Slavery & Abolition

A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies

ISSN: 0144-039X (Print) 1743-9523 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsla20

Making freedom work: the long transition from

slavery to freedom during the Haitian Revolution

Philippe Girard

To cite this article: Philippe Girard (2019) Making freedom work: the long transition from
slavery to freedom during the Haitian Revolution, Slavery & Abolition, 40:1, 87-108, DOI:
10.1080/0144039X.2018.1452683

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2018.1452683

Published online: 22 Oct 2018.

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SLAVERY & ABOLITION
2019, VOL. 40, NO. 1, 87–108
https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2018.1452683

Making freedom work: the long transition from slavery to

freedom during the Haitian Revolution
Philippe Girard

ABSTRACT
The 1791 slave revolt in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and the first
French abolition of slavery in 1793–1794 are generally seen
as epochal events that redefined labor relations in the
French Caribbean. But a close analysis of the labor codes
promulgated during and after the Haitian Revolution
indicates that elites were eager to reconcile the ideal of
universal freedom with the needs of plantation agriculture,
resulting in a succession of oppressive labor systems that
subsisted until the 1820s.

On 29 August 1793, Year II of the French Republic, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax,

France’s commissioner in the colony of Saint-Domingue, issued a formal procla-
mation in the city of Cap-Français. To the people assembled before him – most
of them black or mixed-race, the bulk of the white population of Cap-Français
having fled during an outbreak of political violence two months earlier – Sontho-
nax announced that ‘all blacks and mixed-race people who are currently
enslaved are now declared free.’1 The event marked the first time that a colonial
power had abolished slavery in the New World.
After two centuries of relative neglect, historians are now paying close atten-
tion to the first French abolition of slavery, focusing more particularly on the
issue of causation.2 Situating the events of the Haitian Revolution within the
general context of the French Revolution, some scholars have described eman-
cipation in Saint-Domingue as an expansion of European Enlightenment ideals
(Laurent Dubois, Nick Nesbitt, Sibylle Fischer), the product of contentious leg-
islative debates in the French parliament (Yves Bénot), or the unilateral decision
of French administrators like Sonthonax (Jeremy Popkin). Others, refusing to
give France undue credit for a victory won by the Afro-Caribbean slaves who
had initiated the Haitian Revolution in 1791, prefer to stress local agency; that
school is further divided between ‘great men’ historians who emphasize the
genius of revolutionary heroes like Toussaint Louverture (Aimé Césaire) and
‘bottom up’ historians who view rank-and-file rebels as the only true revolution-
aries (Carolyn Fick, Jean Fouchard, Michel Rolph-Trouillot).3

CONTACT Philippe Girard girard@mcneese.edu Department of History, McNeese State University, Ryan St.,
Lake Charles, LA 70609-2860, USA
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
88 P. GIRARD

This debate on the coming of emancipation presupposes that the initial slave
revolt of 1791 and Sonthonax’s abolition proclamation of August 1793 marked a
sharp break between two distinct labor systems, one based on human bondage
and the other on individual liberty – ‘in a single night,’ writes Nesbitt, the
Haitian rebels created a society dedicated to ‘undivided universal human
rights.’4 But the distinction was not so clear-cut, not even to the man generally
credited with abolishing slavery in Saint-Domingue: the French commissioner
Sonthonax. After an idealistic preamble in which he invoked the Declaration
of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to denounce the immorality of
slavery, his proclamation went on to sharply limit the practical effects of eman-
cipation. Slaves would now become ‘cultivators’ (art. 16), who would be paid and
could no longer be whipped, but who would continue working on their planta-
tion of origin under a series of mandatory one-year contracts. Idleness and
vagrancy would be punished by sentences ranging from one month of prison
to one year of forced labor. ‘Do not think that the liberty from which you are
about to benefit will be a state of laziness and idleness,’ Sonthonax admonished
the newly minted freedmen. ‘In France, everyone is free, and everyone works.’
Freedom entailed rights as well as duties.
Over the years that followed the 1793 proclamation, the debate over the legal
status of freedmen continued to dominate the French and colonial political land-
scapes. Revolutionary ideals demanded a departure from past labor practices,
but the economic future of the colony and the credibility of abolitionist prin-
ciples also required that the staffing needs of the plantations be met. Many colo-
nial experts, including progressive figures like Sonthonax, doubted the viability
of a plantation system relying entirely on free labor; the strength of the anti-abol-
ition party in Europe and the Caribbean also meant that liberty’s apparent
triumph was never assured. Abolition had to work, even if this meant circum-
scribing the rights of freedmen, or the enemies of liberty would cite social
chaos and economic decline in Saint-Domingue as proof that African free
labor was impracticable.
This predicament resulted in a series of labor codes that, like Sonthonax’s
1793 proclamation, narrowly defined liberty in the name of economic and pol-
itical pragmatism. In many ways, these codes were more historically significant
than the tracts and treatises on the philosophical merits of abolition published
during the Age of Enlightenment: they were actual policy decisions that
impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands of Caribbean workers, not just dis-
cussion topics for Parisian salons. And yet, these labor codes, which are dis-
persed in a variety of archives on both sides of the Atlantic, have been studied
far less extensively by historians than the published works of abolitionist thin-
kers which are more readily accessible.5
These codes generally fell short of outright freedom, which forces us to reex-
amine the abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue: more than an event that can
be associated with a specific revolt or proclamation (Nesbitt’s ‘single night’), it
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 89

was a contentious process that lasted decades and outlasted the French and
Haitian Revolutions. The limitations of the Revolution have generally been
well understood in Haiti, where scholars have long complained of the ‘capora-
lisme agraire’ (agrarian militarism) imposed by self-interested black officers
after they seized power.6 By contrast, academics outside Haiti, who wish to cele-
brate the Haitian Revolution as the only successful slave revolt in world history,
tend to downplay the continuity between pre- and post-revolutionary labor
practices.7 When analyzed in systematic fashion, the labor codes clearly
support the Haitian school. Further, these labor codes were promulgated by
the elites of the colony while their implementation was opposed by reluctant
field hands, which supports the historiographical school that describes the
Haitian Revolution as a ‘Revolution from below’ (Fick) in which liberty was
won by field hands rather than handed down by great historical figures,
whether white, black, or mixed-race.
**********************
The writings of the Enlightenment provided little guidance on the contours of
the post-emancipationist order. Eighteenth-century philosophers made a con-
vincing case that slavery was a moral abomination that was incompatible with
the principles of the rights of man (Henri Grégoire, Nicolas de Condorcet); an
economic aberration that cost more than free labor (Pierre du Pont de
Nemours, Anne Turgot, Adam Smith); and a perilous social system likely to
end in a slave revolt and the massacre of the white planters (Guillaume
Raynal, Louis Mercier). But these authors were less persuasive when explaining
why former slaves would continue to work in the absence of compulsory
measures like the whip. Material gain was the sole motivator under Smith’s capi-
talist model, but critics predicted that in islands where land was plentiful, such as
Saint-Domingue, former slaves would choose subsistence agriculture on their
own plots over salaried work on sugar plantations. In response, some abolition-
ists proposed to promote a taste for luxury products among black workers, thus
giving them an incentive to earn a salary. Others, convinced that there would
never be enough willing black workers, proposed to reinstate white indentured
servitude or to generalize the use of labor-saving devices like the plow. None of
these arguments was particularly compelling.8
It did not help that most opponents of slavery were theorists who had never
set foot on a Caribbean plantation. Condorcet wrote his Réflexions sur l’esclavage
des nègres (1781) under the pseudonym of a fictional Swiss pastor who had never
met a Caribbean slave and expected his opponents to dismiss his proposals as
‘chimerical ideas.’ Indeed, Condorcet denounced the immorality of slavery
with great sophistication but only spent 1 of 12 chapters describing the actual
labor system that should be adopted after emancipation. Doubting the black
workforce’s intelligence (‘Negroes are in general of great stupidity’) and rever-
ence for law and order (‘one may fear that [free] Negroes … may not be con-
trolled’), he proposed to abolish slavery gradually over a period of 40–50
90 P. GIRARD

