1. 1820 -- 1843: The rule of Jean-Pierre Boyer
Bob Corbett
July, 1995
Quick overview of thesis and point: Earlier in my treatment of the rule of
Alexander Petion from 1807 until 1818, and now in continuation of the spirit of
that period with the presidency of Jean-Pierre Boyer, I want to present a picture
that says that these years were among the most important in establishing the
social, political and economic structure of the Haitian State. Further, after
trying to make this point now with Boyer (already having done so with Petion)
I will argue against a common popular view in the U.S. today, that the
international community has almost single handedly determined the Haitian
reality. I will give the reasons why I believe that this 1807-1843 period is
at least as important as any other phenomenon in Haitian history, if not the
singly most important set of events, in shaping contemporary Haitian history.
A preamble to this section which has less to do with this period that a sketch of
the background for why I think the views presented, were they accurate, would
have an important place in understanding the present.
Ah, I seem to have a penchant for putting my head on the chopping block. But
the above overview represents how I see the history and development of Haiti,
and whether it coincides with the political needs of the moment I don't know.
Nor do I really care. I may well be wrong about the historical analysis, and I
welcome discussion of that. I am quite aware that one cannot write an idealized
value-neutral historical analysis. But, I do work hard at abstracting from the
present in trying to understand the past. History, which is not my field of
specialization, has always been a tremendous love of mine. I have gone to
history to try to understand the present and because it is simply interesting and
fascinating in its own right. But I try very hard not to go to history to justify my
desires for the present.
I don't mean to suggest that the past does not influence my views of how to
understand the present and even what is best for the future. More than most
people I've ever met, I am convinced that to understand the present one must
see it in it's genesis. But what I am saying is that I don't believe in shaping my
view of the past to justify current political needs and desires, no matter how
noble those needs and desires may seem to me.

2. Why do I take time out to say these things? I worry that in some contemporary
historical analyses of Haiti there is a tendency, as I see it, to read Haitian
history in a way that is particularly scaled to serve current political views of
what is good and not good for Haiti, even if those historical views don't quite
fit the facts and events of that history.
I know that some of you were upset and unhappy with my review of Paul
Farmer's book since I charged him with that sort of history. Perhaps I was too
harsh on Farmer and took out on him, concerns that were wider than Farmer
himself. If I did this, and I may well have, I apologize to him and his book. But,
in general this tendency of using a carefully selected past to support particular
ideas of the present, where it seems to me the analysis of the
present precedes the analysis of the past and shapes the latter to the purposes of
the present, is a major factor in how many people analyze Haitian history.
On to the history of this period.
Perhaps the primary concern during the rule of Boyer was security. Perhaps his
greatest failure was security. He manifested his concern for security in three
notable ways.
1. After the death of Henry Christophe, Boyer was quite worried about the
rebellions military leaders in the north. He moved quickly and forcefully
against them and neutralized them, either killing them or bringing them
into his sphere of interest. He got his security there.
2. On November 30, 1821 Santo Domingo declared its independence from
Spain and became "Spanish Haiti." This relieved a weak threat to Boyer,
since he was concerned about Spain's presence just over his border.
However, this was an opportune time to be certain that Spain would not
come back, and a way to keep some of Christophe's officers busy. Boyer
led an invasion of Spanish Haiti, quickly conquering it and thus holding
the entire island in the name of Haiti.
3. This left the biggest nut for Boyer to crack in his search for security --
France. Boyer and all of Haiti lived on the edge, dreading and fearing the
return of the French, their colonial rule and slavery. Boyer wanted to get
the French threat off Haiti's back forever and to formally join the
company of nations of the world. He sued for recognition from France.
After many years of on and off again negotiations, Boyer finally agreed
to an outrageous French proposal. Haiti would pay: 150 million francs
within 5 years. Actually by the time it came down to this point in the
negotiations Haiti had little choice. This "offer" was given with 14

