.10

Education was not the only potential source of “revolution” that Boyer worried about. Like his predecessors, he exercised state control largely through the military, with local officers appointed as governors of rural districts; but living long enough in a particular region often led these officers to develop divided loyalties. After years or even decades of dispensing counsel and moderating disputes over land, water, and other resources, they frequently became more deeply attached to the areas they administered than to the central government in Port-au-Prince. When conflicts arose within the country, they often ended up representing the interests of their districts instead of following presidential commands. As Boyer and many leaders who followed him found out, in times of political crisis, the very generals who were the foundation of their power could easily become leaders of insurrections. Depending heavily on the military as a tool for governance was, it turned out, a double-edged sword.

What was true for officers held for their men as well. In principle, soldiers were under the strict control of the central government; in practice, however, starting with Pétion’s regime, military service had become essentially a kind of militia service, which most men carried out while living and working at home. Soldiers were paid pitiable salaries, from which they were required to provide their own shoes, sabers, and epaulettes. They were not fed or housed by the state. Their duty was to show up for exercises once a week, on Sunday, while military bands played martial tunes—among them, decades after independence, the “Marseillaise,” France’s revolutionary anthem. The rest of the time the soldiers lived with their families and worked for themselves. Though they were sometimes mobilized for guard duty in the capital or for national wars, such as Boyer’s invasion of Spanish Santo Domingo, the army was increasingly decentralized and thus no longer a fully reliable guarantor of presidential power.

Knowing the tenuousness of his hold on power, Boyer repressed all forms of political opposition. Hérard Dumesle was one of many who, in the 1820s and 1830s, would discover that there was a cost to speaking out against the president. Boyer was not the first Haitian ruler to crush dissent, but because his rule lasted so long, it had a profound impact on Haiti’s political history, establishing an autocratic approach to the presidency as the country’s norm. Anténor Firmin, a prominent Haitian intellectual of the late nineteenth century, would look back and see in Boyer the “true creator of the militaristic regime whose wounds, un-healable, still poison our national organism.”11

The cost of the political structure established by Pétion and perfected by Boyer—the combination of nominally liberal institutions with thoroughly autocratic governance—was made startlingly clear in 1825, when Boyer finally gained Haiti’s diplomatic recognition by France. Though the deal he made ended his country’s political isolation, the president in fact offered Haiti a defeat disguised as a victory.

*   *   *

By the mid-1820s, the exiled planters of Saint-Domingue understood that France was never going to reconquer Haiti and they were never going to be able to go back. They did not, however, give up on demanding compensation for what they had lost. Since the French government had offered restitution to individuals who were forced into exile and dispossessed of their properties during the French Revolution, they argued, why shouldn’t the former plantation owners of Saint-Domingue receive the same benefit?

In 1825, Charles X, the king of France, decided it was time to resolve the Haitian situation once and for all. He planned to follow essentially the same approach as that suggested by Pétion in 1814: Haiti would pay an indemnity to compensate the exiled planters, and in return France would recognize Haiti’s independence. But exactly how to carry out this plan was not clear. After all, if France admitted that Haiti was an independent nation, then it would have no right to impose financial demands on it. On the other hand, if France was merely addressing a wayward colony—as the French government had maintained for the past twenty years—then they could not present to Haiti a treaty laying out the conditions of the agreement, since treaties could be negotiated only between independent states.

In the end, Charles X cut through this Gordian knot by issuing the demand for an indemnity as a royal ordinance: a diplomatic instrument which, in the words of one historian, was “as extraordinary in its form as in its content.” Royal ordinances were traditionally used only to address internal matters within a kingdom, so the agreement—although it has often been described as a “treaty” between Haiti and France—really wasn’t one. Rather, it was an order given by the French king to Boyer’s government, which that government accepted. (The constitutionality of this arrangement was in fact challenged several times in both countries in subsequent decades, but to no avail.)12

The royal ordinance didn’t use the term “Haiti,” referring instead to “the French part of Saint-Domingue.” This made some legalistic sense: while the state of Haiti under Boyer controlled the entire island, including Spanish Santo Domingo, France could not legally intervene in the status of the Spanish territory. But the terminology also reflected the sustained reluctance on the part of the French government to accept historical facts. More than two decades after the debacle of the Leclerc mission and Dessalines’s declaration of independence, the French government still had difficulty uttering the name “Haiti.”

In its content, Charles X’s royal ordinance was deceptively simple. To address the “interests of French commerce,” the “miseries of the former colonists of Saint-Domingue,” and the “precarious state of the current inhabitants of the island,” it laid out three articles. The first declared that the ports of the “French part of Saint-Domingue” would henceforth be “open to the commerce of all nations,” with “equal and uniform” tariffs on trade—except that tariffs on French goods would be only half the standard rate. The second article declared that Haitians would deposit in the French treasury 150 million francs “to compensate the former colonists who request an indemnity,” payable in five equal installments starting in December 1825. The amount was supposed to represent the value of the property held by French planters that was lost as a result of the Haitian Revolution, though the method of calculation was in fact rather vague. Finally, the third article offered something in return: “According to these conditions, we concede with this ordinance to the current inhabitants of the French part of the island of Saint-Domingue the full and complete independence of their government.”13

Once the ordinance was written, Charles X sent Ange René Armand, the Baron de Mackau, to Haiti with orders to get Boyer’s government to accept the conditions of the royal decree. According to Mackau’s instructions (labeled “very secret”), the terms of the ordinance were “the only ones which his majesty deigns accept in granting independence to the government of Saint-Domingue.” If the Haitian government balked at paying the 150-million-franc indemnity, Mackau was to reassure them that they could “easily take out a loan in France under acceptable conditions”; indeed, he was to “insist” that they not look anywhere else for such a loan. And if that offer still didn’t persuade the Haitians to be “grateful” and sign the agreement, Mackau was to threaten them with the “interruption of all maritime commerce.” A squadron of French warships would be waiting off the shores of Haiti, ready to carry out a blockade; and that blockade would end only “after the island has submitted itself, without any conditions, to the supremacy of France.” In short, there was to be no compromise: either the Haitian government accepted the ordinance as written or it went to war with France.14

In command of the French warships that accompanied Mackau was the Admiral Jurien de la Gravière. He was a striking choice: his personal history was a microcosm of all the reasons Haitians had to resist the French. Gravière had first visited Saint-Domingue in 1789 as a sailor on a slave-trading vessel arriving from Africa with a cargo of captives. Later, in 1803, he had captained a ship with a grisly mission: to fetch from Cuba 150 dogs specially trained to attack blacks, so that they could be used against insurgents in Saint-Domingue. Now, in 1825, he was in command of a naval squadron ready to sever the island nation from the outside world.15

On July 3, 1825, three French ships arrived off the coast of Haiti. Two of them anchored far enough away to be out of the range of the country’s coastal batteries, while Mackau entered the harbor of Port-au-Prince on the third. He presented Charles X’s ordinance to President Boyer, who set up a commission to examine it and respond to the French. The members of the commission, shocked by what they read, rejected the document immediately and categorically. As he had been ordered to do, Mackau responded that the French squadron was prepared to blockade the island. The Haitian commission replied pugnaciously that Mackau had better go move the ship he’d arrived in: the Haitian guns were ready.16

Before leaving, however, Mackau set up a personal meeting with Boyer in a last-ditch effort to salvage the negotiations. The Haitian president was much more conciliatory than his commission, though he complained that the indemnity was too large. Mackau reassured him: the amount could be renegotiated in the future, he promised, based on the friendly relationship between the two countries. And if Haiti couldn’t pay immediately then French banks would be happy to offer a loan. After a brief conversation, Boyer decided to accept the deal. The essential point, he considered, was that after twenty years of political isolation and constant worry about another French invasion, his country finally had the opportunity for recognition and peace.17