years. In the transition period, blacks would be subjected to a ‘strict discipline

regulated by laws,’ which were not spelled out in the text.9
Public servants in the French Ministry of the Navy and Colonies were better
versed in colonial matters and introduced more specific proposals for labor
reform in the 1780s. But they worked for a government with a financial stake
in the trade of colonial crops, and so they merely proposed to modify the
laws regulating slavery in French colonies, known as the Code Noir, not
abolish slavery. By outlawing the most egregious cases of labor abuse, they
hoped to ensure slavery’s long-term survival.10
Proponents of slavery capitalized on the abolitionists’ lack of alternative labor
models. As the eighteenth century progressed and the Enlightenment’s critique
of slavery became more pointed, planters found it increasingly hard to defend
the morality of that institution. So they cleverly shifted the debate to practice
rather than theory, knowing full well that their opponents were on shaky
ground when it came to the economic realities of colonial agriculture. Slavery
might lead to occasional abuses, they conceded, but there was no other way to
grow crops in a tropical environment when the climate was so deadly for
white workers and African laborers only worked under duress according to a
growing body of pseudo-scientific racial speculations. Merely mentioning the
word ‘freedom’ was too risky in a society where people of color often outnum-
bered whites 20 to 1. Emancipation, they predicted, would lead to economic ruin
and political chaos. ‘Without slavery, no colonies’ became the colonists’ rallying
cry. ‘It is not slavery that I support, but work, without which there can be no
production,’ explained one writer.11 Another purported to show ‘maybe not
its legitimacy [of slavery], but at least its great usefulness, and even its neces-
sity.’12 Another declined ‘to examine if owning humans is legitimate, but it is
surely advantageous.’13 Many of these writers were planters who wrote with
the confidence of grizzled veterans who knew plantation agriculture from per-
sonal experience and could dismiss their critics as naïve European liberals.
The marquis de Lafayette, who had experienced slavery firsthand during the
American War of Independence, was the rare abolitionist who tried to tackle the
practical aspects of ‘the day after.’ Spurred on by Condorcet, he purchased a
plantation in French Guiana (Guyane) to prove that free black labor was a prac-
tical scheme.14 It was also in French Guiana that the French commissioner
Daniel Lescallier proposed to tie freedmen to the land in exchange for a percen-
tage of a plantation’s profits, thus anticipating the system that would eventually
be adopted after emancipation.15 But Lafayette’s experiment was interrupted by
the French Revolution and Lescallier’s proposal was not immediately
implemented.
In the absence of a detailed framework for a post-emancipation labor system,
the Société des Amis des Noirs, an abolitionist lobby founded in 1788, focused
on the immediate abolition of the slave trade and equal rights for free people of
color while relegating the issue of abolition to a more distant and hazier future.16
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 91

Jacques Brissot de Warville, who traveled to the United States on the Société’s
behalf in 1788 to get a first-hand look at slavery, came back convinced that
emancipation was both necessary in the long term and difficult to implement
in the short term. ‘Time and patience’ would be required, George Washington
told Brissot when they met.17 The beginning of the French Revolution
changed nothing in the Société’s thinking. ‘The rights of man, conceded brus-
quely to those who do not know its duties, could become a deadly gift,’ explained
the Société’s most celebrated member, Henri Grégoire, in 1790.18
It was the unexpected outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 that revived
the debate on the post-abolitionist labor order: for the first time, emancipation
became a fact in a colony with an enslaved population of half a million individ-
uals. Would liberal economists be right? Would slaves work harder if offered a
salary? Or would racists be right? Would Africans yield to their alleged incli-
nation for laziness and barbarism? Saint-Domingue could thrive economically
and politically, as abolitionists hoped, or it could succumb to poverty and
chaos, as critics expected, which would undermine the entire abolitionist move-
ment. As the first Caribbean colony to experience abolition, Saint-Domingue
became a test case for emancipation and observers on both sides of the Atlantic
closely followed events in the colony.19 Prosperity and social order were the two
criteria by which the practicality of black liberty would be measured.
The first years of the Haitian Revolution were not encouraging on either
count. Rebel slaves often killed their masters during the initial 1791 slave
revolt, after which Saint-Domingue was plagued by years of political upheaval
compounded by invasions by Spain (1793–1795) and Britain (1793–1798). Pro-
duction also plummeted. Contemporary accounts must be read carefully
because, depending on their political leanings, authors often tried to dramatize
black on white violence (or minimize it) and to emphasize the collapse of the
plantation system (or deny it). But there is little doubt that Saint-Domingue
became less orderly and less productive in the 1790s: five years after the 1791
slave revolt, the value of colonial crops produced in Saint-Domingue had
declined by 98%, from a high of 226 million colonial livres in 1789 to a low
of 4 million colonial livres in 1796.20
White colonists were not the only elite figures to express concern. Georges
Biassou and Jean-François Papillon, who led the two main rebel forces in the
north of Saint-Domingue in 1791–1793, also feared the breakdown of law and
order on plantations. Remarkably, they did not immediately embrace the goal
of universal abolition and instead strove to maintain production levels on the
plantations under their control – albeit under black leadership. Toussaint Lou-
verture, who served under Biassou until 1794, gave orders to force servants ‘to go
back to their duty’ and proposed to ‘go on an inspection tour every week to
restore order’ on plantations.21 The conservatism of the rebel leaders on labor
matters reflected their economic and strategic interests: they took over the
estates of white planters during the revolt and then smuggled tropical crops
92 P. GIRARD

