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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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