The Present State of Hayti (Saint Domingo) with Remarks on its Agriculture, Commerce, Laws, Religion, Finances, and Population

When we look into the state of the products in the time of Toussaint, and compare them with those of Boyer, it is a just conclusion to draw, that the one knew his people, and the other feared them; that the former by compulsory means enriched his country, and kept the people quiet, whilst the latter, by giving unlimited latitude to indolence, has impoverished and ruined them. This is the more extraordinary, also, when we look at the means of each chief for cultivating the soil, and the strength of the population at the respective periods. Toussaint’s population, according to Humboldt, only amounted to three hundred and seventy-five thousand, and by the census taken in 1824, when the island was incorporated under Boyer’s government, it amounted to nine hundred and thirty-five thousand, three hundred and thirty-five, so that in 1822 it could not have been many short of that number. And supposing therefore the census of Boyer to be correct, was such an astonishing decrease ever known in the means of any country in the world, and arising too from the incapacity of its ruler and the weakness of its government?

When poverty began to be felt, and the exigences of the state became alarmingly pressing, Boyer became convinced that his policy had been defective and ruinous, and that it was time to concert plans for rousing himself from the lethargy into which he had fallen. He was forced to seek advice from the very people whose counsels he had before rejected with disdain. He courted them, and even begged, that they would suggest the most beneficial plans for relieving the country from that dilemma into which his precipitancy and obstinacy had thrown it. They again stepped forward, and their first suggestion was a rigid system of agriculture, the revival of Toussaint’s principle of culture, and the strict enforcement of it without any evasion or escape. It was by coercion that Toussaint, Dessalines, and even Christophe, raised their country, and by coercion only could Hayti recover its pristine condition. Her prosperity had received a stab, and it required skill and experience to restore her wonted vigour.

It is evident that the sugar plantations were nearly all thrown up, as the country scarcely produced more than was necessary for its own consumption. There were a few only that had the appearance of being cultivated, and those were in the possession of individuals connected with the government either in a civil or military capacity. On these plantations the work was generally performed by labouring parties from the military stations in their vicinity; and if labourers from the general class of cultivators were engaged, they never omitted to exact from them a due proportion of work, and they were always superintended by the gens d’armes, or country police, armed for the sole purpose of compelling them to the performance of their duty.

A variety of expedients were tried, it is true, by the leading proprietors in the country, but more particularly by the military ones, for the purpose of advancing cultivation by the most effectual means. The cane, requiring a greater proportion of labour than any other of the staple articles of growth, was little attended to; it seemed therefore adviseable to hold out inducements to prevail upon the people to undertake its culture. In many instances, I have been informed, the proprietors have not only offered them a fourth of the produce, but they have actually promised a pecuniary remuneration in addition to it. Even this would not induce them to work, and nothing therefore remained but to adopt a system of compulsory labour. That compulsion was resorted to, is a fact; but the law was not sufficiently strong to punish offenders in the case of disobedience, and many delinquents, many of the refractory labourers, who had engaged to perform a certain portion of duty on a plantation, but neglected to do so, escaped that punishment which they deserved.

The law for the better observance of the culture of the soil, until the Code Rural, of which I shall speak hereafter, made its appearance, was extremely deficient, and merely compelled all cultivators to remain on their respective settlements, and to attend to the duties required on them, except on Saturday and Sunday, and such holidays as were particularly enumerated; but there was no penalty for disobedience sufficient to deter a man from being guilty of it. As far however as the proprietors dared to go in enforcing labour, many of them certainly proceeded, and in several instances I have seen the labourers working under the terror of the bayonet and sabre, and this too on the plantations of Boyer himself. I have seen it also on those of Secretary-General Inginac, Colonel Lerebour, General Jeddion, and General Mazuy, and several others.