3. French warships in Port-au-Prince harbor, supported by nearly 500 guns.
It was clear to Boyer that were he not to concede to this "indemnity" that
France would immediately re-open hostilities. There was no realistic
way for him to defend against this force. He signed on July 11, 1825 and
France recognized the existence of Haiti.
It is hard to describe the level to which this debt crippled Haiti. After a few
years when Haiti couldn't pay, the debt was renegotiated down to 60 million
francs without interest, but even this debt strapped Haiti far beyond her means.
Between this debt and the Petion/Boyer land distribution system and the
resulting subsistence agriculture, Haiti's future was relatively fixed into a
pattern of simple and primitive life.
Boyer seemed to have finally gotten the security that he wanted. But, in
actuality, he had gravely undermined it. Instead of finally vanquishing his last
source of insecurity, France, he had unleashed a new and much more dangerous
one -- his own people.
Outraged at paying an indemnity to the former slave masters, and unwilling to
be taxed, the masses turned on Boyer and his mulatto government. Responding
to the pressures to repay the debt, on May 1, 1826, Boyer tried to generate
income and returned to the basic plan of fermage which Toussaint, Dessalines
and Christophe had used earlier. Boyer had a new Rural Code passed which
bound cultivators to their land and placed production quotas on them.
This was an impossible plan.
• The plantations, source of export levels of sugar cane, had been broken
up into smallholdings.
• With the accord having been signed with France, there was no longer a
fear of France, thus there was little to no motivation for rallying people
around some concept like national need.
• The army's power had been steadily weakening since the revolution and
was incapable of serious enforcement of the Rural Code.
The only real impact of the Rural Code was a very negative one, the
recognition of Petion's fait accompli. By giving the army the role of overseeing
the new code and exempting the towns from it, Boyer gave implicit recognition
of the two Haitis.
• A rural Haiti of black subsistence farmers ruled by a mainly black army.

4. • A mulatto urban life ruled by the official government of Haiti, a mulatto
government.
The basic class and color division of Haiti's different worlds was solidly in
place. The very social and economic structures that Boyer tried to change by
means of the Rural Code, he solidly reinforced.
Boyer's days were numbered. The formal revolt began on Jan. 27, 1843 under
the leadership of Charles Riviere-Herard, a black leader from the south. The
revolt, however, was wide spread and didn't only represent black discontent
with the state of things, but included young rising mulattos who wanted into
areas of power and wanted changes in the structure of the country.
The revolt was quick and successful and on Feb. 13, 1843 Boyer fled first to
Jamaica and later settled in France.
The end of the first phase of Haiti history came with the fleeing of Jean-Pierre
Boyer. However, the basic social, economic and social structures of Haiti were
fixed, and remain basically the same today as they were then.
Haiti's first 39 years produced a country that relied on subsistence farming on
small plots of land by the rural masses, controlled by an almost wholly black
army. A small urban elite, almost totally mulatto, controlled what economy
there was and the government. The economy was adequate to supply that small
elite with lifestyles of considerable wealth and ease.
Haiti today is in great struggle. There is a vehement call for fundamental
changes in the basic structures of government, privilege, economy and social
values. What is it that the increasingly vocal and powerful mass wants hanged?
It is basically the social system that the 1807-1843 rule of Alexander Petion
and Jean-Pierre Boyer nurtured into existence.
Many historians have pointed out that the international community has played a
crucial role in the shaping of Haiti's present. This is certainly true. It is difficult
to calculate the impact of the fact that from 1804 until 1826 no foreign nation
recognized Haiti's existence and that it was until the 1860s until Haiti came
more fully into the world of nations. How many investors were discouraged by
this situation, and how many were discouraged by the internal lack of security
in Haiti? How many trading partners turned away from Haiti who might have
stirred a desire for production? My own view is that there were plenty of
markets for Haiti's goods, but that the decisions of Petion and Boyer

5. encouraged and acquiesced in a form of life which produced few goods for
export.
The French debt was a major factor in the inability of Haiti to dig out from
under this economic weight and to recover anything like a normal economy.
However, the basic form of life as subsistence farming was already well
entrenched before the impact of the French debt was felt. The primary negative
impact of that debt came after the time of Boyer, or at least very late in his
regime, after the form of the economy and social system was fixed.
Lastly I want to return to the question: Isn't this system what the Haitian people
really wanted? And if so, shouldn't they have had what they wanted, regardless
of the consequences for later generations? I don't know the answer to either
question with any firm assurance, but I strongly suspect an answer of yes to
both questions. I've argued this case earlier.
Does democracy mean that people should be free to have what they want out of
life, whether or not it meets certain criteria of utility, or certain values of
material progress? Should people be free to choose to not progress, or to have a
different concept of progress than material progress? When is peace and
tranquility more important that keeping one's nose to the grindstone? Is a lack
of desire to work hard for material progress a sign of ignorance or
backwardness? I don't think so. It just seems to me a different set of values,
conditioned not by some ideal choosing in a vacuum, but a group of people
looking around at the actual conditions facing them in 1804 and choosing that
course of action that looked best to them.
For me the issue is not: Did they choose rightly. The issue is: Did they make
their own choice. I think they did, not from a position of power and strength,
but they chose what they thought was best for them given the situation they had
inherited.
HE RESULT OF THE PETION/BOYER YEARS:
SUBSISTENCE FARMING
Bob Corbett
July 10, 1995
Scholars are generally agreed that the decision and practice by Alexander
Petion, followed and reinforced by Jean-Pierre Boyer, to distribute land in
small units to the Haitian army and others to whom the state owed debts, was