Boyer never publicly shared the details of his negotiations with Mackau, or indeed even the terms of the deal he had made. The Haitian Senate registered approval of the agreement after hearing it read publicly to them; then the document was locked away in a velvet case. When the French squadron—fourteen ships in all—sailed into the harbor of Port-au-Prince, Boyer did not mention that it had been poised to blockade the island, but simply announced that he had secured French recognition of Haitian independence. The French ships, he declared, had come “to salute this land of liberty” and in so doing had “consecrated the legitimacy of your emancipation.” There were several days of festivities in Port-au-Prince, punctuated by toasts and songs celebrating the dawn of a new era of cooperation between the two countries. It was only several months later, when newspapers describing the agreement arrived from France, that Haitians found out that—without consulting the citizens of his country—Boyer had contracted a massive debt, one they would have to pay for generations.18

Many citizens were furious at Boyer for giving away Haiti’s meager wealth to their former colonizer, and several officers even sought to organize an uprising to force the government to reverse Boyer’s decision. There were other forms of scattered protest as well: in Port-au-Prince, a few angry residents harassed French citizens, while the following year a group of Haitians tried to prevent one of the first payments from being loaded onto a French ship. Over time, Boyer would come to realize that many considered what he had done a crime, one for which he could never be forgiven. But by then it was too late.19

To be fair, Boyer was confident that Haiti would be able to pay the indemnity. The country was agriculturally very productive, exporting coffee and dyewood along with other goods, and the government collected taxes from all the exports. He also hoped that French merchants, absent in the colony since 1804, would return after the agreement was signed, and commerce would boom. Boyer even imagined that with a little discipline and control the population could be made to go back to cultivating sugar, further boosting exports and filling state coffers. Those sugar dreams never came to pass, though, and while the opening up of trade did create some new opportunities for Haitians, the economic advantages did not counterbalance the cost of the indemnity.20

In November 1825, Boyer took out a huge loan from a French bank in order to pay the first installment of the indemnity. The terms of the loan were highly disadvantageous: the Haitian government was obligated to repay 30 million francs over 25 years at an annual interest rate of 6 percent, but the bank charged an additional 20 percent fee just to provide the money to Haiti, so in fact only 24 million francs went toward the indemnity. This arrangement helped create what Haitians came to refer to as the “double debt” of independence, with the original amount of the indemnity significantly increased over the long term by loan fees and interest. Though Boyer eventually brokered a deal that decreased the indemnity itself from 150 million to 60 million francs, the 1825 loan turned out to be only the first of many, and the repayments represented a constant drain on the Haitian treasury. With the indemnity, Haiti suddenly became a debtor nation, an unlucky pioneer of the woes of postcolonial economic dependence.21

From the French perspective, the deal between Boyer and Charles X marked the beginning of a bright new era for France in its former colony. The Haitian population “speak our language, and share our habits,” one French writer enthused. He even asserted that the only memories Haitians had were French, since their links with Africa had been entirely “broken.” Building on these connections, France would elevate Haiti by bringing its arts and sciences there, exchanging “all the treasures of the human spirit” for the “products of that fertile land.” By recognizing Haitian independence, the writer exulted, France had gained for itself a much better form of control over the country than they could have achieved through war. In a way, he was right. The extent of French economic dominance in Haiti throughout the nineteenth century is starkly illustrated by the fact that when the National Bank of Haiti was founded in 1888, it was fully owned and controlled by a French bank.22

The indemnity was certainly not the only reason why the coffers of the Haitian state were empty throughout the nineteenth century. Money raised by taxing exports was wasted on a bloated army that served mainly to buttress the presidential regime; it was drained away by corruption and consumed by internal conflicts. Yet there is no doubt that the payment of the indemnity, and of interest on the loans that it required, profoundly sapped the public treasury. Year after year, Haiti’s population watched as money that could have been used to build roads, ports, schools, and hospitals simply vanished. In 1838, according to Victor Schoelcher, about 30 percent of Haiti’s total annual budget was spent servicing the national debt, and almost 50 percent went to the military. By contrast, less than one percent was spent on education. “Everything you need to know about Haiti’s government is summarized in that,” Schoelcher lamented.23

Would a different kind of leader have acted differently in the face of France’s demands? Christophe, of course, had steadfastly refused to even hear of an indemnity. Pétion, who had originated the idea, ended up, under pressure, taking a similarly firm stance against the French. Boyer had much in common with his predecessor: like Pétion, he was born a free man of color in colonial Saint-Domingue, fought against Louverture and Dessalines as part of Rigaud’s breakaway government during the Haitian Revolution, was exiled to France, and came back to Haiti as a member of the Leclerc expedition. Like Pétion, he was a landowner himself, and on that basis perhaps sympathized with the plight of the white planters of Saint-Domingue who had lost their properties. Without the counterbalancing presence of someone like Christophe, Boyer in a way represented just what French officials and writers had for years hoped to find in Haiti: a pliant and cooperative elite, ready to work with France to create a new form of external control. Perhaps he had no real choice, facing the squadron of French ships and the threat of a blockade. Yet it is hard not to wonder whether it might have been better to fight than pay, especially in view of Haiti’s previous military successes against France.

More generally, Boyer’s choice shows how costly it was to the Haitian people to live in a political order organized around near-absolute presidential power and lacking in broader structures of accountability. If others had been present at the meeting between Boyer and Mackau, and if the Haitian head of state had felt that it was impossible for him to make such a consequential deal without any consultation, things might have turned out differently. Instead, he made the decision essentially by himself, confident that he knew what was best for the nation. Boyer could not accept, it seems, that all around him Haitians were busily creating a very different social order—a true alternative both to the slavery they had experienced and to the new forms of foreign dominance that their president was ready to allow.

*   *   *

For decades—as Dessalines defended Haiti, as Christophe and Pétion fought each other, as Boyer consolidated power and negotiated with France—ordinary men and women had been building their own local communities. Drawing on traditions of farming that they had brought from Africa and developed in their plantation gardens, they took the plantations and created something new. Thanks to a remarkably strong and widely shared set of cultural forms—the Kreyòl language, the Vodou religion, and innovative ways of managing land ownership and extended families—they built a society able to resist all forms of subjection that recalled the days of slavery. More than the military leaders who claimed to represent the Haitian Revolution, these new settlers were the ones who truly pursued the core goals of that uprising.

By the 1820s, the establishment of the “counter-plantation” model was essentially unstoppable. Thanks to Pétion’s distribution of land to his troops, some Haitians now had legal access to small farm plots; others simply squatted on privately-owned or state-owned land. Landowners soon found that they had little choice but to negotiate with rural residents. Many simply sold off their land piece by piece, while others became absentee landlords, living in towns and leasing small parcels of their land to farmers in exchange for half the crop produced. This métayage system, originally developed in Pétion’s republic, quickly became an established method of agricultural production throughout the country.24

After Boyer agreed to the indemnity, he tried to reverse this process, considering it particularly urgent to rebuild the plantation system and increase tax revenues. In 1826 he inaugurated a new Code Rural meant to reestablish state control over agricultural production. The new legislation placed rural residents under a set of specific laws that gave landowners extensive powers over their laborers. Declaring, as earlier rulers had, that agriculture was the “principal source of prosperity for the state,” Boyer decreed that any rural resident who was not employed by the government or working in another profession “must cultivate the land.” He outlawed agricultural cooperatives, used by farmers to jointly buy needed supplies and agree on prices for their products, and forbade rural laborers to set up their own farm stands to sell what they produced. The code also limited the movement of rural residents, denying them the right to travel to towns or cities without authorization from a local official, and created a rural police to enforce these regulations. In addition, Boyer’s new laws provided for so-called corvée labor, which allowed officials and the police to temporarily force rural residents to work on road repair projects without pay. One British visitor noted that corvée laborers were spared the whip by their overseers, but that the “bayonet or sabre is used in its stead (to prick them).”25