It was evident to every man in Hayti, at all conversant with the negro character, that an attempt to keep up cultivation without force was impossible, and many of the proprietors, themselves negroes, knew that by force only could they obtain labourers amongst their people. They knew that indolence in the negro was innate, and that it was absolutely impracticable to carry on the work in the soil unless rigid laws were enacted to enforce it. The laws which had been passed by Toussaint and Dessalines had become so mutilated by relaxation and modification, that they were little more than a dead letter; and the government, recovering from its apathy, and feeling the consequences of its loss of energy and want of decision, very wisely remonstrated with the president, and condemned further submission to the will of a people desirous to go on unrestrained in their indolent propensities. This remonstrance was effectual, and Boyer acquiesced in the necessity of establishing a system of extensive cultivation, and of enacting a law to provide for its due observance throughout his dominions. He saw the good effects which had arisen from the application of force on his own plantation at Tor, on which the cultivators worked under the surveillance of a military guard; and he therefore became now as willing an advocate for a law to sanction coercive labour, as he had been negligent in not providing for the culture of the soil from the beginning of his power.

The Code Rural, the existence of which has been the subject of much doubt, was passed by the Chamber of Communes on the 21st of April, 1826, admitted by the senate on the 1st of May, and received the president’s fiat on the 6th of the same month. All this took place during my residence in Port au Prince. This law is the work of Secretary-General Inginac, aided by one or two of the members from the chamber and the senate. During the discussion of this law in the Chamber of Communes, it was remarked by one of the most intelligent of its members, “that it was a measure of expediency, for that the citizen cultivators had become so indolent that agriculture had in some districts been almost forgotten, and that cultivation was completely suspended.” This declaration was echoed through the chamber, and every member concurred in the observation, and gave it his unqualified assent.

On the 1st of May, the day appointed for the celebration of the Fête Agriculture, and when the cultivators were assembled in the public square bearing specimens of their several productions of the soil, the president, together with a member from the chamber and another from the senate, addressed them, and said that the legislature would provide for a more general cultivation, and that all persons not engaged, or usually occupied as labourers, would be peremptorily called upon for a more strict attention to their duty, as the government contemplated a revival of agriculture, which had fallen into so much neglect from the indolent habits of the people. These addresses were not received with acclamation, and many a cultivator heard them with a degree of dissatisfaction which seemed to forebode resistance.

The Chamber of Communes, in its farewell address, tells the people that laws “just and severe” were imperative for the revival of agriculture, and that by the law which they had passed to enforce cultivation they thought that they had materially served their country, and in such an opinion I most readily concur. They rendered to their country an important service by passing the Code Rural; for it will tend towards obstructing the course of immorality pursued by the people in their idleness, and will eventually reestablish upon a sound basis the shattered finances of the state. The passage in that address is so very forcible, and so extremely just, that I shall call the attention of my readers to it, as it has been given by a gentleman to whom I am under many obligations for his assistance upon various rious subjects connected with this work. It says, “What is due to the conservative principle would not have been provided, if the revival of our agriculture had not been stimulated (provoqué) by laws at once just and severe; your representatives in passing the Code Rural, have believed that a benefit was conferred upon the people.” This was conclusive of the opinion of the country that severity was imperative for enforcing a general cultivation, and that, without laws “just and severe”, force cannot be resorted to with any chance of a favourable result.

It may not be unimportant to give a few of the articles of the Code Rural. This Code has now found its way to Europe, and the public, on reading its enactments, will be enabled to judge of the feelings of the leading persons in Hayti with regard to the state of cultivation, when such laws are said to be required to force the people to labour.

“Art. 173. The purposes of Rural Police are,

“First. The repressing idleness.

“Second. Enforcing order and assiduity in agricultural labour.

“Third. The discipline of the labourers collectively or in gangs.

“Fourth. The making and keeping in repair of the roads, both public and private.

“Art. 174. All persons who are not proprietors or renters of the land on which they are residing, or who shall not have made a contract to work with some proprietor or renter, shall be reputed vagabonds, and shall be arrested by the rural police of the section in which they may be found, and carried before the justice of the peace of the commune.

