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

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

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

  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.