In effect, Boyer had created two classes of citizens in Haiti: urban residents, who were governed by the national laws, and rural dwellers, who were subject to a different, highly restrictive set of rules. And yet, while the Code Rural encouraged and enabled mistreatment and exploitation of rural residents by local officials and landowners, it was ultimately unenforceable. Over generations, Haitians had practiced and refined their resistance to various forms of coerced labor, and by Boyer’s time many of them had gained an essential weapon in that battle: their own plots of land. Once they had a place to plant their own crops to feed themselves and their families, they could refuse or avoid forms of wage labor they considered too harsh or poorly paid. In response to Boyer’s attempts to control and constrain them, rural residents perfected techniques of evading government officials, living as much as possible beyond the gaze of the state.26

The laborers’ resistance made it impossible for Boyer to carry out his grand plans of reviving sugar production. As it turned out, he was not able to realize his goals even on his own two-thousand-acre plantation: after years of effort, only 2 percent of his land was successfully planted with cane. Meanwhile, Beaubrun Ardouin, one of Haiti’s founding historians and a senator under Boyer’s regime, found it similarly impossible to keep laborers on his coffee plantation. Those he tried to get to work for him had established “new properties for themselves and their families.” On land that they owned or leased, rural residents could grow coffee for themselves just as easily, and make much more in the process. “Could I have stopped them?” Ardouin wondered. An English visitor to Ardouin’s plantation noted that many laborers had essentially taken over the land that Ardouin considered to be his—going so far as to “appropriate to themselves almost the whole of the provisions which the land furnishes, sending on down a few of the rarer vegetables, beans, peas, and artichokes to their master.” Throughout the country, landowners largely ceded control of cultivation to their tenant farmers. Increasingly, they had only very tenuous power over the land they held title to. Though the landowners could legally have tried using force against the laborers who resisted them, most of them realized that in practice, any deployment of police or soldiers against the local population would result in at best only a temporary victory.27

Over time, many Haitian leaders—following the example of Pétion—simply accepted the push for mass land ownership. In 1862, President Geffrard would sign a law allowing for the sale of government-owned land in small parcels, and in 1883, President Salomon, hoping to promote exports, carried out a policy of distributing small plots of land to anyone who committed to cultivating coffee, cotton, tobacco, or indigo there. Over the course of the nineteenth century, then, the number of Haitians owning land—usually no more than a few acres—increased dramatically. Although some individuals and families certainly continued to hold on to large plantations, the overall level of distribution and fragmentation of land ownership in Haiti was remarkable, surpassing that of any other society in the Americas.28

The population did not just take control of the land. They also developed a set of social and cultural practices intended to secure this land ownership over time and to guarantee every rural resident a measure of autonomy. The most visible and widely shared of these practices, and one that has left a distinctive mark on the social geography of Haiti, was the system of the lakou. In its most basic sense, a lakou (from the French la cour, or courtyard) refers to a group of houses—sometimes including a dozen or more structures, and usually owned by an extended family—gathered around a common yard. But the lakou also came to represent specific social conventions meant to guarantee each person equal access to dignity and individual freedom. The lakou system has had a profound impact on life throughout Haiti, which has long been—and indeed remains—a largely rural country. In the mid-twentieth century, 85 percent of the population still lived in rural areas, and while that number has steadily declined in recent decades, to this day the majority of the population resides outside the cities. What’s more, many of those who live in urban areas were born in the countryside, and they have imported elements of the lakou setup to the cities as well.29

The lakou system developed largely in the absence of—indeed, in opposition to—the Haitian government. Unable to transform the national political system, rural residents found another solution: they created, as one scholar puts it, “an egalitarian system without a state.” Profoundly innovative, this system was predicated on the “auto-regulation” of local communities. These communities took on many of the tasks of social organization that might otherwise have been supervised or legislated by the authorities, such as the regulation of inheritance, land ownership, and family relationships. In a sense, the lakou system was analogous to the Citadel built by Christophe—except that while his edifice was designed to withstand a siege from external attackers, the lakou enabled communities to repel a threat that came from within Haiti, from the state itself as it attempted to reconstruct the plantation order.30

The egalitarianism of the lakou system was rooted in the land ownership arrangements. Each individual or nuclear family owned their own land, through which they provided for basic necessities by growing food and raising livestock for their own consumption and for sale in local markets. They also grew export crops, such as coffee, in order to buy imported consumer goods such as clothes and tools. While the lakou involved some forms of communal assistance and exchange—relatives and neighbors might join together to help out with large harvests or the building of a house, for example—the system was generally constructed around close-knit family networks and emphasized self-reliance through working the soil. From the moment a child was born, it would literally become a property owner: the infant’s umbilical cord was buried in the yard, and a fruit tree planted upon it. The fruit of that tree would then be used to buy clothes and other necessities for the child as it grew up, and the income thus generated could eventually provide the foundation for investment in livestock or even land. In principle, at least, the lakou thus divided power in a way that allowed rural residents to live and work as they wished, while preventing the consolidation of wealth, and therefore control, in the hands of any person within the community. In practice, of course, there were some disparities in wealth: certain peasants, for instance, were established on more productive plots or had better connections for selling their products, and were thus able to expand their holdings and consolidate their economic power. Even the wealthier rural residents, however, remained rooted in the codes of the communities where they lived.31

The antithesis of lakou-based autonomy was salaried work, which represented a surrender to the demands of another individual. Indeed, one scholar argues that whereas workers in many societies over the last two hundred years have accepted salaried work but sought to curb its excesses through government control or union organizing, the preferred strategy in Haiti has been to “refuse the entire system.” The rural population, writes Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, was not willing to trade its liberty for money. “When it had to choose between a higher income and direct control of the labor process, it chose control.”32

In order to preserve that control, the lakou system established its own set of customs to regulate land ownership and land transfers. The state had no part in these transactions, which were overseen entirely by community and family institutions. When several people in an extended family owned adjacent plots of land, for example, the formal title to the entire set of fields would usually be held by just one family member, who served as the interface between his lakou and the official world beyond. Meanwhile, the actual division of the land would be done within the family, leaving few if any written traces. As far as the lakou was concerned, the individual ownership was no less real for its lack of state recognition. When it came to their own fields, the family members could do whatever they wished, with just one signal exception: they could not sell the land to anyone outside the lakou.33

That, of course, might seem like a serious restriction. But most rural residents would not have wanted to sell their fields anyway, out of deep-rooted fear that the loss of one plot could open the door to the acquisition of larger pieces of property by outsiders who, by gaining control over land, would gain control over the community and its labor. Land transfers could take place within an extended family, of course, according to processes governed by consensus; but ceding land to an outsider was largely taboo. In essence, the limits on the sale of land were driven by the idea that it was always possible, if the community were not extremely careful, for the plantation to return. And indeed, over generations, these cultural restrictions on selling land have effectively protected Haiti’s rural communities from encroachment by outside interests, whether from within the country or from abroad.34

Like any social system, the lakou had to keep the peace among its members. That was often a serious challenge, for in a situation of relative poverty and intense individualism, conflicts over property could easily turn violent. As a result, in many communities great care was given to the placement of boundaries—often “living fences” made out of cactus, for instance—to prevent livestock from causing damage to neighboring yards. The means of access to and from properties also required careful discussion, with many communities settling on a network of small paths with few large common roads: the roads might have been useful in some ways, but they would have taken land away from planting and opened up a danger of access from the outside. The location of spots for defecation, too, was a contentious question, regulated by a set of customs whose transgression could be a serious issue. Thus, while the rural residents preserved a sense of individual autonomy, they did so in a world governed by codes and coordinated by lakou leaders, usually the family patriarchs. Everyone was subject to a kind of reciprocal control from family and neighbors that maintained the delicate balance required for an egalitarian existence.35

