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  After their initial slavery-abolishing proclamations in 1793, Sonthonax and Polverel had hurriedly issued a series of decrees that sought to contain the economic and social impact of emancipation. According to these regulations, former slaves were obligated to remain on their plantations. No longer slaves but not fully free either, they were called “cultivators,” and in return for their labor they received a quarter of what was produced on the plantation, to be divided among themselves. Rapidly put together in a moment of crisis, these regulations ended up having a remarkably long-term impact on the territory. They became the foundation not only for Louverture’s administration, but also for many of the laws enacted by Haitian leaders after independence.

  Both the French commissioners and Louverture might, of course, have chosen another solution: breaking up the plantations and giving the land to the slaves. After all, as at least one commentator noted during the revolution, the slaves had worked for no pay for a long time. People who fled from France or its territories after 1791 were officially considered traitors by the French government, and the state took over their property. In Saint-Domingue, that meant that the military regime led by Toussaint Louverture was now in control of estates abandoned by the planters and could dispose of them as it saw fit.

  Louverture never really considered breaking up the plantations, however. He saw the continuation of the plantation system as the only viable choice for his people. How else, after all, could the economy of an export-oriented colony function? During his time as leader of Saint-Domingue, Louverture steadfastly defended the plantation system, telling the ex-slaves that they had to prove to the world that it was possible to produce sugar and coffee without slavery. He argued fervently that in order to preserve their hard-won freedom, the ex-slaves of Saint-Domingue had to accept the restrictions that would keep plantations going.

  In practice, this meant that Louverture offered up the sequestered land for rent. Those who leased the plantations paid the ex-slave cultivators a quarter of what was produced and gave another quarter to the state. The rest was theirs. It was a very lucrative proposition, and the people who were best placed to take advantage of this opportunity were members of Louverture’s regime—especially the army’s higher-ranking officers and generals. Their military power allowed them to dominate the state, and that in turn gave them access to valuable properties in the colony. This equation, established over the course of the revolution, would long haunt independent Haiti.15

  For the plantation laborers, the process must have seemed particularly cynical. Louverture was the one who insisted on the maintenance of agricultural policies, set up by Sonthonax and Polverel, that forced ex-slaves to keep working as “cultivators”; and his generals doubled as agricultural administrators, using the armed forces to police the plantations and punish anyone who sought to run away from them. Saint-Domingue’s social hierarchy was no longer based on race or on chattel bondage; like the overall population, the army was comprised mostly of ex-slaves, many of them African-born. But with the military hierarchy offering the only definitive escape from plantation toil, the path to power in the colony was still closed off to all but a small group of men.

  Plantation laborers knew that their condition had changed for the better, but they also resented the many continuities between the old regime and the new. Some of them put up resistance reminiscent of what slaves had done before the revolution: running away to the mountains or the towns, or even turning to violent rebellion. (Louverture decisively crushed such revolts, including one led by his adopted nephew Moïse.) Others fought back in more subtle ways, taking advantage of provisions in Sonthonax and Polverel’s 1793 decrees that set up democratic assemblies on the plantations. These assemblies, in which laborers could vote on details of their work routine, elect their own leaders, and discuss problems or complaints, were clearly cherished by the cultivators. The laborers quickly put the assemblies to good use in lively debates, making choices that often frustrated plantation managers and officials.

  Women were especially active in these assemblies. Because they could not join the army, and because mothers with young children found it more difficult to simply run away from the plantation, in many areas women came to make up the bulk of the labor force. Accordingly, they had a particularly powerful interest in shaping the structure of labor on the plantations, and they frequently took the lead in the debates. They complained about the fact that while they did essentially the same work as men, they were paid less. And they pushed for the cultivators to spend less time working in the sugarcane fields and more time developing the small plots of land that they depended on to feed themselves and their families—plots whose history and significance stretched back to the days of slavery.16

  In Saint-Domingue as in most other slave societies, masters trying to figure out how to feed a large slave population had settled upon a kind of compromise. Instead of purchasing expensive provisions, they allowed the slaves to farm scattered plots of land for themselves or else to work collectively on provision grounds for the whole plantation. The plots given over to the slaves were often difficult to cultivate: all the best land was kept for growing sugar, coffee, or cotton. Still, slaves took full advantage of the opportunity, developing productive gardens, planting fruit trees, and raising livestock in tiny spaces. What they didn’t consume themselves they sold in local markets. (These markets also provided a place for slaves from different plantations to meet and talk, connect and conspire.) The garden plots were so productive, in fact, that by the late eighteenth century they produced most of the food eaten in the colony by slaves and masters alike. From a tiny, self-serving concession by the owners, the slaves had carved out a measure of autonomy. Over time they came to consider the plots of land essentially theirs.17

  After the insurrection began on the northern plantations, masters and managers throughout the colony found that the increasingly hard-to-control slaves were turning away from field labor and toward expanding their individual plots or the collective provision grounds. Sugar and coffee were not particularly useful to them, the slaves made clear; potatoes, livestock, and fruit were. It was a quiet, nonviolent revolt, but no less emphatic for all that.