“Art. 175. The justice of the peace, after interrogating and hearing the person brought before him, shall make known to him the articles of the law which oblige him to employ himself in agricultural labour; and after that communication he shall remand him to prison, until he shall have bound himself by a contract according to the provisions of the law.

“Art. 176. The justice of the peace will allow the person arrested to make his own choice of the individual with whom he is to contract to labour.

“Art. 177. If, after eight days of detention, the prisoner shall not have agreed to go to field work, he shall be sent to the public works for cleaning the town or district where he may be arrested, and there he shall be employed until he shall consent to go to field labour. The person who removes any labourer from the public works to employ him in private work shall be subject to a fine of fifty dollars, of which a moiety is to be paid to the person complaining.

“Art. 178. If the prisoner be a child under age, the justice of the peace shall inquire out his parents, and send him to them to follow their condition of life.

“Art. 179. After the expiration of three months from the publication of this Code, rigorous measures shall be enforced against delinquents.

“Art. 180. Every person attached to the country as a cultivator, who shall on a working day, and during the hours of labour, be found unemployed, or lounging on the public roads, shall be considered idle, and be arrested and taken before the justice of the peace, who shall commit him to prison for twenty-four hours for the first offence, and shall send him to labour on the public works upon a repetition of the offence.

“Art. 181. To provide against vagabondage, under the pretence of being a soldier.

“Art. 182. Officers commanding the rural police shall take care that in their respective sections no person shall live in idleness. For this purpose they have authority to oblige such persons as are not actually employed in labour, to give an account of their occupations; and such persons as cannot prove that they cultivate the soil, or are keepers of cattle-pens, shall be considered as without visible means of procuring their livelihood, and shall be arrested as vagabonds.

“Art. 183. Field labour shall commence on Monday morning, and shall never cease until Friday evening (legal holidays excepted); and in extraordinary cases, when the interest of the cultivator as well as of the proprietor appears to require it, work shall be continued until Saturday evening.

“Art. 184. On working days, the ordinary field labour shall commence at day-dawn, to continue until mid-day, with the interval of half an hour for breakfast, which shall be taken on the spot where the work is carrying on. After mid-day the field labour shall commence at two o’clock, and continue until sun-set.

“Art. 185. Pregnant females shall be employed on light work only, and after the fourth month of pregnancy they shall not be obliged to do any work in the field.

“Art. 186. Four months after delivery they shall be obliged to resume the labour in the field; but they shall not turn out to work until one hour after sun-rise; they shall continue to work until eleven o’clock, and from two o’clock until one hour before sun-set.

“Art. 187. No labourer attached to an estate in the country shall absent himself from the labour assigned him, without the permission of the overseer, in the absence of the proprietor or farmer; and no one shall give that permission unless the case be urgent.

“Art. 188. Gangs of labourers upon estates shall be obedient to their drivers, jobbers, sub-farmers, farmers, proprietors and managers, or overseers, whenever they are called upon to execute the labour they have bound themselves to perform.

“Art. 189. Every act of disobedience or insult on the part of a workman commanded to do any work, to which he is subjected, shall be punished by imprisonment, according to the exigency of the case, in the discretion of the justice of the peace of the commune.

“Art. 190. Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays being at the entire disposal of the labourers, they shall not be permitted on working days to leave their work, to indulge in dancing or feasting, neither by night nor by day. Delinquents shall be subject to imprisonment for three days for the first offence, for six days for the repetition of the offence.”

The remaining articles of the code relate to the making of roads and keeping them in repair.