Highly charged issues were softened by intensive habits of hospitality, with food shared either through communal dining or through the custom of sending part of whatever one family cooked to their neighbors in the lakou. Religious life, too, served to hold this world together. Each lakou included a set of family tombs, allowing residents of the countryside to do something that had been difficult if not impossible under slavery itself: to keep and maintain a cemetery, paying respects to the dead and through them honoring more distant ancestors in Africa. Such service to ancestors is an important part of Vodou practice, in which departed family members are seen as being connected to the broader pantheon of lwa (gods). The presence of the tombs served as a constant reminder of the origins of the family and the lakou, thereby emphasizing each family member’s responsibility to maintain the community and the land that it was built upon. Naturally, some found this world constraining, even claustrophobic, and fled their communities—often going to the cities in search of education and new opportunities. Still, until the twentieth century, the Haitian countryside seems largely to have sustained and satisfied the population that lived there.36

Of course, though they were focused on individual autonomy, the lakou were never isolated from one another, or from the broader economic system of Haiti. Rather, they were the building blocks of a complex agricultural system tied together by a network of thriving and bustling markets. The Haitian geographer and novelist Georges Anglade, who mapped this network of markets in a 1982 atlas, described them as not just places for commercial exchange but a “fundamental aspect of rural life.” Each market sustained the region around it, providing a site for the exchange of news as well as for the organization of social events, political action, and secret societies that governed life in much of the countryside. The markets helped “an infinite number of small intermediaries” to “share the crumbs” of rural production: “merchants, resellers, brokers, porters, artisans who all work to get a few cents.” The work of buying and selling in the market was “scattered,” Anglade writes, precisely in order to “provide resources to the greatest number of people, notably peasants without land,” who hired themselves out to work for other peasants in their gardens. Outsiders often saw (and still see) Haitian markets as chaotic and incomprehensible, but their form in fact reflects their evolution over time to serve specific purposes, channeling commerce in particular ways for the communal good. Since the markets were one of the main places where rural residents encountered government officials, their fragmentation had another benefit as well, making it all the more difficult for the state to track, control, and tax the trading that went on there. In this way, the markets also allowed the rural population to resist those who sought to control them from outside.37

The form of agricultural and social organization developed in the Haitian countryside in the nineteenth century was highly productive, even if it didn’t supply Boyer with the tax revenues he had been counting on. While the lakou system never generated the massive profits that planters and French merchants had gained from the slave economy, it provided the former slavers and their descendants with a relatively comfortable and sustainable life. Indeed, Haiti at this time was a magnet for immigrants. In addition to African Americans drawn by Boyer’s travel subsidy, men and women from Germany, Corsica, Syria, and other countries came to Haiti in significant numbers during the second half of the nineteenth century. Migrants also arrived from other parts of the Caribbean. Hundreds came from Guadeloupe and Martinique after slavery was abolished there in 1848—considering that, even though they were now legally free, they would find a truer independence in Haiti. Thanks to a broadly shared Kreyòl language, they were able to integrate themselves into the society relatively quickly, joining in the creation of Haiti’s remarkable culture.38

*   *   *

“The first step one takes into Haiti is a little frightening, especially for an abolitionist,” the French antislavery activist Victor Schoelcher wrote in his account of the journey he took to Haiti in 1841. “I desired, I feared, I hoped.” He had read ardently about Haiti’s struggle for freedom, and he admired Toussaint Louverture and other heroes of the fight for emancipation. He wanted contemporary Haiti to provide further proof to the world that slavery was unnecessary and that the Caribbean could thrive without it. But he worried that he would find instead that the proslavery voices were right, and that he would encounter only “disorder and barbarism” in the former colony.39

As it turned out, Schoelcher had kind things to say about many of the Haitians who welcomed him during his travels. Ultimately, however, he found himself disappointed. He was shocked by the scrappy look and habits of Haitian soldiers, and claimed that the material conditions of free Haitians were little better than those of the slaves in other parts of the Caribbean. Schoelcher tried to take the sting out of his remarks by arguing that the situation was a result of bad leadership—Boyer’s unwillingness to fund education, for example—rather than of any inherent incapacity on the part of the Haitian people. But in a curious way, his descriptions of Haiti at times dovetailed with those peddled by the proslavery advocates of the day, who gleefully circulated images of Haitian peasants descending into a mire of laziness and poverty when deprived of the benefits of white tutelage and mastery.

Schoelcher wrote that areas that had once been covered with thriving sugar plantations had become sites of “misery and sterility,” with residents growing nothing more than food for themselves and a bit of cane to make alcohol. The lakou—scattered houses connected by narrow paths—looked to him like slave huts. He lamented that the women went around bare-breasted and the children naked, that whole families were sleeping together in one room and surviving on meager rations of bananas. Schoelcher was upset to find that Haitians had not developed the desire for consumption that “gives birth to industry and forces us to work” while also “refining” a people’s sensibilities. Theirs was a “negative happiness,” he wrote: “they live from day to day and, thanks to their liberty, they are happy and content despite their poverty.” Desiring little beyond one’s basic needs might be a fine “natural philosophy,” he claimed, but it precluded mental progress.40

Haitian peasants, Schoelcher concluded, were ultimately being condemned to an “animalistic” existence. What was worse, by allowing this to happen, the country’s leaders were doing harm not only to themselves but to the entire abolitionist cause. “The crime of Haitian barbarism is not only mortal for your Republic,” he expostulated, “but can be called a universal crime.” By giving comfort to all those who defended slavery, it helped to keep millions of men and women in chains. “Have you not thought about what you are doing? Have you not considered the responsibility that weighs on you? Are you not afraid that one day the voices of four million of your brothers will be raised against you in the universe’s tribunal, accusing you of having slowed down their emancipation?” From the trees of liberty planted throughout Haiti, Schoelcher wrote, had come nothing but “bitter and disappointing fruit.”41

It was a strange accusation: certainly the responsibility for holding millions of people in bondage lay with slave owners and their governments, not Haitian farmers. And it shows how even a leading abolitionist like Schoelcher could remain essentially blind to the antislavery revolution that was still under way in Haiti. The rural culture he condemned was driven by a historically constituted set of aspirations and a determined search for autonomy. To him, however, it looked like a retreat into primitivism, a criminal step backwards. Such charges against the country’s rural population were in fact startlingly common during that time. Propagated by defenders of slavery and abolitionists alike, portrayals of Haiti’s rural culture as atavistic, isolationist, and unsustainable took root in the nineteenth century, and they have never gone away. As Louis-Joseph Janvier noted furiously in 1882: “There are tons of idiots who have never used their ten fingers for anything, and who wander around constantly repeating, inanely: ‘Haitians are very lazy.’” Such views were common among foreigners, and they have been shared by many elites in Haiti as well. In 1842, an article in the Patriote newspaper declared that “polygamy and laziness” were the “two major vices that afflict our population.” Since the early nineteenth century, Haiti’s peasants have repeatedly been accused of refusing progress and rejecting the benefits of consumption, depicted by their own rulers as subjects in desperate need of reform who were holding the country back.42

*   *   *

If they were so vilified, of course, it was partly because they had been so successful. Through their social and cultural institutions, the rural population of Haiti managed to steadfastly refuse plantation labor and construct something else in its place. The ruling class—largely composed of men who had already owned significant amounts of land in 1804, either because they had been among the wealthier free people of color in Saint-Domingue or because their military rank had enabled them to acquire land during the revolution—found itself stymied when it tried to reproduce the colonial economy. Within a few decades of Haiti’s independence, many of its leaders had realized that they couldn’t rebuild the plantations or stop the country’s majority from pushing for land and autonomy. What they could do, however, was channel and contain that push, surround and stifle it. Unable to control the bodies or the work of the rural residents, Haitian elites instead focused on controlling the nation’s points of access to external markets: the port towns.