into Spanish Santo Domingo to pay for imports of ammunition. Their reluc-
tance to abandon the plantation system also reflected the social and gender
divide separating a rebel leadership that was predominantly male, créole, and
formerly employed in leadership and technical roles on pre-revolutionary plan-
tations, from rank-and-file rebels who were often female, bossales (African-
born), and former field hands. ‘All these negresses should work,’ explained a
rebel leader to justify his reliance on forced labor.22
Gaining the respect of white elites was another objective of the rebel leader-
ship. This could be achieved by managing plantations as effectively as white
planters. This quest for legitimacy gained urgency when France sent large
reinforcements to Saint-Domingue in 1792 and the rebel leaders, fearing
defeat, sought the support of Spanish authorities in Santo Domingo. To prove
themselves to their Spanish overlords, Biassou and his aide-de-camp crafted a
detailed program to ensure that the areas they placed under Spanish control
would ‘submit exactly to the discipline of His Catholic Majesty.’ To that
effect, they proposed to raise an army of 7200 black soldiers and to send all
the black men who did not serve in the army, as well as all women and children,
back to work on their plantation of origin. The pre-revolutionary social order
would be altered in one crucial aspect: the racial identity of the planter class.
White planters would be banned from returning to the colony, a black
manager would oversee each plantation, and revenue from the plantations
would finance the king’s army, which is to say Biassou and his black officers.
This rarely read document, preserved in the Spanish archives in Simancas,
was in effect Saint-Domingue’s first post-revolutionary labor code. The militar-
ization of the plantation labor force for the benefit of a new elite of black officers
remained the norm as long as Spain controlled parts of Saint-Domingue with the
assistance of rebel leaders (1793–1795).23
It was in part to gain the support of rank-and-file rebels during the war
against Spain that Sonthonax, who governed the areas of northern Saint-Dom-
ingue still under French control, formally abolished slavery in August 1793. But
his proclamation was crafted carefully to avoid losing the support of other con-
stituencies such as white colonists, who already viewed him as too liberal, the
French government, which had instructed him to maintain slavery, and free
people of color, many of whom owned slaves. That tension is reflected in the
proclamation, which was translated into various languages to reach different
audiences. Though they employed the same formatting and looked identical,
the original French version, which was intended for colonists, the French gov-
ernment, and elite free people of color, differed from the version in Haitian
Kreyòl that was read aloud to freed slaves. The French preamble was much
longer than the Kreyòl preamble and referred extensively to Vincent Ogé, a
quadroon executed in 1791 for advocating equal rights for free people of
color, and the law of 4 April 1792 that had eventually granted them those
rights. Leaving aside philosophical considerations and the issue of free-colored
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 93

rights, the Kreyòl version instead emphasized black freedom and encouraged
black rebels to swear off their allegiance to the king of Spain: ‘it’s the king
who makes slaves, it’s the French Republic which frees you.’ The labor code
itself was more accurately translated, though often in a way that simplified
complex legal matters, as if talking down to a child, and that could be downright
misleading: in French, art. 38 specified that ‘the dispositions of the Black Code
remain temporarily abrogated’ while the Kreyòl version promised that ‘we won’t
treat Blacks like before: we destroy the ordinances of the king that allow this’
(emphasis added). The French version was often tentative and apologetic
while the Kreyòl version was a ringing endorsement of freedom. This was
likely to create problems once field hands who were convinced that they had
gained full freedom faced plantation managers who were eager to exploit the
law’s equivocating clauses.24
Convincing freedmen to continue working after the abolition of slavery was
Sonthonax’s main concern. To do so, he relied on tangible incentives such as
a share of the crop and the threat of prison time. He also enlisted the power
of language and symbols: he replaced the terms ‘planter,’ ‘slave,’ and ‘comman-
der’ (slave driver) with ‘landowner,’ ‘cultivator,’ and ‘conductor’ in his code, and
he asked that the abolition proclamation be read to plantation workers by envoys
carrying a pike topped by a Phrygian cap, an allegory of liberty that is now part
of the coat of arms on the Haitian flag (Figure 1). Finally, Sonthonax reminded
freedmen that slavery remained in effect in the regions occupied by Spain and
Britain: in such an uncertain strategic environment, it was wise to comply
with his labor code to give emancipation a good name and ensure its long-
term survival. Everywhere, enemies of the blacks were convinced that ‘a freed
African will no longer work,’ he explained. ‘Prove them wrong.’
Convincing white skeptics was another priority. To dispel abolitionists’ naïve
reputation in conservative circles, Sonthonax was careful to portray his policies
as pragmatic. In a private letter to the French commissioners assigned to other
areas of the colony, he explained that his code was ‘as politically necessary as it
was just.’25 His code also maintained gender and social hierarchies. Plantation
workers would split a third of the crop as salary but skilled workers, who
were usually Creole men, would receive two or three shares, while field hands,
who were usually African-born, would only receive one share, and women
would only receive two thirds of a share.
Étienne de Polverel was France’s commissioner in the western province of
Saint-Domingue, and later in the southern province as well. A long-time advo-
cate of abolition, he had begun in early 1793 to take small steps toward a gradual
transition from slavery to free labor. The emancipation decree signed by Sontho-
nax in August 1793 forced him to act more decisively and Polverel abolished
slavery in the west and south of the colony in September–October 1793. His
extremely detailed labor code, which he published in February 1794, began
with reminders about the importance of plantation agriculture and admonitions
94 P. GIRARD

Figure 1. J. Barlow, ‘View of a Temple erected by the Blacks to Commemorate their Emancipa-
tion,’ in Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (London: Albion
Press, 1805), 218.

against ‘abusing liberty,’ reflecting contemporary concerns about economic

decline and social instability. Unusually, his code called for payments in cash
rather than a share of the crop and allowed work contracts ranging from one
year to as little as a day, but work remained a requirement, and uncooperative
field laborers could be sentenced to unpaid forced labor for periods ranging
from one to six months.26
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 95

Sonthonax and Polverel had been sent from France to quell the slave revolt,
not abolish slavery, so Sonthonax sent six representatives to France in 1793 to
obtain the government’s blessing for his actions. Upon arriving in Paris in Feb-
ruary 1794, one of the deputies made a long and apologetic speech to the French
parliament to present abolition as a necessary and limited response to the ‘press-
ing’ military situation. ‘The proclamation, while declaring their freedom, forces
them to reside on their former plantation, and subjects them to a severe disci-
pline as well as daily work for a set salary,’ he added in reference to field
hands. ‘They are in a way tied to the soil.’27 But the French parliament’s
response, in keeping with pre-revolutionary philosophical discourse, was far
more idealistic than practical. The deputies considered it dishonorable to even
debate the issue of slavery and confirmed the abolition decree at once. The
resulting law of abolition, a mere two sentences long, was as straightforward
as it was cursory: abolition would take effect in all French colonies, not just
Saint-Domingue; all freedmen, even those who were African-born, would
become citizens of France.28 The law mentioned no transition period or
financial compensation. No labor code was provided either, not even in the
instructions drafted later by the Ministry of the Navy for the benefit of Sontho-
nax and other colonial agents.29
Because France offered little guidance on how to implement the February
1794 law of abolition and because the naval war with England isolated the
metropole from its empire, it was up to local officials to determine how abolition
would work in each colony. With remarkable consistency, from Guadeloupe to
French Guiana, they adopted an intermediate model of free but forced labor
modeled after Sonthonax’s 1793 proclamation. The exceptions were Martinique,
which was under British occupation at the time, and Réunion, where planters
rejected emancipation outright.30
Despite constant leadership changes, the cultivator system remained in effect
in Saint-Domingue throughout the Revolution. Étienne Laveaux, who served as
governor from 1793 to 1797, issued regulations on 12 January 1794 that ‘forced
… all cultivators to return to the plantation of their former owners, and work
there.’31 André Rigaud, a mixed-race officer who oversaw a quasi-independent
regime in southern Saint-Domingue until 1800, passed a labor code in Septem-
ber 1794 that awarded workers a third of the crop if they worked nine days out of
every décade (the 10-day week of the new revolutionary calendar). Those who
only worked 8 days out of 10 would only get a fourth of the crop, and those
who worked 7 days or less would get nothing (the norm for slaves before the
Revolution had been 5 or 6 days of field work per 7-day week). If this graduated
pay scale was not enough to motivate workers, Rigaud added that he was ready
to employ ‘means of authority’ to enforce compliance.32 Implementation
remained difficult, workers resisted by fleeing to coastal islets, and five years
later Rigaud was still complaining of the cultivators’ ‘license and laziness,
96 P. GIRARD