“These clauses are given as more particularly exhibiting the effect of the code on the field labourer. To exhibit the whole system by which the driver is made answerable for the labourer, the overseer for his drivers and labourers, and the police, in its various grades, for the whole, it would be necessary to translate the entire code. During imprisonment, the labourer being absent from field work forfeits his wages; the pregnant women also appear to receive no wages during their exemption.”9

It is impossible for any one who is at all conversant with the negro character not to say, that the Code Rural is just such a law as the exigences of Hayti particularly require: and that it is absolutely and imperatively called for in order to extend cultivation, and to bring the people to some sense of duty towards their country and themselves. Left any longer to pursue their uncontrolled and unlimited propensity for indolence, they must recede into barbarism and uncivilization, and the country fall a sacrifice to the mistaken policy of its chief and the leaders of his government, and to those false ideas of philanthropy with which they are so often assailed by persons who are incompetent to advise, because they are without any knowledge of the country or its people.

The Code Rural, therefore, now enforces labour with a rigid hand, – nothing more excessive can be demanded of the slave in the British colonies; and I aver, that if the whole of the clauses of this code be complied with, it will exceed the labour performed by persons in actual slavery. I have my doubts, however, respecting the feasibility of carrying its clauses into successful operation, and whether the temper of the people at the present moment will be submissive enough to adhere to it in all its parts, I am inclined to think that they have been too long indulged in those vices which seem inherent in the negro, to be brought to obedience; and that too rigid an enforcement will bring on discontent, and finally a general resistance. I think it therefore exceedingly probable that Boyer with all his vaunting, with all his proclamations, and aided by his military force, will never proceed to those extremities to promote agriculture, to which he can now go under the sanction of laws made expressly for that purpose. The Code Rural must unquestionably astonish those advocates for free labour who have held up Hayti as an example of what can be accomplished by it; and I think they cannot now have the temerity to say that cultivation in the tropics can be effectually carried on without coercion, when even the Haytian government is constrained to have recourse to it. For my part, I have seen nothing in Hayti to induce me to alter the opinion which I have always entertained of the negro, nor for a moment to expect that cultivation can be carried on with any probability of success without coercion. But I declare it to be my firm conviction, that unless coercion be resorted to, the negro will not labour. The impulse for indulging in sloth and in indolence is too irresistible, and it will not be in the power of the government to make any progress in agricultural labour, except it be done by actual force.

The system pursued by the Haytian government respecting the disposal of its lands seems to be erroneous. Allotting it out in small grants of ten to fifteen acres, is an injudicious measure: it only tends towards extending and perpetuating the evil and pernicious habits of the people. When a negro obtains a grant of a small tract of land, he cares little about the cultivation of it beyond the production of enough for his own immediate wants, and those wants are trifling. Two or three hours’ labour in each week will suffice to answer all the purposes of the culture required to produce food enough for himself; the rest of his time is then allowed to dwindle away in the most puerile pleasures and inconsistencies. No object which moderate industry could procure would balance the insatiable desire for reposing under the shade of the guava, and for ablutions in the neighbouring stream; with these and a little food all his wants are supplied. Such being the case, and known to be so by the government, it is enough to surprise one that they should parcel out their lands in this way, because, even under the Code Rural, the person holding it is no longer a labourer, but a proprietor, and is not therefore amenable to it. Had the government proceeded differently, and let the estates to farm as they were originally laid out, so many petty proprietors would not have existed, but would have remained amenable to the law for enforcing cultivation. From this unwise system, labourers are scarce in Hayti, and the few that are to be obtained are of the worst characters, negroes so abandoned as not to have been considered worthy of inheriting a patch of land. Hayti abounds with these small proprietors; their patches of land, with their huts upon them, are generally situate in the mountains, in the recesses, or on the most elevated parts, on spots, as the poet has described, “the most inaccessible by shepherds trod.” They are therefore lost for the purposes of agriculture: their cultivation does not extend beyond vegetables for the markets in their vicinity, added to which they furnish an occasional supply of pork, poultry, and wild pigeons.