As Michel-Rolph Trouillot put it, nineteenth-century Haiti became “a republic for the merchants.” By funding its activities almost entirely through the taxation of exports and imports, the government “persistently siphoned off the meager resources of the peasantry, so that this peasantry came to finance the state while having no control over it.” This arrangement created an enduring tension within Haitian society. The elites were able to retain their positions of wealth and power, but only by abandoning the drive for equality and liberty that had inspired Haiti’s revolution in the first place. The rural inhabitants, meanwhile, carved out their own way of life in the countryside, but came to regard the state as a largely predatory force, at its best when it was absent altogether. With neither side able to prevail and gain control of the entire country, the situation settled down into a grinding stalemate.43

The government’s emphasis on the taxation of foreign trade had evolved gradually in the first decades of Haiti’s independence. During the Haitian Revolution, the state had taxed agricultural production in a simple way: a quarter of what was grown on each plantation was literally handed over, in kind, to local authorities, who then sold it themselves on behalf of the state. Since plantation labor and production were closely controlled, and many estates were run by military officers, this form of taxation was a fairly efficient and reliable means of collecting revenue. (Christophe used a similar system of taxes to support his plantation-based regime.) Such an approach, however, was much less well suited to the increasingly dispersed and scattered agricultural production of the early nineteenth century. Accordingly, when he became president in 1807, Pétion focused on levying duties on imports and exports, and by the time of Boyer’s regime, the Haitian government had come to depend exclusively on this form of taxation to raise money for the state. The import-export duties were collected not in the fragmented countryside but in the well-controlled port towns, where the coffee produced in the interior was sold to foreign merchants and exchanged for goods arriving from overseas. Indirectly, of course, the costs were still borne by the rural farmers, who received less for their export crops and paid more for the imported goods that they bought.44

After sugar, coffee had been the second most important crop in colonial Saint-Domingue, and it became the key export for independent Haiti. Despite forceful attempts by Louverture, Christophe, and Boyer, large-scale sugar production never returned to the country. (A few scattered sugarcane fields always remained here and there, but they were mostly used for the production of rum.) Coffee, however, was a very different kind of crop: its cultivation and harvesting was less brutal, its processing less complicated. Rural Haitians after independence found coffee ideal because its production could be carried out on a small scale and sustained with little outlay of money. In parts of the country where old coffee plantations sat empty, rural residents could simply harvest beans from coffee trees that were growing wild. Coffee was also a useful crop because there was significant demand for it on the global market, and the Haitian product was of high quality. Indeed, it was the equivalent of today’s coveted shade-grown organic crops, with the label “St. Marc Coffee” considered a benchmark for quality throughout the world in the nineteenth century.45

However, on the long journey of prime Haitian coffee from bean to cup, Haitians were generally able to take part in—and profit from—only the earliest stages of the process. There was good money to be made in the coffee business, and it drew foreign merchants to Haiti in large numbers. (Germans were especially well represented among these merchant ranks.) Because they offered essential access to transatlantic trade networks, the foreign merchants soon gained substantial control over Haiti’s export trade, becoming a powerful presence in Haitian society. Their interest in the country was entirely pecuniary: as Michel-Rolph Trouillot bluntly puts it, the merchants were essentially “uninterested in the fate of the nation.” Nonetheless, Haitian leaders—even as they publicly presented themselves as proud defenders of Haiti’s national sovereignty—increasingly allowed the foreign merchants to monopolize the country’s international commerce, on the theory that economic gains made through this alliance would be worth the price. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the power of foreign merchants in Haiti continued to increase, and they proved a constant source of economic pressure and political instability.46

Meanwhile, the state became completely dependent on the taxation of exports for its own survival. “The peasant’s coffee was for the government,” quips one historian, “what the sheep’s wool is for the shepherd.” In 1810, 73 percent of government revenues had come from intake at customs houses; in 1842 that percentage was up to 92, and by 1881, duties on exports and imports comprised over 98 percent of state income. The indirect taxation was much less visible than direct levies, but it was also the opposite of a progressive taxation system, since it placed the heaviest burden on the country’s poor majority: the rural farmers, for whom export crops were—at least potentially—the most profitable product of their land. “The state was spending,” writes Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “but it was the peasant who was footing the bill.”47

There was, of course, nothing unique to Haiti about merchants pursuing profits and the government imposing taxes on trade. What made the situation unusual was the fact that customs duties became nearly the only source of wealth in the society. After the breakup of the plantations, Haitians aspiring to riches and elite status no longer had the option of large-scale land ownership, and the dominance of foreign merchants made it difficult for Haitians to prosper in the import-export trades. That left control of the state as one of the few obvious sources of potential affluence and social advancement. The great number of aspirants to state power, in turn, made those who did have control of the state particularly concerned with holding on to their positions—which meant spending large amounts of money on the military and constantly compromising with the demands of foreign merchants and governments.48

Was this what Louverture, Dessalines, and Boukman had had in mind as they fought to establish a new order? Many under Boyer’s regime felt as if the promise of liberty and dignity that had inspired the nation’s founding had turned into a strange, nightmarish farce. Their country, so hard won, was being handed over to outsiders all too eager to take control, or milked by elites who had little concern for the general welfare. They watched with alarm, fearing that the very generation that had secured Haiti’s independence was now allowing it to slip away.

*   *   *

By the 1830s, young activists in Haiti’s various port towns as well as in Port-au-Prince were increasingly bold in their challenges to Boyer’s rule. Opposition newspapers multiplied, attacking the government’s authoritarianism and demanding greater rights. Such attacks took courage. The activists knew that just a few years after Boyer became president, he had been harshly criticized by a writer named Félix Darfour, who accused Boyer of having “sold the country to the whites” through the indemnity agreement. Darfour wrote to the Chamber of Deputies, laying out a series of grievances and complaining of the exclusion of darker-skinned Haitians from political power. In response, Boyer arrested Darfour and had him tried in a military court, even though Darfour had never been a soldier. Convicted of sedition, he was sentenced to death and executed.49

A decade after Darfour’s death, however, the opposition press was flourishing, part of an increasingly vibrant public sphere in the country. Everyone, it seemed, had a plan for reforming Haiti. One writer lobbied for the abolition of Catholicism in favor of Protestantism and the abolition of French in favor of English. The Chamber of Deputies, meanwhile, was increasingly populated with critics of Boyer. Though it had little power to institute real reform, the Chamber often became a forum for passionate speeches against the president.50

Among the most vocal members of the opposition was Hérard Dumesle. In 1832, a few years after publishing the account of his journey to the north of Haiti, he was elected deputy for Les Cayes and led the call for a profound reform of Haitian society, ranging from modernization of commerce to greater investment in public education. Boyer would have none of it and expelled Dumesle from political office. Dumesle continued to speak out, however. Within a few years, he was reelected, and was named president of the Chamber by the rest of the deputies. Victor Schoelcher, who was in Haiti at the time, characterized the choice as a “declaration of war” against Boyer. The president quickly cracked down, expelling Dumesle from the Chamber again, outlawing public meetings, and arresting opposition figures. When a local teacher and some of his students collected money to present Dumesle with a medal acknowledging his political service, the teacher was fired.51