which are a rather ordinary consequence of the sudden passage from slavery to
liberty.’33
The willingness of colonial leaders of all races to employ legal and physical
compulsion to maintain the plantations’ output reflected the fragility of the
post-emancipation order. Resistance on the part of former slaves was constant;
production levels were subpar. French archives contain countless letters in
which French officials underline the difficulty of convincing former slaves to
work. One was sent by Sonthonax on 10 September 1793, just 10 days after
his historic abolition proclamation.34 Conservative critics were quick to high-
light those problems and bitter debates on the impact of abolition broke out
in the French parliament in 1795 and 1797. For Vincent Viénot de Vaublanc,
the planter who led the conservative faction in Paris, experience had proved
that emancipation was unworkable. ‘Everywhere negroes have stopped cultiva-
tion,’ he complained, and power had fallen into the hands of ‘ignorant and
brutish negroes who are incapable of distinguishing between rowdy license
and an austere liberty governed by laws.’ Instead of being freed overnight,
slaves should have been brought gradually from slavery to ‘dependency’ and
then finally ‘liberty.’35 Toussaint Louverture, who had switched from the
Spanish to the French army in 1794 and had become the most powerful
figure in northern Saint-Domingue, replied that black rebels were less violent
than the planters who had oppressed them and that the colonial economy was
well on its way to recovery. Only on one issue did he find common ground
with Vaublanc: because abolition had been too sudden, many people of color
‘lack the knowledge required to take over [skilled] jobs,’ forcing him to
employ whites in his administration as a stopgap measure.36
Louverture prevailed in the 1797 debate, but it was clear that emancipation
would not be widely accepted until order reigned and the economy rebounded.
The cultivator system, far from being eased out over time, instead became more
stringent to address the criticisms of Vaublanc. Gabriel de Hédouville, who
became France’s agent in Saint-Domingue in 1798, issued his own code upon
taking office. After making the customary pledge that cultivators should ‘get
rewarded for their work’ but also punished for their ‘laziness and nonchalance,’
he embraced the labor laws of his predecessors, with two significant differences:
the cultivators now only shared one-fourth of the crop, down from one-third,
and they had to sign three-year contracts with their employer, up from one
year.37
Louverture criticized Hédouville’s labor code to gain the support of the black
population but his own approach to labor regulations was just as strict. In the
areas he reconquered from the Spanish and British, he ordered cultivators
back to work. A decree he issued in the region of Verrettes, for example, stipu-
lated that ‘work is necessary … Vagrants will be arrested and punished.’38 Lou-
verture also complained to a white general of ‘the bad way that universal liberty
was proclaimed’ in Saint-Domingue, which is to say too abruptly.39
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 97

Louverture initially tried to cultivate voluntary support for his economic

agenda. To do so, he reused the arguments first made by Sonthonax in 1793,
which had become a fixture of official rhetoric at public festivals. When you
revolt, he told a group of reluctant cultivators on the Andro plantation in
1796, you convince ‘enemies of our liberty’ that when blacks are freed ‘they
stop working and only commit theft and murders.’40 Working diligently was a
more effective way to defend one’s freedom than rebelling. He also switched
languages according to his audience, speaking to field hands in Kreyòl or the
West African Fon language, which he had learned from his parents, while
defending abolition in formal French-language pamphlets intended for the intel-
lectual elite in Paris. But his increasing reliance on violence as years passed
hinted that moral suasion had failed and that he no longer expected voluntary
compliance from workers.
After expelling Hédouville and the British in 1798, then defeating Rigaud in
1800, Louverture became Saint-Domingue’s sole ruler and he issued a new labor
code in October 1800. Like his predecessors, he railed against vagabonds and
made paid work a requirement. More unusual was the overt militarization of
plantation work: Louverture explicitly compared field laborers to soldiers and
running away to desertion, which implied that marronage was punishable by
death. He also instructed his generals to oversee plantation work: his second-
in-command, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who became inspector of cultivation in
the west and south, was particularly feared for his harshness. Several clauses
of Louverture’s 1800 code applied specifically to female cultivators, who had
become the majority of the workforce now that many men had died in the Revo-
lution or enlisted in the army. Among other restrictive measures, women were
barred from entering army barracks so that they could not foster alliances
with the male soldiers charged with disciplining them.41
After annexing Santo Domingo in January 1801, Louverture informed the
slaves of that colony that they would now enjoy their ‘liberty’ and receive a
fourth of the crop as salary, just as in Saint-Domingue. But he immediately
added that field hands would ‘work, even more than before; remain obedient;
and do their duty with diligence, being fully determined to punish severely
those who do not.’42 His labor policies were so strict in practice that contempor-
ary Spanish planters were unsure whether he had actually abolished slavery in
Santo Domingo.43
The laws passed by Louverture in 1801, which now applied to all of Hispa-
niola (Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo), further restricted labor rights. In
February, he banned sales of plots smaller than 50 carreaux (160 acres) to main-
tain the integrity of large estates and prevent field workers from acquiring sub-
sistence farms.44 In July, he restated in a constitution that ‘slavery is forever
abolished’ (art. 3) but also banned any ‘change of domicile’ (art. 16), which effec-
tively tied laborers to their plantation for life, like medieval serfs, when the law
had only required three-year contracts since 1798.45 In September, he required
98 P. GIRARD

that cultivators obtain his personal authorization before marrying someone on

another plantation so as to further stabilize the workforce.46 In November, he
decreed that anyone who dared to speak against the cultivator system would
be sentenced to forced labor or even death.47
Assessing the political views of common rebels during the Haitian Revolution
is a difficult task given low literacy rates and gaps in the archival record. Judging
by their actions, the groups of runaways known as ‘Congos’ or ‘Africans’ were
fundamentally opposed to plantation agriculture and chose a life of isolation
in the mountains to avoid any field work. These labels used to describe them
further hint that most were newly imported Africans expected to perform
hard labor in the fields. But maroon communities were generally small while
the plantations provided lodging, food, companionship, and a modicum of stab-
ility in a dangerous world. Existing documents indicate that a portion of the
workforce would have been willing to accept the cultivator system if its more
progressive clauses had been implemented in earnest.48 But the continued
strength of the anti-abolition lobby in Paris, various projects of naval expeditions
in French ports, and rumors of imminent re-enslavement spread by political
rivals, convinced many cultivators that abolition was temporary and that they
could not trust the planter class. In the uprising on the Andro plantation men-
tioned earlier, a representative of the rebels complained that a popular black
commander ‘who had shared our woes to gain our liberty’ had just been
replaced, that blacks were still ‘badly regarded’ by whites and people of color,
and that they were ‘cheated’ of their share of the crop: as a result, they were con-
vinced that ‘they want to make us Slaves.’49 Similarly, cultivators rebelled after
the passage of Louverture’s strict October 1800 code, seeing it as a first step
toward the restoration of slavery; then again near Cayes in the spring of 1801
when Louverture sent the wives of soldiers back to work on plantations; then
again near Cap-Français in November 1801 when rumors spread that he was
importing slaves from Jamaica. In a vicious cycle, labor unrest prompted colo-
nial leaders to implement harsher legal measures, which themselves led to
more suspicions and more unrest.
The cultivators’ fears about France’s ultimate intentions were not entirely
unfounded. In 1802, Napoléon Bonaparte sent large expeditions to the French
Caribbean to reassert direct French rule and, in some cases, overturn abolition.
Where slavery had never been abolished in practice, such as Martinique and
Réunion, he planned to keep the Code Noir in place. In colonies where
slavery could be restored fairly easily, like Guadeloupe and French Guiana, he
vaguely proposed to issue new regulations over the next 10 years (in practice,
slavery was restored in stages in 1802–1803). But in Saint-Domingue, he
planned to preserve the cultivator system because Louverture had sent inflated
accounts of the colony’s economic recovery to Paris and the first consul
thought that the system worked.50
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 99