6. instrumental in determining the economic and social structures of Haiti which
are still central factors of Haitian life today.
There is a good deal of debate as to why they did this. Was it, as some would
say, some sort of liberal desire to give the people what they wanted and spare
them anything like the hated fermage system which both Dessalines and
Christophe tried to enforce, or was it some more calculating method of
pacification of the masses and control by the elite few of resources adequate for
their own wealth?
This is a question that I won't address. Rather, I want to focus on something
that interests me much more -- that is, the seemingly universal judgment that
this policy of breaking up the large plantations, allowing sugar to effectively
die as an export crop and allow the nation to move into subsistence farming,
has been a disastrous policy which caused great mischief in Haiti.
I am one who is not convinced that this condemnation of the Petion/Boyer
policy is justified.
However, the negative judgment against Petion/Boyer is virtually universal.
James Leyburn in his important book THE HAITIAN PEOPLE expresses this
common sentiment in the following manner (assessing Petion): "His country
was rich when he came to power and poor when he died; united in 1806 and
divided in 1818. Candor compels his admirers to admit that many of the
calamities of the social and economic history of Haiti can be traced to Petion's
administration."
Leyburn's view is typical. Regardless of Petion's motives, the result of his
policy was a "calamity" for Haiti. It is this view that I want to challenge.
I believe that there is a nearly universal assumption among those who write
about Haiti, an educated western class of people, that material progress is
clearly a good and to be preferred over a more simple form of existence. In the
past 200 years the world has had the industrial revolution and more material
comforts are available to people than ever before in human history. It is surely
the case that such material change (I don't say progress) could not have
occurred within an agricultural economy, but only within an industrial one.
Yet I think the evidence is clear that the Haitian people wanted to retreat into
an agricultural subsistence economy. It is my reading of Haiti that for some
time, probably up to the turn of the century -- near 1900 -- that Haiti's land was
able to provide a simple subsistence to the masses of Haitian peasants that was

7. not a life of misery, but of simplicity. But things changed. Within this view that
I have four major factors tipped this precarious simplicity over into misery:
• Increasing population
• Decreasing land plot sizes (mainly from selling off ancestral land, or
having it expropriated, and by dividing it among all sons rather than
giving it to the oldest son
• Increasing share-cropper status of the peasant as they lost their land
(again, either from sale or expropriation)
• Decreasing land fertility due to poor farming methods.
However, if one returns to the beginnings of Haitian independence one finds a
people ready to try subsistence farming. They had just finished a long and
costly war of independence. They were no longer slaves. The overwhelming
bulk of them had been field hands in Saint-Domingue; they had farming and
gardening skills. The French, main landowners were either fled or dead. Much
land was simply there, its title somewhat unclear, and would, in fact, revert to
state ownership. Dessalines and Christophe attempted to enforce fermage, a
serf-like system onto the people and they knew they did not want this. It looked
much too much like slavery and enforced a discipline and hardship in life that
people did not want.
The population was small, probably not more than 350,000 people. The land
was phenomenally fertile. It was nearly a Jack-and-the-beanstalk land, throw
some seeds over your shoulder and tomorrow there were crops. With a
relatively small plot of land a man could provide for his family, the whole
family working the land together. African ways were remembered, revived.
If one compares the attractiveness of a simply life supported by subsistence
farming with the options that people had known -- the harsh colonial slave
system, or the similar system of fermage -- how could it possibly compare to
the seeming idyllic life of subsistence farming.
Further, the leaders of Haiti, north and south alike, expected the return of the
French. They wanted to have a standing army for national defense. Some did
willing choose this mode of life, but they were a small minority. Increasingly
the state turned to forced conscription into the military. The peasant had a
response: retreat deeper into the interior and try not to go "out" where the rest
of Haiti was. Women adopted the role of doing the marketing, in large measure
to protect the men from going into the towns where it was easier to round them
up in forced enlistment.

8. The new leadership of Haiti proved to be corrupt. The primary relation that the
peasant came to associate with government was that something negative would
happen. The strategy was: retreat and having nothing to do with "Haiti."
In effect it seems to me that two countries emerged, and I'm not referring to the
Kingdom of Christophe and the Republic of Petion. Rather, there was the "real"
country of Haiti, the constitutional government in force, which, while not
having international recognition, was the de facto government of Haiti, and
controlled the coastal towns and major markets of the countryside. Then there
was the borderless "Haiti at large," a largely anarchic world of peasants who
had retreated as far away from the Haitian government and lived a life beyond
the pale of formal law, commerce, and the western concept of development and
so-called progress.
They traded their right to live under government and the possibility of
participation in it, for the freedom to avoid its worst abuses. In exchange they
lived lives of pre-industrial simplicity, but, until the turn of the twentieth
century, not lives of misery.
Surely my portrait will be criticized as romantic. I think it is not. It is romantic
if one assumes that anything which is not striving for material aggrandizement
and which is satisfied with something significantly "less," (from the materialist
point of view) is romantic. I am not assuming that the simple life of subsistence
farming was easy or that it didn't have negative aspects. There was no modern
health care. There were herbal healers and faith healers, but the health of the
people suffered the lack of such modern achievements as inoculations, and
modern sanitary conditions including pure water and safe waste disposal. There
was no education and nearly everyone was (is) illiterate, a world that
necessarily closes in upon itself in a dangerous fashion for long-term survival.
(One example of this lack is that traditional agricultural practices were, in fact,
damaging the soil, and their deforestation activities were foreboding coming
disaster, but the people were not in a position to gather or process this
information.)
Life expectancy was 30 years shorter than ours is today. People had fewer
options to difference or change.
I am not hiding from these realities; thus I don't think my view is, in that sense,
romantic. However, given the conditions to which people were responding in
the 1804-1820 period, faced with the pressures from the north toward
regulation of life, and from both north and south for various forms of
exploitation, and from forced conscription, and given the utter weariness of