  Under Louverture’s regime, the little garden plots assumed even greater importance. Working on the same plantations for meager wages seemed a poor recompense for the costs of insurrection. Having survived the brutality of the slave system and then the violence of the revolution, the ex-slaves strongly believed that the land should be theirs; land ownership would give freedom its full and true meaning. Through their emphasis on self-sufficient agriculture, they built what Haitian sociologist Jean Casimir dubs a “counter-plantation” system, one based on a steadfast resistance to plantation labor in all its forms.18

  Louverture never yielded to the counter-plantation resistance. Indeed, his use of force against unwilling plantation laborers led to persistent rumors that he was in league with the white planters and was planning to reestablish slavery. Thousands of planters had fled the island during the insurrection, heading to Jamaica and to U.S. cities such as Philadelphia, Charleston, and New York, but there were plenty who stayed in the colony, and Louverture developed an uneasy but stable compromise with them. They found that, while they had lost their direct ownership and immediate control of the laboring population, they could still survive, and in some cases even thrive, under Louverture’s regime. Indeed, he did so well by the remaining planters that many of those who had fled in the midst of war between 1791 and 1793 soon returned, attracted by the relative stability and the prospect of regaining control of their plantations.* For a few years during the late 1790s, two groups of landowners—some of them former masters, others former slaves—broadly cooperated in running the colony.20

  In 1801, a commission composed almost entirely of white planters wrote a constitution for the territory of Saint-Domingue that made Louverture governor-for-life of the colony and gave him broad political powers. At the same time, the constitution established
even more draconian agricultural provisions, solidifying and expanding regulations that forced laborers to continue working on the plantations. It was, in effect, a charter for a new colonial order, one in which slavery and racial hierarchy were dismantled but plantation production—and even white ownership of many plantations—was preserved.21

  In the short term, this regime was an economic success. Under Louverture, coffee production reached nearly the levels it had achieved before the insurrection of 1791, while sugar production—severely affected by the widespread destruction of sugar processing machinery during the uprising—was steadily increasing. In the long run, however, the Haitian population’s hunger for land ownership and autonomy meant that the plantation system was doomed. Although the governments that came in the wake of Louverture would, like him, attempt to maintain and rebuild the plantation system—at times with tentative success—they could never truly reverse the process that began with the revolution of 1791 and the emancipation of the slaves two years later. The people of Saint-Domingue were determined to take control of their lives, and they would build their society around that resolve.

  * * *

  Although Saint-Domingue was still a French colony, Louverture often acted like the head of an independent state. Besides trading with the United States, for instance, he established a series of trade agreements with England—even though England and France were at war. And while Louverture always professed loyalty to France, he clearly didn’t fully trust the country’s commitment to emancipation. He made sure to keep his army well supplied with guns and ammunition, largely purchased from the United States, ready to work with France but also to fight it if necessary. He had reason to be concerned. Over the preceding years, many Frenchmen had attacked Louverture’s regime, painting damning portraits of a “despotic” governor and plantations overrun by lazy and violent ex-slaves. As long as there was a strong parliamentary system in France, Louverture had eloquent defenders who managed to hold back such challenges. But he knew how rapidly the situation might change.22

  In November 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte carried out a coup in France, naming himself first consul. With the help of his brother-in-law, Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, he eliminated the parliament, silenced public debate, and centralized power in his own hands. Napoleon’s approach to colonial policy was shaped by a small group of advisers, several of whom were convinced that it was time for the experiment in emancipation to come to an end. Napoleon was particularly incensed by Louverture’s 1801 constitution, which he considered an inexcusable attack on his authority. He also knew that the timing was right for a strike: the French had begun peace negotiations with the British, and Napoleon had received assurances that any ships he sent to Saint-Domingue could travel unmolested across the Atlantic. He decided to act.

  In late 1801, Napoleon placed Leclerc in charge of a massive military expedition to Saint-Domingue. Publicly, he proclaimed his commitment to liberty in the colonies and announced that the troops had an innocuous mission: to help buttress the defenses of the territory and keep order there. But he gave his brother-in-law detailed secret instructions: Leclerc was to either co-opt or destroy the black generals and prepare the way for the reestablishment of the old colonial order. “Rid us of these gilded negroes,” Napoleon pleaded, “and we will have nothing more to wish for.”23

  When Louverture saw Leclerc’s armada hovering off the shores of Saint-Domingue, he decided to stage a tactical retreat. Realizing that he wouldn’t be able to hold the port towns, he ordered his officers to burn them to the ground, leaving nothing behind for the French. One of Louverture’s highest-ranking generals, Henry Christophe, who was in command of Cap Français when the French troops arrived, set his own mansion there alight before proceeding to the rest of the town. Dessalines, then the commander at Gonaïves, did the same. Christophe and Dessalines then led their troops into the mountains to begin the campaign of resistance against the French.24

  Not everyone in the colony was united behind Louverture, however. Back in 1798, a rival general, André Rigaud, had refused to serve under Louverture’s authority and had created his own autonomous regime in the south of Saint-Domingue. Louverture soon crushed the uprising, and Rigaud fled to France, along with two prominent officers who had supported him: Alexandre Pétion and Jean-Pierre Boyer. Now, Napoleon invited Pétion and Boyer to be part of the Leclerc expedition. He also sent along Louverture’s two sons, who had been studying in France, with a personal letter from the emperor to their father. The presence of all these familiar figures from the colony in the French armada reassured many people in Saint-Domingue that Leclerc had in fact come only to assist the colony’s armed forces and help assure internal stability. So while Christophe and Dessalines followed Louverture’s orders, some of his other top generals welcomed the French troops and gave their support to Leclerc.