Another important question arises on this subject, and that is the quantum of labour which a negro is capable of performing within the day. In the British colonies an experienced planter can at once discern how much labour a slave is capable of performing. He can also discriminate between slaves who are willing and industrious, and those who are careless and indolent; and apportions their labour according to their respective deserts and capacities. The Haytian proprietor is deficient in these requisites; he is not a planter practically, and he is ignorant of its theory. There is nothing regular in his system; it is an anomaly, a strange, incongruous method of proceeding, having no tendency either to improve the soil or benefit himself. The sugar planter in the first place is so ignorant that he knows not the virtue which his soil possesses, nor what it is capable of producing. He considers not whether one field is better adapted for the production of canes than another, but plants indiscriminately in bad or good soil, in heavy or light; in fact he knows not whether it ought to be planted with canes or cotton, or if it would be wise to allow it to become common pastures. He is contented, and seems to be quite satisfied, if he can but obtain vegetation in any way; careless about the manner in which it is accomplished. To ascertain whether it can be improved by art or industry, is a matter about which he is unconcerned.

But the cane is not often planted. Most of the cane pieces on plantations are old, probably they were planted by the French, or subsequently in the time of Toussaint. They exhibit an appearance of age, for their circumference is small, and their joints are not more than three inches apart, nor do they ever exceed four feet in length. These are very seldom manured or trashed, nor do they receive any attention from the time of cutting until they are again ready for the mill the following year. There is no such thing as stirring the soil between the rows at particular times, nor do the cultivators ever trouble themselves about divesting the cane of its superfluous and decaying leaves, so as to open a free course for the air through the whole. Nothing of this is done in Hayti. The fertility of the soil, the congeniality of climate, and the regularity of seasons, suffice for manure, and the rest is left to nature. Art and the industry of man contribute little or nothing to the growth of the cane. The hoe and other implements of tillage are rendered useless by indolence, the planter’s unconquerable love of ease having brought them into disrepute; and I shall be somewhat astonished if the Code Rural will have power enough to revive their use.

The same irregularity attends the operations at the mill, the boiling-house, the distillery, and the other departments of the plantation. I have been through them often, and have been surprised at the want of order which every where prevails. There is nothing systematically arranged, – every thing seems in confusion; the works are detached, and resemble more a heap of ruins than conveniences for manufacturing and distilling. The interior of the boiling-house would astonish a Jamaica planter: the several boilers are not ranged in succession from the receiver to the teacher, as they are in the British colonies. They are placed without rule, and in their manner of conveying the liquor from one copper to another the waste is considerable; and this is observable too in all their operations. There is nothing like cleanliness in their works; filth and every species of dirtiness are to be seen in them; and this is prevalent, although they must be sensible that it is injurious, and often destructive to the quality of the sugar. The distillery department is also very injudiciously constructed. They take no pains to keep the heat at the proper degree requisite for fermentation: every thing has the appearance of negligence, and conveys to the observer a very bad specimen of Haytian skill in the art of manufacturing sugar or of distilling spirits. They do not often make rum: I only know of one or two plantations on which rum is distilled, and these are conducted by Englishmen; one in particular at Aux Cayes, a Mr. Towning, who has an extensive distillery. He produces rum, which, in point of flavour, strength, and every other quality, I do not think inferior to that of Jamaica. To all persons who visit Aux Cayes this gentleman is well known for the hearty and hospitable reception he always gives to a stranger. He is the only person in Hayti who devotes his attention to the distillation of rum. The Haytians cannot distill it; they are ignorant of its principle, and consequently confine themselves to the distillation of what is known in the British colonies under the denomination of low wines. The flavour of this spirit is most unpleasant; which arises, I conjecture, from the ingredients thrown into the fermenting vessels, and from which it is distilled: these, consisting of the molasses from the boiling-house, with all the sweepings of the works, with a proportion of water from any pool however stagnant, if pure water be not near, I apprehend give to the spirit a very acrid quality, as well as a fetid smell. It is however held in great estimation by the people, who drink it freely, and they can obtain it cheap. Upon the whole there can be no difficulty in declaring that the Haytians are ignorant both of the cultivation of the cane, and of the process of manufacturing sugar.