Under the 1816 constitution, all Haitian men over the age of twenty-one could participate in the local elections that chose parliamentary representatives. In 1841, however, Boyer raised the voting age to twenty-five, hoping to stall the electoral progress of the reformers. The political conflict was very much a generational one: although Dumesle was already in his sixties, many of his comrades and supporters were significantly younger. The older politicians in power were mostly veterans of the war of independence, and they depicted the reformers as young idealists who didn’t truly understand the threats Haiti faced. The reformers, meanwhile, saw those in power as a sclerotic group who used old glories to justify their stranglehold on the government even as they sold out the country—a corrupt, authoritarian regime unconcerned with Haiti’s national interests. Many young Haitians were thoroughly demoralized. “It seems as if there is no future,” Schoelcher noted on his visit, “there is no tomorrow.”52

Though they came mainly from Haiti’s elite professional classes, the young reformers sought to create an alliance with the rural farmers who made up the majority of the population. At a time when some political leaders argued that Haiti should revoke the constitutional ban on ownership of property by foreign whites in order to attract international investment, the reformers fervently defended the prohibition. Foreign merchants and property owners, they argued, represented a threat to Haiti’s small farmers. An 1841 editorial proclaimed that giving foreigners access to land would be “fatal to our political existence”: outsiders would create large properties by absorbing smaller ones, which would mean returning to a kind of colonial rule. “They will be the masters and we the workers—they the exploiters and we the exploited.” Inspired by the ideas of Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, and other French radicals of the time, the young reformers imagined an alternative to the hierarchical labor relations of Boyer’s Code Rural: small farmers would form associations and cooperatives, gathering around “a central common” with buildings and factories that could be used collectively. What they were imagining was a kind of large lakou, albeit one that brought together not just an extended family but a broad community of laborers committed to growing crops for export in an egalitarian arrangement.53

One young opposition member, the twenty-four-year-old James Blackhurst, tried to put these ideas into practice. Schoelcher, who visited Blackhurst’s experimental sugar plantation, noted that unlike other landowners in the area, Blackhurst was easily able to find laborers to work in the cane. The difference was that Blackhurst treated his workers well and lived “fraternally” among them, his dwelling as simple as the rest. “You are in the house of a peasant, sir,” he announced to his visitor. Blackhurst also ran his farm as a cooperative and didn’t keep too much of the profit for himself. What’s more, Schoelcher effused, the young reformer knew that “a society, like a field, gets overgrown with weeds when you don’t tend to it,” and he was planning on setting up a school at his farm. In the meantime, he periodically gathered all the “most intelligent” laborers and delivered lectures to them on various topics, sometimes inviting guests to give talks as well. Schoelcher saw hope for Haiti in Blackhurst and believed that his cooperative agricultural model might make it possible for the country to start exporting sugar to European markets once again.54

Blackhurst’s experimental farm, just a few miles from the capital, openly flouted Boyer’s Code Rural, and was typical of increasingly bold actions on the part of the reformers. By the early 1840s, Boyer was facing challenges from all sides. In Santo Domingo, a rebellion against Haitian rule was gaining more and more popular support. At the same time, the Haitian government was struggling to deal with a mounting financial crisis. Then, in May 1842, a massive earthquake struck the northern part of the country, killing perhaps half the residents of Le Cap and demolishing the Sans-Souci palace. (Christophe’s massive Citadel was mostly undamaged.) The tremors were also felt in Port-au-Prince, and the dislocation and suffering caused by the disaster increased the sense of crisis in the country. In the face of these calamities, the government seemed “without will and without means,” and its inaction was strongly criticized by the opposition.55

In the election of 1842, the reformers won a majority in the Chamber of Deputies. Boyer’s response was unsubtle: he placed troops in front of the parliament with orders to admit no one but his supporters. Led by Hérard Dumesle, the excluded parliamentarians created the Society for the Rights of Man and the Citizen and organized a series of dinners and meetings. The gatherings at Dumesle’s home, outside the southern town of Les Cayes, culminated in a proclamation that attacked Boyer’s regime as well as the 1816 constitution upon which it was based. The “vicious” constitutions, the manifesto declaimed, had made it too easy for leaders to forget the fundamental truth: that the people were the real sovereigns of the nation. The document crystallized sentiments that were shared widely throughout Haiti’s towns and villages. As desire grew throughout the country for a more liberal political order, activists converged on Les Cayes to plan a revolution.56

In January 1843, the Les Cayes insurgents, led by Dumesle and his cousin Rivière Hérard, announced that the fortieth year of Haitian independence would be the “first year of the Regeneration.” Taking up arms, they marched on the nearby town of Jérémie, which harbored a garrison of government troops, but the town’s population welcomed them warmly and the army regiments joined the uprising instead of fighting it. When Boyer sent reinforcements from Port-au-Prince to crush the revolt, those troops did the same thing. A British officer reported that when one group of soldiers was ordered to attack the rebels, they “refused to fire upon their countrymen and, when repeatedly urged to advance by their Commandant, they went over in a body, and recommended to the General if he valued his life to make the best of his way back to Head Quarters.” The rebellion, in fact, was strikingly peaceful, consisting largely of speeches and mass protests in the streets rather than armed conflict. “This extraordinary mode of revolutionizing a Country,” the British officer wrote, “with scarcely any of the attendant scenes of Bloodshed, rapine and violence (so common in such cases in European Civilized Countries),” presented “a case almost unparalleled in History.” Urban women played a major role in the revolution, speaking out in favor of the uprising and taking part in military operations. During one of the rare pitched battles, a group of women dragged two cannon from a fort outside of Léogâne and set them up to fire on Boyer’s advancing troops, killing thirty soldiers. Later, Boyer himself was surrounded by a “disturbance of women, who followed him and cursed him, abusing him in the most scathing manner.” Within two months, Boyer abdicated, going into exile in Jamaica. His palace in Port-au-Prince was invaded and looted, with furniture smashed and portraits of the departed president destroyed. Hérard Dumesle led a triumphant march into Port-au-Prince, greeted with “delirious enthusiasm” by the population.57

It was a remarkable democratic explosion, the greatest the country had seen since the days of the Haitian Revolution. “Democracy,” one contemporary observer wrote, “flowed full to the brim. And what democracy!” While the movement did not actually include all segments of Haitian society—the main actors were residents of cities and towns, and the leaders were largely professionals—it nevertheless represented a significant break with Boyer’s enclosed and authoritarian system of power. After two decades under his leadership, urban Haitians enthusiastically and fervently debated alternative forms of government, from “American federalism” to the more centralized model of postrevolutionary France. Many wanted to organize town meetings that would choose representatives and produce legislation. One newspaper effused that such meetings would become “the great occupation of the national elite, the rendezvous of the enlightened, the intelligent and the capable,” creating an “immense” good in the society. The U.S. consul in Les Cayes, who watched the movement develop, reported back approvingly, noting his belief that the reforms would ultimately benefit American commerce and U.S. relations with Haiti in general.58

The leaders of the movement that overthrew Boyer chose Rivière Hérard as the provisional president and put him in charge of creating a new constitution. Elected representatives from throughout the country gathered in Port-au-Prince and formed a constitutional convention. The debates were attended by large and boisterous crowds, largely drawn from Port-au-Prince’s professional classes and from students of the city’s elite schools, who alternately booed and applauded orators as they took the stand. One of the fiercest discussions, as before, concerned the provision prohibiting whites from owning property in Haiti. The Chamber of Deputies at the time included a number of representatives from the Spanish half of the island; several of them considered themselves white and asked that the stipulation be removed from the constitution. Other representatives, however, rushed to defend the provision. One deputy who regretted the “isolation from the great human confraternity” caused by the exclusion of whites nevertheless defended the law, arguing it was less a manifestation of prejudice than an expression of fears that Haitian independence might be compromised. In the end, the provision was maintained.59

“Mr. President, we bring you the little monster,” announced the representative who handed the final draft of the 1843 constitution to Rivière Hérard for ratification. It was substantially more liberal than those that had preceded it, and included a constitutional guarantee of the right to political assembly and the right to a trial by jury in criminal cases. There were also changes to the electoral process: senators would no longer be selected from nominees put forth by the president, but chosen by direct elections. Likewise, the president was no longer to be appointed by the Senate. Instead, as in the United States, the population would vote for electors, who were then charged with choosing the new head of state.

