Haiti Page 8
For all these reasons, the Code Henry impressed, and indeed seduced, many contemporaries. The naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, a veteran of Captain Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific and cofounder of the abolitionist African Institution, declared, “It is worthy to be written in gold; nothing I have ever seen which was written for the same purposes by white men is worthy to be compared to it.” Many abolitionists hoped that Christophe’s regime would serve to refute the racist theories of their opponents and prove that—despite the arguments of proslavery forces—emancipation did not necessarily mean the end of prosperity in the Caribbean. Christophe, in turn, actively reached out to international allies, hoping they would help him build a new world in Haiti.32
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“Without a doubt,” the prominent French priest and abolitionist the Abbé Grégoire wrote in 1815, “the most difficult problem to resolve would be how to appropriate all the advantages of European civilization, without including the vicious and hideous parts.” Europe, he went on, had “done much for the spirit,” but it had also “perverted reason” and “neglected … the education of the heart.” Grégoire was writing about Africa, but he elegantly captured the dilemma facing the Haitian leadership: they looked to Europe for models of governance even as they ruled over a land that had experienced the worst of what the “perverted reason” of European empire had to offer.33
Many Haitians deeply admired Grégoire, who had been at the forefront of the battle for the rights of free people of color early in the revolution, and had given his strong support to Haitian independence. His 1808 work De la littérature des nègres presented an impassioned and richly documented defense of the capacities of blacks; Christophe ordered fifty copies of the book and published excerpts from it in his newspaper. Grégoire, however, was politically uncomfortable with Christophe’s regime: he considered Christophe’s elaborate ceremonies a waste of money, and he was appalled by Christophe’s adoption of a monarchical system, arguing that a “nobility of paper” was just as absurd as the “nobility of skin color” that the white masters had enforced in Saint-Domingue. Even if the ex-slaves of the country didn’t have much education, Grégoire insisted, that did not mean they lacked the capacity to elect their own leaders. Grégoire was happy to work with Pétion’s republic, and he continued to be a steadfast supporter of “free Haiti” overall, but his antimonarchical views—shaped by the French Revolution—ultimately made it impossible for Christophe to rely on his support.34
No one else in France seemed particularly eager to help Christophe either. And Christophe, for his part, also had a deeply personal reason for wanting to avoid dealing with the French: he had lost a son to them. Late in 1801, Christophe had decided to follow the example of Toussaint Louverture—who had sent his two sons to France to be educated—and began making plans to send his firstborn, Ferdinand, to school in Paris. After the Leclerc expedition arrived in early 1802 and Christophe burned Le Cap and started fighting against the French, of course, this no longer seemed like a good idea. But when he surrendered a few months later, Christophe went ahead with the project. The decision is puzzling, and Christophe was clearly uneasy about it. “If you had our skin,” he confided in a white French general, “you would perhaps not share my confidence in sending my only son” to be “raised in France.” But perhaps Christophe believed at the time that ultimately France would triumph in Saint-Domingue, and he and his son would then both be in a better position if Ferdinand had a Parisian education. It was a dangerous gamble, though, essentially making Ferdinand both student and hostage.35
For his first few months in Paris, Ferdinand was treated well. When news arrived that his father had once again turned against the French, however, he was transferred to a state orphanage and told he would learn to be a shoemaker. Ferdinand refused: he had come to Paris, he complained, “to get a fine education, not to be a cobbler.” The teachers who had now become his jailers replied that he was nothing more than “a little brigand, the son of a bigger brigand who was massacring all the whites in Saint-Domingue.” Ferdinand was beaten in the orphanage so badly that he eventually died from his injuries. His fate was covered up by the authorities, and Christophe never publicly mentioned Ferdinand again.36
It is not surprising, then, that instead of trying to repair his relations with Grégoire or perhaps connect with other potentially sympathetic Frenchmen, Christophe looked to France’s great enemy, Britain. The king spoke English well; he liked the British, whom he saw as embodying the virtues of hard work and discipline, and he believed that his subjects liked them too. The ongoing war between Britain and France served Haiti particularly well since it kept their former colonizers largely tied up militarily, lessening the chance that they would try to reconquer their lost territory. Christophe (like Pétion in the south) cultivated the valuable trade with the nearby British colony of Jamaica, and ships shuttled back and forth constantly between the two islands.
But while the British government happily let their merchants trade with Haiti, they refused to recognize Haiti’s independence, or even to dignify Haiti’s representatives with the formalities extended to other diplomats. Like officials in the United States, British functionaries worked hard to prevent Haitians from actually spending any time in British territory. Britain had abolished the slave trade in 1807, but they maintained slavery itself in their colonies for three decades after Haitian independence; and to deal on equal terms with Haiti, they assumed, would send a message to their own population that an antislavery revolt was acceptable.
