Haiti

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  If they were so vilified, of course, it was partly because they had been so successful. Through their social and cultural institutions, the rural population of Haiti managed to steadfastly refuse plantation labor and construct something else in its place. The ruling class—largely composed of men who had already owned significant amounts of land in 1804, either because they had been among the wealthier free people of color in Saint-Domingue or because their military rank had enabled them to acquire land during the revolution—found itself stymied when it tried to reproduce the colonial economy. Within a few decades of Haiti’s independence, many of its leaders had realized that they couldn’t rebuild the plantations or stop the country’s majority from pushing for land and autonomy. What they could do, however, was channel and contain that push, surround and stifle it. Unable to control the bodies or the work of the rural residents, Haitian elites instead focused on controlling the nation’s points of access to external markets: the port towns.

  As Michel-Rolph Trouillot put it, nineteenth-century Haiti became “a republic for the merchants.” By funding its activities almost entirely through the taxation of exports and imports, the government “persistently siphoned off the meager resources of the peasantry, so that this peasantry came to finance the state while having no control over it.” This arrangement created an enduring tension within Haitian society. The elites were able to retain their positions of wealth and power, but only by abandoning the drive for equality and liberty that had inspired Haiti’s revolution in the first place. The rural inhabitants, meanwhile, carved out their own way of life in the countryside, but came to regard the state as a largely predatory force, at its best when it was absent altogether. With neither side able to prevail and gain control of the entire country, the situation settled down into a grinding stalemate.43

  The government’s emphasis on the taxation of foreign trade had evolved gradually in the first decades of Haiti’s independence. During the Haitian Revolution, the state had taxed agricultural production in a simple way: a quarter of what was grown on each plantation was literally handed over, in kind, to local authorities, who then sold it themselves on behalf of the state. Since plantation labor and production were closely controlled, and many estates were run by military officers, this form of taxation was a fairly efficient and reliable means of collecting revenue. (Christophe used a similar system of taxes to support his plantation-based regime.) Such an approach, however, was much less well suited to the increasingly dispersed and scattered agricultural production of the early nineteenth century. Accordingly, when he became president in 1807, Pétion focused on levying duties on imports and exports, and by the time of Boyer’s regime, the Haitian government had come to depend exclusively on this form of taxation to raise money for the state. The import-export duties were collected not in the fragmented countryside but in the well-controlled port towns, where the coffee produced in the interior was sold to foreign merchants and exchanged for goods arriving from overseas. Indirectly, of course, the costs were still borne by the rural farmers, who received less for their export crops and paid more for the imported goods that they bought.44

  After sugar, coffee had been the second most important crop in colonial Saint-Domingue, and it became the key export for independent Haiti. Despite forceful attempts by Louverture, Christophe, and Boyer, large-scale sugar production never returned to the country. (A few scattered sugarcane fields always remained here and there, but they were mostly used for the production of rum.) Coffee, however, was a very different kind of crop: its cultivation and harvesting was less brutal, its processing less complicated. Rural Haitians after independence found coffee ideal because its production could be carried out on a small scale and sustained with little outlay of money. In parts of the country where old coffee plantations sat empty, rural residents could simply harvest beans from coffee trees that were growing wild. Coffee was also a useful crop because there was significant demand for it on the global market, and the Haitian product was of high quality. Indeed, it was the equivalent of today’s coveted shade-grown organic crops, with the label “St. Marc Coffee” considered a benchmark for quality throughout the world in the nineteenth century.45

  However, on the long journey of prime Haitian coffee from bean to cup, Haitians were generally able to take part in—and profit from—only the earliest stages of the process. There was good money to be made in the coffee business, and it drew foreign merchants to Haiti in large numbers. (Germans were especially well represented among these merchant ranks.) Because they offered essential access to transatlantic trade networks, the foreign merchants soon gained substantial control over Haiti’s export trade, becoming a powerful presence in Haitian society. Their interest in the country was entirely pecuniary: as Michel-Rolph Trouillot bluntly puts it, the merchants were essentially “uninterested in the fate of the nation.” Nonetheless, Haitian leaders—even as they publicly presented themselves as proud defenders of Haiti’s national sovereignty—increasingly allowed the foreign merchants to monopolize the country’s international commerce, on the theory that economic gains made through this alliance would be worth the price. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the power of foreign merchants in Haiti continued to increase, and they proved a constant source of economic pressure and political instability.46

  Meanwhile, the state became completely dependent on the taxation of exports for its own survival. “The peasant’s coffee was for the government,” quips one historian, “what the sheep’s wool is for the shepherd.” In 1810, 73 percent of government revenues had come from intake at customs houses; in 1842 that percentage was up to 92, and by 1881, duties on exports and imports comprised over 98 percent of state income. The indirect taxation was much less visible than direct levies, but it was also the opposite of a progressive taxation system, since it placed the heaviest burden on the country’s poor majority: the rural farmers, for whom export crops were—at least potentially—the most profitable product of their land. “The state was spending,” writes Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “but it was the peasant who was footing the bill.”47