  Haiti’s war of independence thus felt to its combatants more like a civil war, creating profound divisions within the population and pitting different parts of the Saint-Domingue military against one another. After all, for most of the previous decade, Louverture and his troops had all served under the French flag, fighting for the Republic. They had successfully defended the colony against Spanish incursions and a large-scale English invasion. Leclerc’s forces fighting in Saint-Domingue in 1802 were bewildered to find, during one battle, that their opponents were singing French revolutionary songs. The two armies had the same anthems.

  Even with only partial support from his army, Louverture held the French at bay, drawing Leclerc’s troops into a series of exhausting engagements in the interior of the colony. He knew that if he could last long enough, the rainy season would bring yellow fever to the unacclimated French forces, weakening them enough that he might be able to triumph. But after a few months of fighting, Louverture realized he was in a precarious situation, his troops exhausted and stretched too thin to hold out. In April 1802, Henry Christophe surrendered to the French, and Louverture and Dessalines followed soon afterward. The three of them made a deal: if they could keep their rank and privilege as generals, they would help the French destroy the vestiges of resistance in the colony. Having distinguished themselves in battle against Leclerc, Dessalines and Christophe now used their considerable military talents fighting fiercely for the French.

  Louverture was not with them. Suspecting that his submission was only a temporary ruse and that he was just waiting for an opportune moment to attack the French again, Leclerc reneged on the deal, arrested Louverture, and deported him to France. On leaving the island, Louverture famously declared: “In overthrowing me, you have cut down only the trunk of the tree of liberty of the blacks; it will grow back from the roots, because they are deep and numerous.” Leclerc warned the French government, “You cannot hold Toussaint far enough from the ocean or put him in a prison that is too strong.” They locked him in the Fort de Joux prison in the Jura mountains, where he grew ill in his cold cell and died in April 1803, months before Haiti’s declaration of independence. Until his last days, he repeatedly wrote to Napoleon insisting on his loyalty and asking for a chance to defend himself against Leclerc’s accusations. He got no response. When Louverture’s jailers discovered his corpse, they found a piece of paper tucked into the bandanna wrapped around his head. On it Louverture complained one last time of being arbitrarily arrested and sent off “as naked as an earthworm,” with no chance to respond to the charges against him: “Is it not to cut off someone’s legs and order him to walk? Is it not to cut out his tongue and tell him to talk? Is it not to bury a man alive?”25

  Napoleon and his advisers were convinced that once the leadership in Saint-Domingue was firmly under their control, the French could proceed comfortably to the reestablishment of slavery in the colony. They remained blind to a reality that a few observers outside of France saw quite clearly: the revolution in Saint-Domingue had transformed its entire population. Despite all the limits that Louverture had placed on liberty to keep the plantations going, the former slaves ha
d begun to construct a new social order of their own, and many of them were ready to die rather than go back to slavery. So even after all the major leaders in the colony had gone over to the French side, the resistance didn’t stop. Plantation laborers everywhere kept fighting Leclerc’s forces, organizing themselves into small bands that took refuge in the mountains. They were relentless and resourceful. One group sent a riderless horse in front of the French line, enticing soldiers to come out and capture it, and then gunned them down. A group of women attacked the French troops while wearing mattresses to protect themselves from musket fire. As one early account of the war put it, “everywhere the land harbored enemies, in the woods, behind a rock; liberty gave birth to them.”26

  In August of 1802 the rainy season began, and, as Louverture had predicted, the French troops fell prey to yellow fever. As more and more of them died from combat and disease, Leclerc found his mission increasingly hampered by its own contradictions. With few French soldiers left at his disposal, the only way to fight the rebels in the mountains was to depend fully on the very same “gilded negroes” that Napoleon wanted to eliminate from the colony. And in order to maintain their loyalty, he had to keep convincing them—and the population at large—of France’s good intentions. But the longer Leclerc stayed in Saint-Domingue, the more he found it impossible to hide what he had really been sent to do. Some of Leclerc’s officers were openly contemptuous of blacks, and after Napoleon reopened the French slave trade, a few had started buying and selling slaves. In desperation, Leclerc even asked Napoleon to censor French newspapers: they had been publishing racist jokes, and infuriated residents of Saint-Domingue took this as further proof that France had turned against emancipation.27