Accordingly, General Victoire Leclerc, who took over Saint-Domingue on

Napoléon’s behalf in the spring of 1802, changed little to the cultivator system
when he issued his own labor code in May. As before, all cultivators would be
guaranteed their ‘liberty’ and receive a fourth of the crop as salary, but work
would be mandatory so that Saint-Domingue could again be known as the
‘queen of the Antilles.’ The army would oversee plantation work; vagabonds
would be sentenced to six months of hard labor; and female cultivators would
be barred from having intimate relations with soldiers. The similarities with
Louverture’s code were not coincidental: Leclerc had used it as a template
while editing multiple drafts of his code.51 Leclerc was able to arrest and
deport Louverture, but the restoration of slavery in Guadeloupe revived
popular fears about France’s long-term intentions and led to a massive
popular uprising in Saint-Domingue in the summer of 1802. Black land-
owning officers like Dessalines initially battled the uprising, then, after sidelining
the most radical ‘Congo’ groups opposed to any form of plantation work, they
joined the rebellion and declared Haiti’s independence in January 1804.
Dessalines’s independence-day proclamation was a ringing denunciation of
slavery, but he also warned Haitians not ‘to refuse or grumble about the laws
that the genius overseeing your destiny will dictate for your happiness.’52 His
official title of governor general, later upgraded to emperor, hinted at the top-
down, militaristic nature of the new regime. Dessalines was a former slave,
but he was also a man who had acquired many sugar plantations during his
ascent to power and who obtained even more plantations when he exterminated
most white planters in the spring of 1804, as did his officers.53 His personal
financial interest required that field workers stay on the plantations. So did
the financial well-being of Haiti, where taxes on the production and exportation
of tropical crops represented the bulk of government revenue, which was spent
on national defense due to fears of a possible French expedition. In his 20 May
1805 constitution, Dessalines thus reaffirmed that slavery was forever abolished
(art. 2) while demanding that every citizen have a useful trade (art. 11). As
before, in exchange for sharing a fourth of the crop, cultivators were subjected
to a strict labor regime imposed by the dominant class in post-independence
Haiti – male army officers. ‘The cultivators were kept closely at work upon
the plantations,’ noted a visiting merchant from Philadelphia;54 ‘Beating to
death was no rare occurrence’ remembered another visitor.55
When cultivators fled to towns to avoid field work, Dessalines called for an
urban census to identify and repatriate runaways and he instituted an internal
passport system.56 He also punished emigration by death in his 1805 consti-
tution (art. 7) to prevent workers from fleeing to Santo Domingo. Like Louver-
ture before him, he even encouraged slave traders from Jamaica to import new
laborers from Africa because he needed ‘hands to revive and give activity to cul-
tivation’ (imported slaves would have gained the semi-free status of cultivator
upon setting foot in Haiti).57 Dessalines was initially able to enforce his labor
100 P. GIRARD

rules with the assistance of his land-owning generals, but after he made the
mistake of confiscating the plantations of many of his officers, disgruntled
elites joined cultivators in an October 1806 uprising that proved fatal to the
emperor.
Dessalines’s assassination led to a split in Haiti’s political and social fortunes.
Henry Christophe, a black freedman who had once helped Louverture put down
labor uprisings, became king of the northern province, where he maintained the
labor policies of his predecessors. In November 1806, after Dessalines’s downfall,
he prescribed ‘order’ for cultivators and ‘obedience’ for soldiers, and then
ordered cultivators back to work in January 1807.58 His February 1807 consti-
tution began with the obligatory reference to the abolition of slavery (art. 1
and 2) but also proclaimed the need to ‘encourage and protect’ agriculture,
‘the most noble and useful of all the arts’ (art. 49). Christophe’s comprehensive
legal code of cultivation, published in 1812, provided the specifics. Plantation
managers should act toward their laborers like ‘good family heads’ (art. 1), a
paternalistic standard borrowed from the pre-revolutionary Code Noir, in
exchange for which cultivators (now dubbed ‘agricultors’) would receive a
fourth of the crop (art. 56). Idleness and begging were forbidden (art. 17) and
cultivators who sought refuge in towns, refused to work, or left their plantation
without an internal passport could be punished to two months of forced labor or
more (art. 17, 19, 105, 113). The law also distinguished between ‘strong working
field laborers,’ who received one full share, and others (presumably the young
and women) who only received between one-fourth and three-fourths of a
share (art. 66). Crops grown on large plantation units received top billing in
the law: sugar was followed by coffee, cotton, indigo, and finally food crops
(art. 29 and following).59
Like Dessalines, Christophe was a landowner who stood to benefit from the
compliance of laborers as did his entourage, who derived the bulk of their
income from estates leased by the state rather than a set salary. But Christophe
also ruled at a time when slavery continued to predominate in the Caribbean and
Haiti’s neighbors refused to recognize the regime’s existence. In this unfavorable
strategic context, he was concerned that France would send a new army to Haiti,
especially when Napoléon was overthrown in 1814–1815 and the new French
regime explored re-colonizing Haiti and re-enslaving its people.60 Maintaining
the integrity of the plantation system was therefore vital, both to finance defen-
sive works like the famous Citadelle Laferrière and to prove that the Haitian gov-
ernment was legitimate. ‘The entire universe has its eyes upon us,’ Christophe
declared. ‘Our conduct must belie our detractors and justify the philanthropists’
view of us.’61 Meanwhile, to convince Haitians that Christophe’s strict labor code
did not amount to a de facto restoration of slavery, his court historian wrote
graphic accounts of the atrocities committed by slave owners during the colonial
era. However unsatisfactory the current labor system might be, the accounts
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 101