  There was, of course, nothing unique to Haiti about merchants pursuing profits and the government imposing taxes on trade. What made the situation unusual was the fact that customs duties became nearly the only source of wealth in the society. After the breakup of the plantations, Haitians aspiring to riches and elite status no longer had the option of large-scale land ownership, and the dominance of foreign merchants made it difficult for Haitians to prosper in the import-export trades. That left control of the state as one of the few obvious sources of potential affluence and social advancement. The great number of aspirants to state power, in turn, made those who did have control of the state particularly concerned with holding on to their positions—which meant spending large amounts of money on the military and constantly compromising with the demands of foreign merchants and governments.48

  Was this what Louverture, Dessalines, and Boukman had had in mind as they fought to establish a new order? Many under Boyer’s regime felt as if the promise of liberty and dignity that had inspired the nation’s founding had turned into a strange, nightmarish farce. Their country, so hard won, was being handed over to outsiders all too eager to take control, or milked by elites who had little concern for the general welfare. They watched with alarm, fearing that the very generation that had secured Haiti’s independence was now allowing it to slip away.

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  By the 1830s, young activists in Haiti’s various port towns as well as in Port-au-Prince were increasingly bold in their challenges to Boyer’s rule. Opposition newspapers multiplied, attacking the government’s authoritarianism and demanding greater rights. Such attacks took courage. The activists knew that just a few years after Boyer became president, he had been harshly criticized by a writer named Félix Darfour, who accused Boyer of having “sold the country to the whites” through the indemnity agreement. Darfour wrote to the Chamber of Deputies, laying o
ut a series of grievances and complaining of the exclusion of darker-skinned Haitians from political power. In response, Boyer arrested Darfour and had him tried in a military court, even though Darfour had never been a soldier. Convicted of sedition, he was sentenced to death and executed.49

  A decade after Darfour’s death, however, the opposition press was flourishing, part of an increasingly vibrant public sphere in the country. Everyone, it seemed, had a plan for reforming Haiti. One writer lobbied for the abolition of Catholicism in favor of Protestantism and the abolition of French in favor of English. The Chamber of Deputies, meanwhile, was increasingly populated with critics of Boyer. Though it had little power to institute real reform, the Chamber often became a forum for passionate speeches against the president.50

  Among the most vocal members of the opposition was Hérard Dumesle. In 1832, a few years after publishing the account of his journey to the north of Haiti, he was elected deputy for Les Cayes and led the call for a profound reform of Haitian society, ranging from modernization of commerce to greater investment in public education. Boyer would have none of it and expelled Dumesle from political office. Dumesle continued to speak out, however. Within a few years, he was reelected, and was named president of the Chamber by the rest of the deputies. Victor Schoelcher, who was in Haiti at the time, characterized the choice as a “declaration of war” against Boyer. The president quickly cracked down, expelling Dumesle from the Chamber again, outlawing public meetings, and arresting opposition figures. When a local teacher and some of his students collected money to present Dumesle with a medal acknowledging his political service, the teacher was fired.51

  Under the 1816 constitution, all Haitian men over the age of twenty-one could participate in the local elections that chose parliamentary representatives. In 1841, however, Boyer raised the voting age to twenty-five, hoping to stall the electoral progress of the reformers. The political conflict was very much a generational one: although Dumesle was already in his sixties, many of his comrades and supporters were significantly younger. The older politicians in power were mostly veterans of the war of independence, and they depicted the reformers as young idealists who didn’t truly understand the threats Haiti faced. The reformers, meanwhile, saw those in power as a sclerotic group who used old glories to justify their stranglehold on the government even as they sold out the country—a corrupt, authoritarian regime unconcerned with Haiti’s national interests. Many young Haitians were thoroughly demoralized. “It seems as if there is no future,” Schoelcher noted on his visit, “there is no tomorrow.”52

  Though they came mainly from Haiti’s elite professional classes, the young reformers sought to create an alliance with the rural farmers who made up the majority of the population. At a time when some political leaders argued that Haiti should revoke the constitutional ban on ownership of property by foreign whites in order to attract international investment, the reformers fervently defended the prohibition. Foreign merchants and property owners, they argued, represented a threat to Haiti’s small farmers. An 1841 editorial proclaimed that giving foreigners access to land would be “fatal to our political existence”: outsiders would create large properties by absorbing smaller ones, which would mean returning to a kind of colonial rule. “They will be the masters and we the workers—they the exploiters and we the exploited.” Inspired by the ideas of Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, and other French radicals of the time, the young reformers imagined an alternative to the hierarchical labor relations of Boyer’s Code Rural: small farmers would form associations and cooperatives, gathering around “a central common” with buildings and factories that could be used collectively. What they were imagining was a kind of large lakou, albeit one that brought together not just an extended family but a broad community of laborers committed to growing crops for export in an egalitarian arrangement.53