Along with these improvements, however, the new constitution also added suffrage restrictions that had not explicitly existed before. The voting age was rolled back to twenty-one, but now voting would be open only to certain classes of men: those who owned property, those who were renting land under a contract of at least nine years in duration, or those who could prove that they practiced a “profession” or were employed in some kind of “industry.” Those last categories sounded quite broad, but it was not obvious how they would be interpreted. What is more, it was not clear that many rural residents—particularly those who rented plots of land for the short term, worked as informal day laborers, or practiced the system of métayage—would retain the right to political participation.60

Such concerns were largely overlooked by the urban residents and professionals who were the driving force behind the 1843 uprising. They saw the new constitution as a crucial move forward, one that would guarantee greater political liberty. But the reform movement soon met with resistance from a key group: the military. Even before the constitutional debates were completed, military leaders made it clear that they would have no scruples about opposing the new regime. They did so in part because they resented the way that revolutionaries had taken over positions in the army. The opposition movement, after all, had finally triumphed thanks to the military’s support; yet instead of expressing gratitude, the uprising’s leaders—as one historian laments—had “thrown themselves frenetically on the epaulettes,” naming themselves officers and generals as they rallied their supporters. And once in power, the reformers insisted on retaining the military ranks they had taken on during the revolt. They understood that political power in Haiti was always intimately tied to military power, and they were well aware that every president before Hérard had been a veteran of the war of independence. The established army officers, many of whom had joined the revolt once it was under way, were of course not particularly pleased by the spectacle of young lawyers and journalists taking up positions of command within the Haitian army. One of them complained about the pretensions of these “newcomers who have never warmed themselves around the fire of a bivouac.”61

In February 1844, there was a new outburst of violence in the long-standing struggle for independence in Spanish Santo Domingo. Rivière Hérard departed with troops to try to repress the revolt, without success: the independence of the Dominican Republic was declared in May 1844. Back in Port-au-Prince, Hérard Dumesle headed the government in his cousin’s absence, but he found critics of the new regime—both military leaders and reformers who felt that the new constitution had not gone far enough—mounting strong attacks against him in the Chamber of Deputies. Long the victim of authoritarian tactics during his years in the opposition, he nevertheless now used the same tactics himself, and dispersed the assembly.62

The reform movement that ultimately overthrew Boyer was driven by hopes that the spread of popular democracy would bring an end to the militarized, authoritarian style of politics that had dominated Haiti since its independence. But in the end, faced with internal dissent and resistance from the established military leaders, the reformers also fell into the trap of equating military might with political authority. Seeking to preserve their power and institute their new constitution, the leaders of the opposition soon found themselves stuck in the very political model they had hoped to abolish. Both Hérard Dumesle and Rivière Hérard quickly chose to dispense with their commitment to open debate and parliamentary procedure in favor of heavy-handed tactics of rule. They justified this strategic choice by arguing that it was the only way to confront deep-rooted resistance to change, particularly within the military. But they would soon also demonstrate the limits of their own commitment to change, as the 1843 revolution faced its most serious challenge: the political mobilization of small farmers in the countryside who, disappointed with the limits of the reforms, saw an opportunity to push for an even more profound transformation of the Haitian order. As historian Leslie Manigat puts it, Dumesle and his fellow activists had believed that once they passed their constitution, the revolution would be over. In fact, it was just beginning.63

*   *   *

“The bandit Acaau came barefoot,” dressed like a peasant, “in a species of canvas packing-sheet and wearing a little straw hat.” Behind him came the Army of the Sufferers, demanding a change in their condition. They wanted “respect for the Constitution, Rights, Equality, Liberty.” But more than that, they wanted access to more land in order to secure a better existence as farmers. The “bandit,” Louis Jean-Jacques Acaau, saw his mission as divinely ordained: speaking to a crowd convened by the sound of a conch in one public square, he “publicly vowed not to change his clothing until the orders of ‘divine Providence’ were executed.” And what had providence ordered? “The poor people” were “first to chase out the mulattoes, second to divide up the mulatto properties.” At this point, several eyes in the crowd turned and picked out light-skinned peasants who were standing and listening eagerly to Acaau. However, he proclaimed, pointing to them: “Oh—those are blacks!” A man named Joseph, a worker at a nearby rum distillery, stepped out of the crowd and concurred: “Nègue riche qui connaît li et écri, cila mulâte; mulâte pauve qui pas connaît li ni écri, cila nègue”—“The rich black who can read and write is a mulatto; the poor mulatto who can’t read or write is black.” From then on Joseph became one of the standard-bearers of the movement. Respected for his knowledge of both Vodou and Catholic prayer, he led Acaau’s troops on their campaign with a candle in hand.64

So Maxime Reybaud, former French consul in Haiti, described the movement that erupted in 1844 and briefly threatened to upend the social order in Haiti. Reybaud’s accounts, written under the pen name Gustave d’Alaux for the popular French magazine Revue des Deux Mondes, are deeply racist. Yet it is from this text that the often-cited Kreyòl proverb about the tight links between color and class—spoken by a Vodou-practicing rural insurgent, no less—comes to us. Just as Dumesle ended up channeling the words of the departed Boukman, so a supercilious Frenchman gave us the gift of Acaau’s words. If they have remained so famous, however, it is because they point directly to the complexity and dynamism of politics, class, and color in Haiti. As Joseph and Acaau insisted, the real problem wasn’t really the color of one’s skin: it was whether you had access to the wealth and education you needed in order to be truly free.

Acaau’s army, which mobilized thousands of supporters, was dubbed the Piquets after the pickets they carried into battle as rudimentary weapons. As one Methodist missionary in the country wrote, these were “sticks of different sorts of wood; they sharpened the edge, and applied poisonous gum to it, so that any wound which might not be dangerous, would through poison become so. The sticks were from 8 to 10 feet long.” The Piquets were successful fighters, defeating government troops in several engagements and taking over a large swath of the south of Haiti. The political goals of their movement are difficult to document with precision, since they are known to us almost exclusively through the fragmented observations of largely hostile observers such as Reybaud. “Up to now,” Louis-Joseph Janvier noted in his introduction to an 1884 book called Le vieux piquet, “those who have written the history of the piquets were their enemies or their assassins.” Nevertheless, we can glimpse from these writings the broad political agenda that shook Haiti for several months in 1844.65

Acaau’s movement took root in the south, a region with a long history of rural resistance. It was in the southern mountains, for instance, that the former maroon Goman had created a separate republic in 1807, holding out against Pétion’s regime until 1819. Farmers in the south had, of course, followed political events during the final years of the Boyer regime, concerned about what the new order would mean for them. The majority of the peasants spoke only Kreyòl, while the debates and legislation of the 1843 revolution were in French. That fact itself was a source of political exclusion. But rural residents tried to overcome that barrier by gathering in public places and having someone who could read French explain the articles to them in Kreyòl. The lack of direct access to political documents meant that rumors played a powerful role in spreading news and inciting action. The uncertainty about precisely who would have the right to vote, for instance, led many to worry that they would be excluded from the political process. Many peasants also believed—wrongly—that the new constitution included provisions for the dispossession of small-scale landowners and the reconstruction of large properties. There were even whispers that legislation requiring the municipal government to register all newborns and conduct censuses had a sinister goal: the return of slavery. Such rumors tapped into profound fears of a return of plantation agriculture, and with it the destruction of the way of life that the peasants had painstakingly constructed. More broadly, many rural residents seemed to fear—rightly, as it turned out—that for all its sound and fury, the revolution of 1843 would end up merely replacing one authoritarian regime with another.66