implied, field hands were still better off than the slaves of the previous
generation.62
Most of the western and southern part of Haiti was governed by President
Alexandre Pétion after Dessalines’s downfall. He too was aware that ‘the
world have their eyes upon us,’ but his more immediate concerns were domestic:
he faced a restive Senate, recurring overthrow attempts, and the breakaway
regimes of Christophe in the north and Jean-Baptiste Perrier (a.k.a. Goman)
in the south.63 When landowners in the Senate passed a rural code in April
1807 that contained the usual restrictive measures (a cultivator system enforced
by the army, an internal passport, a prohibition against small land sales), Pétion
chose instead to improve labor conditions to gain popular support. His criminal
code of 1807 banned whipping and restricted the use of the death penalty. He
abolished the corvée, which had required local inhabitants to work, unpaid, on
public road maintenance projects.64 He raised the share granted to his own cul-
tivators from one-fourth to one half, forcing other landowners to follow suit, and
in 1809 he distributed plots of land as small as 5 carreaux to revolutionary veter-
ans, a policy that excluded women since the grants were tied to military service.65
In practice, the availability of small plots of land in Pétion’s Haiti and the dimin-
ishing authority of the state meant that many cultivators refused to work on
large estates, even for half of the crop, and that the cultivation of sugar virtually
disappeared in Pétion’s Haiti.
After the deaths of Pétion in 1818 and Christophe in 1820, all of Haiti fell
under the rule of Jean-Pierre Boyer (ruled 1820–1843), who was Pétion’s politi-
cal heir. ‘Negroes are all free,’ noted a French intelligence report shortly after
Boyer took over; ‘they cultivate in exchange for a third or fourth of the crop.’
This share-cropping arrangement was seemingly identical to the old cultivator
system, but the long-term shift from large sugar plantations to small indepen-
dent coffee and cocoa estates made for strikingly different labor relations: as
now practiced, the new cultivator system was more akin to ‘metayage’ than to
forced labor, the French intelligence report noted.66 By the 1820s, Haitian auth-
orities had largely given up on large-scale agriculture, most sugar plantations
had been deserted, and ‘the general character of the country was that of an unin-
habited district,’ noted a British visitor. ‘The only real work is done by the few
surviving Africans who … retire to the mountains, where they cultivate some
sequestered spot, unheeding, and unheeded by, the world.’67 After 30 years,
the ‘Congos’ had finally won.
The philosophical underpinnings of the labor debate had not changed: the
balance of power between workers and landowners had. Conflicts between
land-owning elites and field hands harked back to the popular uprisings of
the revolutionary era and the rivalry between Louverture and Dessalines on
the one hand and ‘Congo’ leaders like Sans Souci and Lamour Derance on the
other. This was what Michel Rolph-Trouillot has described as ‘the war within
the war,’ Gérard Barthélémy the ‘créole-bossale’ divide, and Robert Lacerte
102 P. GIRARD

the ‘irresistible’ push for greater labor autonomy.68 Elites long had the upper
hand, but the long-term decline of the Haitian state allowed rural masses to
claim more autonomy by the 1820s. The demographic cost of the Revolution,
by reducing the population by half, also made it difficult to enforce strict
labor laws when there were so few workers and so much free land for the
taking. To attract enough workers, Boyer encouraged the immigration of free
blacks from the United States, who were promised 12 carreaux of land per
family, but few of these immigrants stayed.69
After agreeing to pay an indemnity of 150 million francs in 1825 in exchange
for France’s diplomatic recognition, Boyer was pressed for cash and made one
last attempt at reviving the production of export crops like coffee. His 1826
rural code resurrected the cultivator system. Unless they were soldiers, domes-
tics, or artisans, all Haitians were barred from living in towns and were required
to work the land (art. 1). They had to sign contracts ranging from two to nine
years (art. 46) and be ‘submissive and respectful’ toward their employers (art.
69), who would pay them one-fourth of the crop (art. 38). The code also restored
the corvée (art. 191).70 But popular opposition was so strong that Boyer’s 1826
code went largely unenforced and was formally abolished in 1843 at the same
time as intermediate labor systems modeled after the Haitian precedent were
put in place in neighboring colonies as emancipation became the norm in the
rest of the Caribbean.
The last major labor code of the nineteenth century, passed under President
Fabre Geffrard, took effect in 1865. Though 72 years removed from Sonthonax’s
1793 decree, it employed startlingly similar language. All Haitians were ‘free’
according to the preamble and article 1, but the code would ‘punish vagabon-
dage and depredations’ because ‘agriculture is the primary source of prosperity
for the State.’ Cultivators were required to complete their work contract (art.
108) and could be fined or even imprisoned if they disobeyed the landowner
(art. 109). The goal was to ‘protect agricultural work and order, even by going
against certain principles of individual liberty,’ explained the legist who pub-
lished the code.71 Army representatives would patrol the countryside to arrest
vagabonds and beggars (art. 118), who would then be forcibly employed on
public works (art. 116 and 117). Cultivators were specifically prevented from
participating in night-long revelries (art. 111) to curtail the practice of Vodou,
an Afro-Caribbean religion associated with lower-class restlessness that has its
own long legal tradition in Haiti. But small communal farming remained the
norm in Haiti, even after one last and unsuccessful attempt to restore large-
scale export agriculture and the corvée during the 1915–1934 U.S. occupation.
**********************
When retracing the tumultuous era of the Haitian Revolution, it is tempting
to focus on the disputes between French colonial officials like Sonthonax and
Hédouville and officers of color like Louverture, Dessalines, and Rigaud: their
correspondence forms the bulk of the archival record and their rivalries make
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 103

for a compelling narrative. By doing so, however, one runs the risk of being con-
sumed by what Fernand Braudel dubbed ‘l’histoire événementielle:’ the day-to-
day minutia of individual lives.72 By stepping back and examining the revolu-
tionary era in its totality (‘l’histoire sociale’ in Braudel’s taxonomy), political
upheavals recede into the background noise and a form of continuity becomes
evident. A dozen major labor codes came and went during and after the
Haitian Revolution. Some were drafted by black and mixed-race officers
drawn from the ranks of the rebel army, others by colonial officials sent from
France. But all began by paying homage to the ideal of individual liberty,
often using identical sentences that had become part of the revolutionary
Gospel, while curtailing this liberty through various restrictive measures that
were buried later in the text in a French legalese that was inaccessible to
Kreyòl-speaking field hands.
The rationale for these measures was fourfold: concerns about social disorder
in a context of near-constant upheaval; a desire to prove the practicability of
abolition at a time when that ideal was still untested in the Caribbean; the
financial interests of land-owning army officers; and the overall needs of a gov-
ernment reliant on taxes derived from plantation agriculture. The methods
employed to achieve those goals were also fourfold: speeches to field hands
insisting that compliance was necessary to prove the merits of abolition; econ-
omic incentives like share-cropping; legal clauses designed to limit the
workers’ mobility (mandatory contracts, internal passports, restrictions on mar-
riage); and violence, whether legal or extra-legal. With the failure of the first
three methods, force became the main way to impose the cultivator system
until the power balance changed and the cultivator system lapsed into
irrelevance.
When observed from the perspective of labor relations rather than politics,
the main engine of historical change during the Haitian Revolution was not indi-
vidual agency but the power dynamic between field hands and landowners or, to
put it in historiographical terms, Karl Marx’s class struggle rather than Thomas
Carlyle’s great men. Louverture and other leaders battled ceaselessly to impose a
plantation model that benefited them and, as they saw it, black workers and the
colony while proving to an international audience that emancipation was econ-
omically viable: but they could not overcome the deep-seated antipathy of the
Haitian peasantry to the plantation system inherited from the colonial era and
the country eventually shifted to the type of small-scale subsistence agriculture
that has defined Haiti ever since.
The belated victory of free labor in Haiti, which was not complete until the
1820s, forces us to reexamine what we mean by ‘Haitian Revolution,’ a
generic term that encompasses multiple transformations. The political revolu-
tion was won as early as 1791–1794 when racist, pro-slavery conservatives
were defeated in Saint-Domingue and Paris. The racial revolution can be
dated to 1798, when Toussaint Louverture and his black generals largely shut
104 P. GIRARD

out whites from the colony’s top leadership. The national revolution waited until
the 1803–1804 war for independence. The social revolution that began with the
slave revolt of 1791 was not fully complete until the demise of the cultivator
system in the 1820s. The intellectual revolution waited another century, when
the intellectuals of the indigéniste (a.k.a. noiriste) movement in the 1920s
finally rejected France’s cultural traditions in favor of Haiti’s own. The gender
and democratic revolutions are still an ongoing process.