9. war, I see the choice of the people to retreat into an anarchistic simple life of
subsistence farming to be a quite reasonable choice.
It wasn't the only choice. They could have carried on the struggle, organized,
pressed the revolution and all that. But I think that alternative is much more a
paper alternative than a live option for most people. I again call attention to the
conditions I just listed in the paragraph above. Further, all those who had
provided the leadership, which allowed the common field hand, to participate
in the revolution, had now switched sides and were the ruling class of the new
Haiti. The masses of peasants were exhausted, tired of it all, and leaderless in
the face of a new oppression. The retreat into simple subsistence farming was
quite attractive.
Thus regardless of Petion's motives, I would argue that the people of Haiti
really and truly did get the best world they could realistically get at that time.
What ultimately caught up with them was their own success. The life of simple
subsistence farming, with all of the limits described above, was such that they
did prosper and increase and multiply. They didn't all die in great numbers (as
they had under slavery and during the revolution, and at other times when they
engaged the "country" of Haiti). Basically they did better when they opted out,
retreated into the fastness of the mountains, scaled down their expectations to
very simple ones, and survived. More than anything else, their own success
killed them as the land mass, their self-selected lack of education and creeping
exploitation from without, eventually turned their simplicity into misery.
Today the consciousness of the peasants of Haiti is not the consciousness of
1818. It is a mixed consciousness. Today's rural peasant still has a great deal of
the 1818 peasant in him or her. But he and she has a modern consciousness too,
an awareness of revolutionary potential, the desire for participation in
government, tremendous desire to participate in the materialist world,
especially health care, education and the goodies seen in the rest of the so-
called "advanced" world. There is no turning back, and that's not the point of
this essay. I'm not suggesting that the Haitians were better off because of the
results of the Petion/Boyer system and should return to it.
Rather, I just want to argue that it is in no way clear to me that life is all that
much better for the modern Haitian peasant than the peasant of the past. It is
not clear to me that the system of Petion/Boyer was such a calamity as Leyburn
and most scholars think it was.
It seems to me to have provided about the best realistic possibility for the
peasants at that time, was much to be desired over what Dessalines and

10. Christophe were offering, and was a wise choice for those who embraced it and
effectively withdrew from the country of Haiti.
Moving away from Haiti in this conclusion, you probably note a mixed view of
modern materialism and so-called progress. Yes. I've made the cultivation of
economic simplicity a liet motif of my own life, though what simplicity I did
achieve was inside a modern industrial state rather than outside. In my reading
and study I've spent a great deal of time looking at those who have, in one way
or another, to one degree or another, said no to unbounded materialism and all
that goes with it. I regularly teach courses in "the simple life" and will be doing
so again this fall.
I made no attempt to go primitive in my life. I embrace much of modern
medicine, but not all. I simply love flush toilets and potable running water. I
take my malaria pills when I go to Haiti. But for most of my adult life I didn't
own a car, or television set and for many years used central heat only as a
begrudging supplement to wood. I struggled to eat as low on the food chain as I
could stand, and eschewed as much as I could of mechanized materialism (with
the notable exception of the computer.) I have always been attracted to the view
that in significant measure the consumption of those of us who consume on the
high end of our planetary consumption system (and despite my flirting with
simplicity, I am one of those) are indirectly causative of much of the suffering
of those who under consume the basic necessities of life.
Thus, from within that perspective, when I look back on the 1807-1900 period
of Haitian history I don't see a "calamity" as Leyburn does. I see a choice that
was wise and understandable in its time, but one that outgrew itself and the
people were unable to change, both for reasons of powerlessness and lack of
understanding of what changes had taken place.
Independent of Petion's motives, I see him as having presided over the birth of
a social and economic system which provided the very best days that the mass
of Haitian peasants ever had in Haiti, and something better than they are likely
to experience again for a long time to come.