Knowing that he couldn’t depend on open support from the British government, Christophe instead sought to cultivate ties with British abolitionists, whom he admired for their successful campaign against the slave trade and their eloquent attacks on racism. He found particular allies in two of Britain’s most prominent antislavery activists, William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson. Unlike Grégoire, Clarkson and Wilberforce were not uncomfortable with the idea of a monarchy, and they immediately responded to Christophe’s offer of friendship. They used their personal contacts and intimate knowledge of European politics to give Haiti’s king advice on how to deal with Europe’s political leaders. When Clarkson suggested to Christophe that he write to the emperor of Russia, for instance, Christophe hesitated: Could he really just write to the emperor without an introduction? But Clarkson took care of the necessary formalities and transmitted the letter, in which Christophe called on Alexander to support Haitian independence and to oppose the slave trade. Clarkson later functioned as goodwill ambassador for Christophe in Europe, trying to get Haitian independence finally recognized. Of course, there was a limit to how much someone like Clarkson could do. As a writer who described himself as a “friend of Christophe” later noted, the king was perhaps liable to forget that the “philanthropists of Britain,” like those elsewhere, didn’t have access to “the treasury and the armed forces.”37
Still, the abolitionists did assist Christophe as much as they could. One of their key initiatives involved helping Christophe to develop an extensive education infrastructure, which was admired by many contemporaries outside the country. Christophe’s interest in education was of long standing: as far back as 1805, he had strongly criticized Dessalines for his neglect of teachers, angrily proclaiming that this lack of support for schools exposed Dessalines as “a barbarian with no idea of civilization, incapable of regenerating the nation … merely a brutal soldier, happy only when surrounded by bayonets.” On taking power in 1807, Christophe declared that public education was—“after religion and liberty”—the most “precious” thing for any population, and that it would be “venerated” under his regime.38
It took most of a decade for Christophe to establish his education projects, and he was perhaps ultimately spurred on by a competitive urge: in 1816, Pétion recruited three teachers from France and created a prestigious secondary school, the Lycée de Port-au-Prince, which offered instruction in Latin, French, English, mathematics, navigation, history, music, and fen
cing. (Later renamed the Lycée Pétion, the school remains one of the elite institutions in Haiti, occupying, in the words of one historian, “the same place in the imagination of Haitians that Harvard does in that of Americans.”) Not to be outdone, Christophe asked Clarkson and Wilberforce to send teachers to the Kingdom of Haiti, and he established an ambitious system of public education that stretched from primary schools to university-level classes. He created a special chamber to oversee the educational system, launched plans to create textbooks designed specifically for Haitian students, inaugurated schools for women, and installed teachers in all of his military’s barracks, hoping in this way to educate his soldiers during their idle moments.39
The scope of Christophe’s educational initiatives soon far outstripped Pétion’s efforts. Between 1816 and 1820, thirteen schools were functioning in the Kingdom of Haiti. It is estimated that as many as 72,000 students attended school at some point during Christophe’s regime, which would have meant that nearly all the children in the kingdom received some public instruction. Christophe believed that Haitians would be better off if they learned to speak English rather than French, and a significant amount of the instruction focused on teaching that language at the primary level. In higher education, meanwhile, one of Christophe’s most lasting contributions was the creation of a chair of medicine in Le Cap, where a Scotsman named Duncan Stewart taught anatomy, disease treatment, and surgery. Stewart’s school was so successful that it was one of the few institutions to survive Christophe’s reign, for after his overthrow, the new president maintained Stewart in his post—though a “simulacrum” of an inauguration was held in order to make it seem that the new regime had actually created the post.40
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Not all of the assistance from Christophe’s British friends worked out quite so well. Hoping to increase the productivity of his kingdom’s plantations—and thus gather more money for building his forts, palaces, and schools—Christophe reached out to his abolitionist allies for technical advice on agricultural matters. Wilberforce was enthusiastic about the notion, becoming the first of many outsiders over the decades to support the idea that foreign expertise could help Haiti’s farmers and laborers become more efficient. He sent two plows to Haiti for demonstration purposes, along with two British plowmen to operate them. Clarkson was only a little more reticent, his main concern being that the transmission of technical knowledge might run up against linguistic difficulties. “I confess I cannot see how common ploughmen, who can only speak English, can instruct the Haytians, who can only speak French,” he wrote. What was needed, he went on, was “some middle man between the two, some very superior farmer, who should be able to speak French and English, and who should go about from farm to farm and explain to the Haytian farmer what the British ploughman wishes to communicate to him.” The plowman could then teach the Haitians the “most judicious application of husbandry to the soil, and in various other departments connected with that science.”41