Notes
1. Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, ‘Proclamation’ (August 29, 1793), Lk12-28, Bibliothèque
Nationale, Paris (BNF).
2. On Sonthonax, see Robert L. Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax: The Lost Sentinel of the
Republic (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985); Serge Barcellini,
‘A la recherche d’une mémoire disparue’, Revue française d’histoire d’outremer 84, no.
316 (Fall 1997): 121–58. On abolition, see Marcel Dorigny, ed., The Abolitions of
Slavery: from Léger Félicité Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848 (1995;
Reprint and translation, New York: Berghahn, 2003).
3. Yves Bénot, La Révolution française et la fin des colonies (Paris: La Découverte, 1987);
Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial
(Paris: Présence Africaine, 1981); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The
Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004);
Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Dis-
avowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2004); Jean Fouchard, The Haitian Maroons: Liberty or
Death (1972; reprint and translation, New York: Edward Blyden Press, 1981); Nick
Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlighten-
ment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Jeremy Popkin, You Are
All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2010); Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Pro-
duction of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995).
4. Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation, 4, 155.
5. For a rare article on the labor issue, see Robert K. Lacerte, ‘The Evolution of Land and
Labor in the Haitian Revolution, 1791–1820’, Americas 34, no. 4 (April 1978): 449–59.
6. ‘Caporalisme’ from K.O. Laurence, ed., General History of the Caribbean, vol. 4
(New York: McMillan, 2011), 290.
7. For example, see C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San
Domingo Revolution (1963; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 242.
8. Caroline Oudin-Bastide and Philippe Steiner, Calcul et morale: Coûts de l’esclavage et
valeur de l’émancipation (XVIIIe-XIXe siècle) (Paris: Albin Michel, 2015), 170, 175.
9. M. Schwartz [Nicolas de Condorcet], Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres (Neufchâtel:
Société Typographique, 1781), vi, 35, 33.
10. On the reforms of December 3, 1784 and December 23, 1785, see M.L.E. Moreau de
Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions des colonies françoises de l’Amérique sous le vent,
vol. 6 (Paris: Moutard, 1784–1790), 655, 918; Dorigny, The Abolitions of Slavery,
107; Malik Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2012), 126.
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 105

11. Barré Saint-Venant, Des colonies modernes sous la zone torride, et particulièrement de
celle de Saint-Domingue (Paris: Brochot, 1802), 24.
12. [François Richard de Tussac], Cri des colons contre un ouvrage de M. l’évêque et sén-
ateur Grégoire, ayant pour titre de la littérature des nègres (Paris: Delaunay, 1810), 112.
For a similar argument made by Jamaican planters, see Trevor Burnard and John Gar-
rigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and
British Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 193.
13. Michel Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Considérations sur l’état présent de la colonie française de
Saint-Domingue, vol. 1 (Paris: Grangé, 1776), 132.
14. François Furstenberg, ‘Atlantic Slavery, Atlantic Freedom: George Washington,
Slavery, and Transatlantic Abolitionist Networks’, William and Mary Quarterly 68,
no. 2 (2011): 247–86.
15. Oudin-Bastide and Steiner, Calcul et morale, 192.
16. Marcel Dorigny and Bernard Gainot, eds., La société des Amis des Noirs, 1788–1799:
Contribution à l’histoire de l’abolition de l’esclavage (Paris: UNESCO, 1998), 33.
17. ‘Du temps’ from Jacques Brissot de Warville, Nouveau voyage dans les États-Unis de
l’Amérique septentrionale, fait en 1788, vol. 2 (Paris: Buissson, 1791), 44.
18. Henri Grégoire, Lettre aux philanthropes (Paris: Belin, Desenne, Bailly, Octobre
1790), 3.
19. On contacts between abolitionists in Saint-Domingue and the U.S., see Giroud to
Pennsylvania Abolition Society (January 17, 1797), Micr. XR572:12, Historical
Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (HSP).
20. For production statistics, see Saint-Venant, Des colonies modernes, 51. These figures
are consistent with tariff records indicating that the French-occupied part of the
colony only exported 1.5 million colonial livres worth of tropical crops in 1797; see
Gabriel de Hédouville to Eustache Bruix (June 10, 1798), CC9B/7, Archives Nationales
d’Outremer, Aix-en-Provence (ANOM).
21. George Biassou to [Father Delahaye] (October 28, 1792), d. 118, D/XXV/12, Archives
Nationales, Paris (AN).
22. Fayete to Delahaye (December 13, 1792), CC9A/7, ANOM.
23. Belair to Joaquín García (September 10, 1793), SGU,LEG,7157,10, Archivo General de
Simancas (AGS).
24. For the French version, see Sonthonax, ‘Proclamation’ (August 29, 1793), Lk12-28,
BNF. For the Kreyòl version, see Sonthonax, ‘DANS NOM LA RÉPUBLIQUE’
(August 29, 1793), 61J71, Archives Départementales de la Gironde, Bordeaux
(ADGir). For the Spanish version, see Sonthonax, ‘Proclamación’ (August 29, 1793),
Dossier 117, D/XXV/12, AN.
25. Sonthonax to his colleagues [Delpech, Etienne Polverel] (August 30, 1793), Dossier
1511, aa55/a, AN.
26. Polverel, ‘Règlement de police sur la culture’ (February 28, 1794), in H. Pauléus
Sannon, Histoire de Toussaint-Louverture, vol. 1 (Port-au-Prince: Héraux, 1920),
222–42.
27. Louis-Pierre Dufaÿ, ‘Discours d’un des députés de Saint-Domingue’ (February 4, 1794),
http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/histoire/esclavage/gazette-discours.asp (accessed June
30, 2013).
28. ‘Le débat à la Convention: Séance du 16 pluviôse an II’ (February 4, 1794), http://www.
assemblee-nationale.fr/histoire/esclavage/debats-16pluviose.asp (accessed June 30,
2013).
29. Truguet, ‘Instructions données par le Directoire Exécutif à ses agens’ (February 12,
1796), doc. 212, B277, FM, ANOM.
106 P. GIRARD

