23661: (reply) Simidor Re: 23618: Esser on Dessalines and land reform (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Daniel Simidor, karioka9@arczip.com

 In a recent contribution, Dominique Esser claimed that Dessalines “was
 assassinated for his attempts at land reform, namely the redistribution
 of land to the poor masses, by taking it away from the land owning class
 that largely acquired their wealth in the times of slavery...”

 That would be nice if it was true, but there is no evidence that
 Dessalines favored peasant ownership of the land.  Dessalines did oppose
 the sweetheart deals that a number of French settlers had made with their
 mulatto children before and after fleeing the colony.  But his defense of
 “my poor blacks whose fathers are in Africa” did not translate into
 small-scale ownership of land for the peasantry.  Dessalines, like his
 predecessor Toussaint, and like Christophe after him, sought to
 strengthen the plantation system as the basis for the new nation’s
 economic power.  He maintained Toussaint’s prohibition against sales of
 less than 50 carreaux of land (1 carreau = 3.17 acres), as well as
 Toussaint slave-like “Règlements de Culture.”

 The peasants were kept by force on the plantations.  They were forbidden
 access to the towns, and were pitilessly flogged for the slightest
 insubordination. Here’s how Beaubrun Ardouin described the whipping of
 peasants, men and women, who transgressed those rules: “The victim was
 placed between two rows of soldiers armed with thorny wands from the
 bayahond tree.  He was forced to run the gauntlet from one end to the
 other, under the soldiers’ blows.  The drums beat a steady battle charge
 to incite the soldiers’ fervor.  The commanding officer who ordered the
 flogging had the sole prerogative of ending this torment, which could
 continue until death ensued, depending on the gravity of the offense.”
 Thomas Madiou who was more sympathetic to Dessalines than Ardouin, cites
 the case of one Mademoiselle Chapotin, from a respectable family, who was
 flogged publicly because she could not pay the 12 gourdes penalty for
 having sheltered a peasant woman in her home.

 As fate would have it, it was the white Conventional Polverel, in his
 Aug. 27, 1793 proclamation, who first introduced the notion of land
 ownership for the newly freed slaves as the basis of citizenship.  And it
 was the mulatto Petion, who served under Polverel, who introduced a
 limited land distribution program by granting 5 carreaux holdings to
 discharged soldiers, to “deserving” plantation managers and foremen, and
 to “industrious cultivators.”  Boyer, his mulatto successor, would extend
 to noncommissioned officers and soldiers of Christophe’s dissolved army
 the benefits of Petion’s limited land reform.  I say “limited” because
 the most valued plantations remained in the hands of the oligarchy, but
 those few concessions explain why, together, Petion and Boyer were able
 to rule more or less peacefully for 37 years!

 About Dessalines’ death, Armand Thoby in “La Question Agraire en Haiti”
 (1888) argued that it was not a case of mulatto against black, as some
 Lavalas “noirists” would have it.  “It was Christophe, a black man, who
 was the leader of the conspiracy.  It was the black Messeroux, an obscure
 justice of the peace in Port Salut, who raised the flag of rebellion by
 arresting General Moreau, commander of the First Southern Division, and a
 mulatto, by the way, who was personally loyal to Dessalines.  It was
 Gedeon, also black, who betrayed the Emperor’s password and made it
 possible to ambush him.  As in all major events in our history, mulattos
 and blacks meshed together their interests and their passions in the fall
 of Dessalines.”

 Ardouin, Madiou and Thoby fall in the category of mulatto apologists
 David Nicholls referred to in his work.  But the facts that they report
 in this instance are nevertheless true.  The Haitian oligarchy is both
 mulatto and black, but the black fraction of the oligarchy likes to raise
 the “race” card in vying for hegemonic control against its mulatto
 counterpart.   Interestingly, Dessalines, Salomon, Aristide and the
 Duvaliers are all dark-skinned oligarchs who married light, and fathered
 mulatto children.