We can imagine the slightly quizzical response of the residents in the north of Haiti as they encountered these foreign experts and their plows. As a contemporary account relates it, one of the plowmen had quite good luck: he was set up on a piece of land that been “prepared before his arrival,” and with the assistance of the plow the plot was “cultivated with a great saving of manual labor, and produced a most abundant crop.” The other Englishman, however, was placed further from Cap Haïtien, on a piece of land that needed to be cleared before it could be tilled. As a result, he needed “the assistance of a great number of laborers, in order to clear it of weeds, bushes, and cane roots before he could introduce his plough.” He was, it seems, working on the ruins of an old sugarcane plantation, which was perhaps why the soil proved to be “less fertile” than the plot farmed by his countryman—the intensive cultivation of cane having tapped out the land—and the use of the plow “gained nothing in point of labour, and nothing in produce.” Beset by difficulties and illness, tasked with carrying out an undertaking which was “likely to be the occasion of constant trouble and vexation,” the second plowman often “lamented ever having quitted England.” If he wondered what he was doing in Haiti, those who worked with him—heirs to a range of agricultural techniques that layered different crops on small plots, developed over generations to maximize productivity and minimize soil exhaustion—probably wondered the same thing.42
While these agricultural experiments were going on, Clarkson also liberally gave Christophe a great deal of advice—much of which sounds eerily familiar—about how to broadly reform Haiti’s social organization. What Haiti really needed, he told Christophe, was a middle class. Where might they find one? In the United States, Clarkson suggested, among the “persons of colour” who were free and owned some property. The advantage to Haiti of such immigration, he explained, would be that such settlers would come with wealth, and could therefore provide that “connecting medium between the rich and the poor and which is the great cause of prosperity in Europe, but which cannot at present have been raised up in your Majesty’s dominions.” The movement in favor of the emigration of free African Americans out of the United States was gaining steam—Liberia would be created in 1822—and Clarkson put Christophe in contact with Prince Saunders, an African American from Massachusetts who came to Haiti to explore the possibility of bringing settlers there. Saunders was fascinated by Haiti’s promise, and in 1818 he published in Boston a glowing description of Christophe’s kingdom and a commentary on its laws.43
Clarkson admitted that some American emigrants might have some trouble adjusting to Haiti. For one thing, being “free men” in the United States, they were “accustomed to go where they pleased in search of their livelihood without any questions being asked them or without any hindrance by the Government. No passports are ever necessary there.” That was not the case under Christophe’s regime, which policed movement assiduously: plantation laborers were, after all, required to stay on their plantations and could not move freely about looking for work. Immigrants might also, Clarkson acknowledged, miss the “advantage” of “being tried by a jury of their own citizens” if they were accused of a crime. Of course, African Americans might gladly have accepted these trade-offs to live in a country that, for all its problems, was at least free from the constant threat and exercise of white supremacy.44
Christophe was enthusiastic about the plans for emigration from North America, and he committed to funding the journeys of immigrants, but his reign came to an end before he could see the project through. In general, his kingdom was noted for being largely hospitable to foreign traders, investors, and tourists; many British and North American visitors came to his court and admired Sans-Souci and the Citadel. One nation, however, was not impressed: France. Indeed, the French government continued to insist that Christophe’s kingdom and Pétion’s republic were not, in fact, independent countries at all.
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More than a decade after the defeat of Leclerc’s forces, many exiled planters from Saint-Domingue still hoped to reverse what had happened and persistently lobbied for a new mission to reconquer the former colony. A number of them held powerful positions in the French government, and their pressure led France to officially insist that it still had a claim over Haiti. Other European nations, in turn, refused to extend recognition to Haiti until the former colonial power did so. Indeed, when Britain and France were negotiating an end to their conflict at the Congress of Vienna, the French signed an additional secret agreement with Britain specifically regarding Haiti. The British promised that they would not interfere if the French attacked their former colony; in return, France formally accepted Britain’s right to trade with Haiti.45
It was an astounding gesture—what right, after all, did France have to determine whether anyone traded with Haiti?—but it summed up the prevailing attitude at the time. Haiti’s declaration of independence was regarded by a surprising number of Frenchmen as just a temporary setback. Some of the former planters laid out
detailed military plans for taking back the colony, arguing that the disaster of the Leclerc expedition was a fluke, or else the result of mistakes that could be avoided by the next commander. Others focused on asking for increased financial restitution. The exiled planters had received some state assistance since they had fled Saint-Domingue during the revolution, but they wanted more. They demanded to be paid back for all the property the revolution had taken from them, including that most precious of property of all: the human beings, once enslaved, who had now become citizens of Haiti.
Some of the former colonists who aspired to return as masters were conservative royalists, committed not only to the old order of slavery but also to the structures of Old Regime France. For them, the Haitian Revolution was an example of the excesses of the French Revolution; Haiti, in their eyes, was the “last province of France still under the control of the Jacobins,” and one that should fall to the counterrevolution like all the other parts of France. They added, furthermore, that all European empires had a clear interest in uniting to crush Haiti—“whose existence, let us be frank, is shameful for all colonial governments.” “No one will accept, in the middle of the Caribbean, a foyer of revolt, a hideout for pirates and brigands, a school for revolution,” one former planter declared. Another argued that the Haitian state was an illegal entity, since it had been founded by slaves and the law had always forbidden slaves to own any property. For those who believed, as these planters did, that “slavery is inherent to the black race,” Haiti was an aberration, unnatural and untenable.46