30. On Guadeloupe, where ex-slaves got two days off a week, as well as room and board,
but no salary, see Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Eman-
cipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 2004), 213. On [PRESUMABLY SHOULD BE ‘FRENCH’] Guiana, see
Miranda Frances Spieler, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guyana
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 40.
31. Etienne Laveaux, Réponse d’Etienne Laveaux … Aux calomnies que le citoyen Viénot
Vaublanc, colon de St. Domingue et membre du Conseil des Cinq Cents, s’est permis de
mettre dans son discours prononcé dans la séance du 10 Prairial dernier ([Paris]:
J. F. Sobry, June 19, 1797), E763.L651s v.12, John Carter Brown Library (JCB).
32. André Rigaud, ‘La Loi’ (Septembre 25, 1794), FM/F/3/199, ANOM.
33. Rigaud to Alexandre Forfait (December 2, 1799), CC9A/23, ANOM.
34. Graham Nessler, An Islandwide Struggle for Freedom: Revolution, Emancipation, and
Reenslavement in Hispaniola, 1789–1809 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2016), 55.
35. Vincent Viénot de Vaublanc, Discours sur l’état de Saint-Domingue (May 29, 1797),
E763.L651s v.12, JCB.
36. Louverture, Réfutation de quelques assertions d’un discours … par Viénot Vaublanc
(Cap-Français: Roux, October 29, 1797), 21.
37. Hédouville, ‘Arrêté concernant la police des habitations’ (July 24, 1798), Box 1/47,
Rochambeau Papers, University of Florida, Gainesville (RP-UF). A faithful Kreyòl
version can be found in CC9A/19, ANOM.
38. Louverture to brothers and sisters of Verrettes (March 22, 1795), fr. 12103, BNF.
39. Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, suivies de la vie du général J-M Bor-
gella (Paris: Dezobry et Magdeleine, 1853–1860), 4:171.
40. [Report to Laveaux] (February 14–20, 1796), fr. 12104, BNF.
41. Louverture, [Règlement des cultures] (October 12, 1800), in Ardouin, Études, 4:247. A
version dated Octobre 25, 1800 is in CC9B/9, ANOM.
42. Louverture, ‘Proclamación’ (February 8, 1801), ESTADO, 60, N.3, Archivo General de
Indias, Seville (AGI).
43. François Desrivières Chanlatte, Considérations diverses sur Haïti (Port-au-Prince,
[n.s.], 1822), 14.
44. Louverture, ‘Arrêté’ (February 7, 1801), CC9B/9, ANOM.
45. ‘Constitution de la colonie française de Saint-Domingue’ (c. July 1801), CO 137/106,
British National Archives, Kew (BNA).
46. Louverture, ‘Arrêté’ (Septembre 30, 1801), CC9B/9, ANOM.
47. Louverture, ‘Au nom de la colonie française de Saint-Domingue’ (Novembre 25, 1801),
West Indian Collection, Sc Micro R1527, Schomburg Center, New York Public Library
(SC-NYPL).
48. Paul Cheney, Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domin-
gue (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 184.
49. [Report to Laveaux] (February 14–20, 1796), fr. 12104, BNF.
50. Paul Roussier, ed., Lettres du général Leclerc (Paris: Société de l’histoire des colonies
françaises, 1937), 263–74; Philippe Girard, ‘Napoléon voulait-il rétablir l’esclavage
en Haïti?’, Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe 159 (May–August
2011): 3–28.
51. For drafts, see Victoire Leclerc, ‘Règlement sur la culture’ (c. May 6, 1802), Box 22/
2239, RP-UF. For the finished code, see Charles Dugua, ‘Ordre du jour’ (May 15,
1802), B7/16, Service Historique de la Défense, Vincennes (SHD-DAT). On the
influence of Louverture, see Leclerc to Denis Decrès (May 4, 1802), B7/26, SHD-DAT.
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 107

52. Dessalines, ‘Proclamation’ (January 1, 1804), dossier 15, AB XIX/3302, AN.

53. Philippe Girard, ‘Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal’,
William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 3 (July 2012): 557.
54. [Condy Raguet], ‘Memoirs of Hayti’ (November 1805), in The Port Folio 3, no. 5 (May
1810): 423.
55. Charles Mackenzie, Notes on Haiti Made during a Residence in that Republic (1830;
reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1971), 1:95 (citing reminiscences by former cultivators).
56. Ardouin, Études, 6:112.
57. Jean-Jacques Dessalines to John Downie (August 15, 1806), WO 1/75, BNA.
58. Ardouin, Études, 6:417, 547
59. Code Henry (Cap-Henry: P. Roux, [1812]), EB.H153 1812 1, JCB. On male domina-
tion, see also Mimi Sheller, ‘Sword-Bearing Citizens: Militarism and Manhood in
Nineteenth-Century Haiti’, Plantation Society in the Americas 4, nos. 2–3 (Fall
1997): 233–78.
60. ‘Instructions pour MM. Dauxion Lavaysse, de Médina et Dravermann’ (c. June 27,
1814), in Copies des pièces des agens du Gouvernement français, imprimées et publiées
en vertu de la Proclamation de Sa Majesté, du 11 novembre 1814, l’an onzième de l’in-
dépendance d’Hayti (Cap: P. Roux, 1814), Hart Lib. Pamphlets, Massachusetts Histori-
cal Society, Boston (MHS).
61. Royaume d’Hayti, ‘Procès-verbal des séances du Conseil général de la Nation’ (October
21, 1814), Tract A17, Boston Athenaeum (BA).
62. Baron de Vastey, ‘Le système colonial dévoilé’ (October 1814), Tract B795 no.2, BA.
63. ‘World’ from Alexandre Pétion, [Proclamation] (December 3, 1814), in Anon., Pieces
Relating to the Communications Made in the Name of the French Government to the
President of Hayti, by General Dauxion Lavaysse (New York: Joseph Desnoues,
1816), 3, 37771 Shaw/Shoemaker fiche, MHS. On opposition to Pétion, see Michel
Hector, ‘Les deux grandes rébellions paysannes de la première moitié du XIXe siècle
haïtien’, in Rétablissement de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises 1802: Ruptures et
continuités de la politique coloniale française (1800–1830): Aux origines d’Haïti, ed.
Yves Bénot and Marcel Dorigny (Paris: Maisonneuve-Larose, 2003), 179–99.
64. ‘Loi sur l’abolition des corvées personnelles’ (June 9, 1817), CC/9a/53, ANOM;
Ardouin, Études 6:544, 7:30.
65. For an example of land grant, see Pétion, [Land grant] (December 16, 1815), Sc. Micro
R-2228 Reel 5 (Executive correspondence: Pétion), SC-NYPL.
66. ‘Note sur les événements qui ont eu lieu à Saint-Domingue après la chute de Chris-
tophe’ (May 1821), CC/9a/53, ANOM.
67. Mackenzie, Notes on Haiti, 1:106, 79.
68. Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995), 40; Gérard Barthélémy, Créoles-bossales; Conflit
en Haïti (Petit Bourg, Guadeloupe: Ibis Rouge, 2000); Lacerte, ‘The Evolution of
Land and Labor’, 449.
69. Jean-Pierre Boyer, ‘Instructions’ (May 25, 1824), in Correspondence relative to the Emi-
gration to Hayti of the Free People of Colour in the United States, ed. Loring D. Dewey
(New York: Mahlon Day, 1824), 17–28.
70. ‘Code rural d’Haïti’ (July 1826), CC9A/54, ANOM.
71. Saint-Amand, Le Code Rural d’Haïti, publié avec commentaires et formulaire (Port-au-
Prince: Département de l’Agriculture, 1890), 1, viii, 53.
72. Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II
(Paris: Colin, 1949), 13.
108 P. GIRARD

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Philippe Girard is Professor in the Department of History, McNeese State University, Ryan
St., Lake Charles, LA 70609-2860, USA. Email: girard@mcneese.edu