Republic of Haiti (1806-1849)

The Republic of Haiti arose from the crisis that followed the assassination of Emperor Jacques I, the former Jean-Jacques Dessalines, near Port-au-Prince on 17 October 1806. Dessalines had led Haiti to independence from France on 1 January 1804 and made himself emperor, but his land policies and harsh rule alienated both the generals of the north and the largely mixed-race elite of the south and west, the anciens libres who had been free before the revolution. After his death an assembly dominated by southern and western leaders drafted a constitution, adopted in December 1806, that created a republic in which the senate held most power and the president was weak. Henri Christophe, the senior general and commander of the north, was elected president under this charter but rejected its limits and marched on Port-au-Prince, where he was repulsed in January 1807. He then set up a separate State of Haiti in the north, which became a kingdom in 1811, while the senate in Port-au-Prince elected Alexandre Pétion, a mixed-race general trained in the French army, president of the republic in March 1807. For thirteen years the two Haitian states fought an intermittent and inconclusive civil war along their frontier.

Haiti's economy had been wrecked by more than a decade of revolution and war, and the great sugar plantations of the colonial era could not be revived without forced labour, which most former slaves resisted. Pétion abandoned the attempt. From 1809 he sold or granted state-owned plantation land in small plots to officers and soldiers, creating a society of peasant smallholders who grew coffee, food crops and some cotton for their own needs and for export. This produced a broad free peasantry, unusual in the plantation Americas, but it ended large-scale sugar exports, reduced state revenue and left a gulf between the rural majority, who spoke Haitian Creole and practised Vodou alongside Catholicism, and a French-speaking urban elite of officials, merchants and landowners. Jean-Pierre Boyer tried to reverse the trend with the Rural Code of 1826, which bound labourers to plantations and restricted their movement, but it proved largely unenforceable. Coffee remained the main export, shipped from Port-au-Prince, Jacmel and Les Cayes to European and American merchants. The Catholic Church lacked a regular hierarchy, since Rome did not recognise Haiti until a concordat in 1860, and education was limited to a few schools for the elite, among them the Lycée Pétion, founded in 1816.

The army inherited from the revolution was the central institution of the republic, and generals dominated its politics. Pétion's forces held the west and south against Henri Christophe, whose northern army was larger and better drilled, and campaigns between 1807 and 1812, including Christophe's siege of Port-au-Prince in 1812, brought neither side a decisive victory. The republic was also divided internally when General André Rigaud returned from exile and set up a separate State of South Haiti in 1810; after his death in 1811 the south rejoined the republic in 1812. Pétion gave crucial help to Simón Bolívar, who arrived in exile in 1815: in 1816 he supplied the Venezuelan leader with weapons, ammunition and ships at Les Cayes and Jacmel, asking in return that Bolívar free the slaves in the lands he liberated. After Christophe's suicide in October 1820 Boyer marched north and reunited Haiti without major fighting. In February 1822 he occupied Santo Domingo, which had just declared independence from Spain, bringing the whole of Hispaniola under the republic and abolishing slavery there. Fear of a French invasion led Boyer to maintain a large standing army throughout his rule, a heavy burden on a poor country, yet in 1844 that army failed to prevent the Dominican secession.

The constitution of 1806 made the senate the strongest body in the republic, electing the president and controlling legislation and finance. Pétion soon found it obstructive and from 1808 governed largely without it, and the revised constitution of 1816 made him president for life with the right to propose his successor, while adding a chamber of representatives beside the senate. Pétion ruled through personal popularity and generosity, earning the nickname Papa Bon Cœur, and his land grants tied soldiers to the regime. After his death in March 1818 the senate chose Jean-Pierre Boyer, commander of the presidential guard, who ruled for twenty-five years, the longest single presidency in Haitian history. Boyer centralised government in Port-au-Prince, issued a civil code modelled on the Napoleonic Code, and relied on army commanders who ran each district and on a small circle of mixed-race officials. His most consequential decision was to accept the ordinance of Charles X of France of 1825, which recognised Haitian independence in return for an indemnity of 150 million francs, payable in five annual instalments, and a halving of customs duties on French goods; Boyer borrowed from French bankers to pay the first instalment. The burden fell on the peasantry through taxes, and opposition from liberal reformers in the legislature grew during the 1830s.

The Republic of Haiti showed that a state created by formerly enslaved people could survive in a hostile Atlantic world, but at a heavy price. Its support for Simón Bolívar helped the liberation of Venezuela and northern South America, and Pétion's request that Bolívar abolish slavery linked the Haitian Revolution to emancipation on the mainland, although the new Spanish American republics did not invite Haiti to the Congress of Panama in 1826. Boyer encouraged free African Americans to settle in Haiti, and several thousand came in 1824–1825, some founding a lasting community at Samaná in the east. The indemnity of 1825, reduced to 90 million francs in 1838, became a symbol of neo-colonial extortion: Haiti paid it, together with interest on the loans raised to meet it, for decades, and modern studies argue that it diverted a large share of state revenue and held back development. The occupation of the east from 1822 to 1844 abolished slavery there but is remembered in the Dominican Republic as foreign domination, and Dominican national identity was shaped partly in opposition to Haiti. Pétion's land policy created the peasant smallholding society that still characterises rural Haiti, while the divide between a mixed-race elite and a Black majority, sharpened under Boyer, remained a lasting theme of Haitian politics.

Boyer's long rule ended amid economic stagnation, resentment of the indemnity and frustration at his refusal to share power. An earthquake in May 1842 destroyed Cap-Haïtien and other northern towns, and the following year the Reform movement led by Charles Rivière-Hérard rose in the south; Boyer resigned and left for exile in March 1843. Rivière-Hérard's new government faced immediate challenges. On 27 February 1844 nationalists of La Trinitaria, the secret society founded by Juan Pablo Duarte, proclaimed the independence of the Dominican Republic in Santo Domingo, and Haitian attempts to reconquer the east failed. At the same time peasant insurgents in the south, the piquets led by Louis Jean-Jacques Acaau, demanded land and justice. Rivière-Hérard was overthrown in May 1844, and the mixed-race elite then chose elderly Black generals as figurehead presidents, a practice later called the politique de doublure: Philippe Guerrier, Jean-Louis Pierrot and Jean-Baptiste Riché followed in quick succession. When Riché died in 1847 the senate chose Faustin Soulouque, a little-known general expected to be pliant. Instead he built up his own power, his forces massacred mixed-race opponents in Port-au-Prince in April 1848, and on 26 August 1849 he proclaimed himself Emperor Faustin I, ending the republic and creating the Second Empire of Haiti.