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