  One young opposition member, the twenty-four-year-old James Blackhurst, tried to put these ideas into practice. Schoelcher, who visited Blackhurst’s experimental sugar plantation, noted that unlike other landowners in the area, Blackhurst was easily able to find laborers to work in the cane. The difference was that Blackhurst treated his workers well and lived “fraternally” among them, his dwelling as simple as the rest. “You are in the house of a peasant, sir,” he announced to his visitor. Blackhurst also ran his farm as a cooperative and didn’t keep too much of the profit for himself. What’s more, Schoelcher effused, the young reformer knew that “a society, like a field, gets overgrown with weeds when you don’t tend to it,” and he was planning on setting up a school at his farm. In the meantime, he periodically gathered all the “most intelligent” laborers and delivered lectures to them on various topics, sometimes inviting guests to give talks as well. Schoelcher saw hope for Haiti in Blackhurst and believed that his cooperative agricultural model might make it possible for the country to start exporting sugar to European markets once again.54

  Blackhurst’s experimental farm, just a few miles from the capital, openly flouted Boyer’s Code Rural, and was typical of increasingly bold actions on the part of the reformers. By the early 1840s, Boyer was facing challenges from all sides. In Santo Domingo, a rebellion against Haitian rule was gaining more and more popular support. At the same time, the Haitian government was struggling to deal with a mounting financial crisis. Then, in May 1842, a massive earthquake struck the northern part of the country, killing perhaps half the residents of Le Cap and demolishing the Sans-Souci palace. (Christophe’s massive Citadel was mostly undamaged.) The tremors were also felt in Port-au-Prince, and the dislocation and suffering caused by the disaster increased the sense of crisis in the country. In the face of these calamities, the government seemed “without will and without means,” and its inaction was strongly criticized by the opposition.55

  In the election of 1842, the reformers won a majority in the Chamber of Deputies. Boyer’s response was unsubtle: he placed troops in front of the parliament with orders to admit no one but his supporters. Led by Hérard Dumesle, the excluded parliamentarians created the Society for the Rights of Man and the Citizen and organized a series of dinners and meetings. The gatherings at Dumesle’s home, outside the southern town of Les Cayes, culminated in a proclamation that attacked Boyer’s regime as well as the 1816 constitution upon which it was based. The “vicious” constitutions, the manifesto declaimed, had made it too easy for leaders to forget the fundamental truth: that the people were the real sovereigns of the nation. The document crystallized sentiments that were shared widely throughout Haiti’s towns and villages. As desire grew throughout the country for a more liberal political order, activists converged on Les Cayes to plan a revolution.56

  In January 1843, the Les Cayes insurgents, led by Dumesle and his cousin Rivière Hérard, announced that the fortieth year of Haitian independence would be the “first year of the Regeneration.” Taking up arms, they marched on the nearby town of Jérémie, which harbored a garrison of government troops, but the town’s population welcomed them warmly and the army regiments joined the uprising instead of fighting it. When Boyer sent reinforcements from Port-au-Prince to crush the revolt, those troops did the same thing. A British officer reported that when one group of soldiers was ordered to attack the rebels, they “refused to fire upon their countrymen and, when repeatedly urged to advance by their Commandant, they went over in a body, and recommended to the General if he valued his life to make the best of his way back to Head Quarters.” The rebellion, in fact, was strikingly peaceful, consisting largely of speeches and mass protests in the streets rather than armed conflict. “This extraordinary mode of revolutionizing a Country,” the British officer wrote, “with scarcely any of the attendant scenes of Bloodshed, rapine and violence (so common in such cases in European Civilized Countries),” presented “a case almost unparalleled in History.” Urban women played a major role in the revolution, speaking out in favor of the uprising and taking part in military operations. During one of the rare pitched battles, a group
of women dragged two cannon from a fort outside of Léogâne and set them up to fire on Boyer’s advancing troops, killing thirty soldiers. Later, Boyer himself was surrounded by a “disturbance of women, who followed him and cursed him, abusing him in the most scathing manner.” Within two months, Boyer abdicated, going into exile in Jamaica. His palace in Port-au-Prince was invaded and looted, with furniture smashed and portraits of the departed president destroyed. Hérard Dumesle led a triumphant march into Port-au-Prince, greeted with “delirious enthusiasm” by the population.57

  It was a remarkable democratic explosion, the greatest the country had seen since the days of the Haitian Revolution. “Democracy,” one contemporary observer wrote, “flowed full to the brim. And what democracy!” While the movement did not actually include all segments of Haitian society—the main actors were residents of cities and towns, and the leaders were largely professionals—it nevertheless represented a significant break with Boyer’s enclosed and authoritarian system of power. After two decades under his leadership, urban Haitians enthusiastically and fervently debated alternative forms of government, from “American federalism” to the more centralized model of postrevolutionary France. Many wanted to organize town meetings that would choose representatives and produce legislation. One newspaper effused that such meetings would become “the great occupation of the national elite, the rendezvous of the enlightened, the intelligent and the capable,” creating an “immense” good in the society. The U.S. consul in Les Cayes, who watched the movement develop, reported back approvingly, noting his belief that the reforms would ultimately benefit American commerce and U.S. relations with Haiti in general.58