Maxime Reybaud had a simple name for what the Piquets represented: “black communism.” Just as the European communists demanded “reduced work and increase of salaries,” he opined, so the peasants of Haiti were demanding “reduction of the price of foreign merchandise and augmentation of the value of their crops.” Many owned small plots of land, but they wanted access to larger properties in order to have a more secure existence. And they wanted to be able to profit more fully from their labor instead of seeing their meager earnings disappear into the state treasury and the pockets of foreign merchants. In fact, however, the Piquets’ agenda covered more than just the economic concerns that Reybaud described. Acaau also demanded that the state provide access to national education, and he tried to bring a truly participatory and democratic form of politics to Haiti. The leaders of the 1843 revolution had come from Haiti’s urban, educated classes, and when they threw themselves into insurrection, they had dressed as military officers—like the members of the government they were opposing. Acaau, in contrast, tapped into a very different kind of political symbolism. He brought together crowds of farmers, few of whom had participated directly in the early uprising, speaking to them in Kreyòl and drawing on the symbols of Vodou and popular Catholicism. Though he was wealthier than many of his rural followers and could have afforded different clothes, he made a point of dressing in the traditional garments of the peasantry, “to show in actions the kind of equality and participation they were speaking about in words.”67

The Piquet uprising began soon after Rivière Hérard’s constitution was promulgated in late December 1843, and Acaau’s followers marched along almost exactly the same route—from the southern province toward Port-au-Prince—as the forces who had overthrown Boyer a few months earlier. The new revolt starkly exposed the limits of Dumesle’s earlier revolution; and for all their earlier idealism, Dumesle and Rivière were not willing to negotiate with Acaau’s movement or address its demands. They responded instead with guns, sending troops to repel the Piquets.68

The Piquet uprising made it clear that in Haiti a little bit of revolution could be a very dangerous thing for the elite. Emboldened by the moderate reforms that Dumesle and his fellow activists carried out, Acaau pushed for a truly democratic order, one that would give real political power to the entire Haitian population. But such democracy would necessarily mean not just political change but a wholesale social transformation: if all the rural residents—the clear majority of the Haitian people—actually gained access to the presidency and the parliament, they would be able to use state institutions to demand more land and more control over the economy in general. And that would inevitably threaten, and probably destroy, the arrangement that the country’s elite had crafted in the decades since independence, the “stalemate” that kept them in power and the peasants at bay.

The threat was a serious one, and many in the political class feared that Rivière Hérard and Hérard Dumesle were not up to the task of containing it. Soon, the ranks of the elites opposing the two leaders included not just military officers and members of Boyer’s bureaucracy but also Dumesle’s former supporters, professionals who had served in the Chamber of Deputies or participated in the opposition press but now were worried about dangerous social upheaval. They found a solution they believed would placate the rebels: replacing President Hérard with a man named Philippe Guerrier. An elderly veteran of the wars of independence, Guerrier had been a high-ranking member of Christophe’s regime, where he was dubbed the Duc de l’Avancé. Famed for his military prowess, he sported a crest decorated with a porcupine and the motto “He who rubs against me will get pricked.” By 1844, though, Guerrier no longer posed any political threat. His candidacy was the first case of what would come to be known as the “politique de doublure,” whereby light-skinned elites choose a black president whom they think they can easily manipulate. Guerrier’s selection was meant to mollify the mass of the population without surrendering political control. And, in a way, it worked. Guerrier offered Acaau a high-ranking government position as general and commander of the region of Les Cayes—which he accepted. Other leaders from the Piquet movement were also brought into the fold.69

Having reestablished control over the state and much of the countryside, the governing elite set to work creating yet another constitution, one that would prevent future threats to order by rescinding the more radical innovations of the 1843 document. The constitution of 1846 gave power largely back to the executive while diminishing the rights of the population. Political assemblies, for instance, were allowed only as long as their goals were not “contrary to public order.” Voting rights remained essentially the same, but the creation of a number of intermediary electoral institutions—as well as restrictions on who could serve as an elector or a representative—introduced new obstacles to popular control over the government. Most significantly, the Senate returned to being a body selected from the president’s nominees rather than chosen through direct elections, with the president in turn appointed directly by the Senate—and named for life. Furthermore, the president was once again given the power to dissolve the parliament under certain conditions. The closed circuit of the Senate and the president left little room for democratic change or reform. The only way for an outsider to take power—one that would be used again and again over the course of the nineteenth century—was to raise an army and march on the capital.70

This reversal created an atmosphere of defeat among reformers, putting an end to democratic aspirations even among some of the most fervent political activists. They found themselves disappointed by the behavior of their own leaders, who seemed all too ready to take on the habits of those they had opposed. And they were alarmed at the breadth and intensity of the political movement that emerged in the countryside, which seemed to threaten the foundations of the economic order that sustained urban life in Haiti. A generation of intellectuals ultimately reacted to the events of 1843 and 1844 by concluding that the Haitian population simply wasn’t ready for democracy. The prominent light-skinned intellectual Romuald Lepelletier de Saint-Rémy declared emphatically that the “black race” had to return to the “second rank” in the country, leaving power to the educated, light-skinned elites. Honoré Féry, a major participant in the 1843 revolution, confessed in 1855 that the older generation had been right to warn the young agitators that they could not apply “what was happening elsewhere” to the “backward” people of Haiti. The politician and historian Thomas Madiou similarly wrote in 1878 that it had been a mistake to imagine that ideals of democracy could be applied to the “semi-barbaric population” of Haiti. It was impossible, he said, to imagine a people of such “profound ignorance,” barely capable of practicing agriculture effectively, “choosing its President, its Senators, its Deputies, its judges.”71

Hérard Dumesle and Acaau were both part of a new generation of political activists who found themselves disappointed with the political regimes of postindependence Haiti. As a young man traveling in the north of the country, Dumesle had channeled the spirit of Boukman, and as an opposition politician he attacked Boyer’s authoritarian regime and stood up for free speech and greater democracy. Once in power, however, Dumesle quickly adopted the style of the very regime he had opposed, and he soon followed Boyer into exile in Jamaica. Acaau, meanwhile, represented the promise of an even greater change, giving voice to the huge segment of the Haitian population that lived on the margins of the nation’s political institutions. Ultimately, though, Haiti’s elites did not yield to the demands of the Piquets, which threatened to upend the country’s social order. Over the following decades, political movements in different regions of Haiti would often mobilize peasant groups with promises of land reform, but once in power they delivered little. The stalemate in Haitian society only solidified, with the state remaining largely unaccountable to its citizens. After Guerrier, the government passed through the hands of a rolling series of elites who, despite different regional and social origins, largely resembled one another. As the Haitian secretary of the interior and agriculture noted in an official report soon after the Piquet uprising, the rural population of the country had become a “distinct class,” separated from the urban dwellers by an “almost unbridgeable demarcation.”72

Acaau, for his part, was never completely co-opted by Guerrier’s government. He tried using his position there to continue the push for broader democracy in Haiti, and in 1846, after those efforts came to naught, he organized another uprising in the south. This second attempted rebellion also ended in failure, and Acaau committed suicide in despair shortly thereafter. His ghost, though, would long haunt Haitian politics. Shortly after his death, Céligny Ardouin, a leading political figure who had helped engineer the presidency of Guerrier, wrote that it was vital to “avoid the appearance of a new Acaau.” A modern historian of French-Haitian relations likewise concludes his work by warning that both foreign and Haitian leaders need to “watch out,” for “a new Acaau can always appear.” The specter of Acaau serves as a constant reminder that one day a truly democratic movement—one that channels the political aspirations of the entire Haitian population—might appear again, and this time succeed.73