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  In fact, the African-born majority of the new nation would largely find themselves marginalized. In his declaration of independence, Dessalines announced his determination to “forever ensure liberty’s reign in the country of our birth.” But most Haitians hearing him in 1804 were not born in Haiti; they had grown up in Africa and been brought to the colony as slaves. Perhaps Dessalines was speaking in symbolic terms, of Haiti as the country that gave birth to the Haitian people regardless of their individual origins. Still, whether deliberately exclusionary or merely careless, Dessalines’s phrasing foreshadowed the second-class treatment that his regime and those that followed would often mete out to the African-born majority.42

  Dessalines had managed a political miracle by creating a broad coalition of insurgents and leading them to victory in 1804. But after independence, the sense of unity did not last: the tensions surrounding land ownership and the distribution of power were simply too strong. Caught between competing social forces, he was unable to count on support from either the Haitian oligarchy or the masses of laborers, and his regime rapidly unraveled. Even the soldiers in his army became increasingly disenchanted with his rule, depriving him of his most essential source of support.43

  Dessalines faced particularly strong resistance in the south, where he had once led Louverture’s troops against Rigaud. Touring the region in 1806, he was infuriated to find piles of dyewood being readied for shipment overseas: he had outlawed any export of wood because of worries about the consequences of widespread logging. Now he punished the merchants who were flouting the law, outraging them by burning the harvest they were preparing to sell. After a series of similar provocations, military leaders decided it was time to act. The imperial regime left little room for political opposition, but the people of Haiti were quite familiar with another mechanism for creating a change in government: armed revolt. Town by town, garrisons rose up against Dessalines, swearing to fight to the death against the emperor. Away from Port-au-Prince when he heard the news, Dessalines rushed back toward the capital, not realizing that many of his top generals had already turned against him. As he arrived at Pont-Rouge, north of the city, he was ambushed by a group of officers and unceremoniously gunned down. His reign as ruler of Haiti had lasted less than three years.44

  Over the years, Dessalines’s assassination at Pont-Rouge has become a legendary historical moment, a tragic testament to the way that Haiti’s glorious independence so rapidly collapsed into violence. Dessalines was apparently ripped to pieces by an angry crowd after he was killed, and it fell to a woman named Défilée—who had been a camp follower in Dessalines’s army units since the early days of the revolution—to make sure he got a proper burial. She is said to have gathered the pieces of his body in a bag and brought them to a cemetery, where he was buried in an unmarked grave. Early chroniclers of the event described Défilée as a madwoman, but over time she has come to seem like the only sane one in the midst of madness. In a 1967 play about the assassination, Haitian historian and playwright Hénock Trouillot has Défilée issue a powerful rebuke to those who assassinated Dessalines: “What the French could not accomplish, have they really done it, these monsters?… The father of our country? What will they say about us tomorrow?”45

  In time, Dessalines’s simple grave got a marker, and there are now many monuments and statues of him in Haiti, as well as streets and shops bearing his name. But perhaps the most vital and complex remembrance he receives takes place in Haitian Vodou, where Dessalines has gained the status of a lwa, or god, in the form of Ogou Dessalines, and where he is the subject of many songs that recount his deeds and channel his memory. Ogou is the god of war, and represents both sides of what soldiers have long meant in Haiti: forces of liberation, they can all too easily clash with the very people they are meant to defend.46

  For Haiti’s later leaders, Dessalines’s short reign offered a cautionary tale: he had led the country to independence, but rapidly fell prey to social conflicts over what that independence should mean. After his death, it would be up to others to confront the challenge of turning the freedom that Haiti had gained into something meaningful, and sustainable, for its people.

  2

  THE CITADEL

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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