Jean Pierre Boyer

This is the first draft of a piece on the Haitian President Jean Pierre Boyer. As such, it is still in pre-publication state, and should not be cited. I welcome, however, feedback and constructive cricicism in order to improve it. Dennis R. Hidalgo

Jean-Pierre Boyer (February 28, 1776- July 9, 1850), the longest serving head of state in Haiti, was President from 1818 to 1843.  Boyer personified the Creole liberal politics of the affranchis, better known as free persons of color or mulattoes, whose republican rhetoric concealed a wariness of the masses.  His ascension to the presidency stands out as one of those rare moments on the island’s history when transition to power did not result from bloody insurrection.  The international community admired Boyer for his diplomacy while the majority of Haitians endured his imposing, but erratic grip.  He exerted influence beyond Haiti by attempting to secure the ambiguous legacy of the Revolution.  This was a hostile time for the first independent black nation, a time when every single Caribbean colony, particularly the neighboring Puerto Rico, Cuba, and even the southern United States were still thriving enslaving societies.  Initially, Boyer appeared to preside over a politically stable country.  He averted impending foreign intervention, attracted a measure of international recognition, and experimented with modernizing social programs.  However, his career deteriorated as his regime sustained a number of natural disasters, political setbacks, and economic downturns.  As a result he grew insular and authoritarian.  Ultimately, Boyer’s most notable accomplishments, the French recognition and the integration of the Spanish side, helped drive his administration to the ground.  His own political class later found him insufferable, and through Charles Rivière-Hérard, deposed him on March 13, 1843.  Disempowered, Boyer escaped to Jamaica and from there into exile in France where he remained until his death in 1850.  He left a country in debt and with the promise of the Revolution unfulfilled.

Born in Port-au-Prince, Boyer was the son of a Congolese woman and a mulatto tradesman.  Like with many young mulattoes, his parents sent him to military school in France, and at sixteen, enticed by the Revolution, he enlisted in the Republican Army.  Two years later he joined Jacobin Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Saint-Dominguan mulatto André Rigaud in their efforts to export radicalism to Saint-Domingue.  Across the ocean they met with a colony transformed by the Revolution in a conflict where blacks struggled to preserve their independence from mulattoes, royalists and foreign empires alike.  After defeat in the 1799 War of the Knives, when the mulatto army lost decisively to Toussaint Louverture in Jacmel, Boyer left for France.  His ship, however, arrived in the United States instead, seized because of a brief French-American diplomatic dispute.  During his short stay in the U.S., Quakers and Masons offered him hospitality after learning about the Masonic regalia he carried.  But, although he gave his Americans counterparts a favorable impression, U.S. racism left Boyer humiliated. He will later remember this sojourn somehow bitterly.

From Paris, Boyer enlisted in yet another Saint-Dominguean military venture. It was 1801, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc led it. Bonaparte had turned his attention to Louverture’s virtual independence, and Boyer embarked hoping that this time the French would recognize mulatto privileges.  A year later, with Louverture captured, but with Bonaparte’s anti-revolutionary plans exposed, Boyer did the unthinkable.  Together with other mulatto officers who had learned of the French duplicity, he joined the black resistance now led by Jean Jacques Dessalines.  In 1804, Boyer partook of the abolition of both slavery and colonial rule, even though his most pressing aspirations had been mulatto interests.  Dessalines’ 1806 assassination split the country alongside the color line.  The black general Henri Christophe now ruled the north while in the south the mulatto Alexandre Sabès Pétion led a rival state. Christophe evolved into King Henri I, and Pétion into the President of the impoverished Haitian Republic.  With little control over these events Boyer stayed at his friend Pétión’s side.

In 1818, hot in the heels of Pétion’s heartrending funeral, senators duly certified Boyer as the succeeding president. Boyer was genuinely concerned with the specter of a French invasion, and accurately recognized the Spanish side as the island most vulnerable part. He quickly began forging secret alliances with generals in the northern kingdom, and businesses in the eastern Spanish colony. His first opportunity for expansion came in 1820, after Christophe’s death.  Boyer’s supporters inside the crumbling kingdom summoned him and he easily filled the political vacuum that Christophe had left in the northern capital of Cap-Haïtien.

Not two years had passed when Boyer again expanded.  In November 1821, José Núñez de Cáceres had led the Spanish Creole elite to independence from Spain. They called their new nation “Independent State of Spanish Haiti.” The elite, however, had little influence beyond Santo Domingo.  The “Haitian Party,” which were Dominicans who had been in contact with Boyer, requested annexation to Haiti, and ultimately carried the day.  Boyer preempted his entry into Dominican territory with a deliberately tactful letter and arrived in Santo Domingo with a powerful show of force.  In February 1822, city officials not only opened the doors to Boyer, but led in the transferring of power ceremony.  Days after taking control, Boyer thwarted French filibusters off the coast of the northeastern peninsula of Samaná, justifying in this way the obligation of his occupation. It did not take long for the insecure Spanish and French elites to emigrate and leave its land behind. In just a few years Boyer had reached the apex of his political life. In both expansions he had managed to cross his army through otherwise unfriendly borders without military conflicts and conspicuous looting. This marked a contrast to previous raucous Haitian expansions.

Legend affirms that in 1818 while in deathbed, Pétion had warned General Joseph Inginac of Boyer’s latent ambitions. After Pétion’s death, however, the equable general still sided with the new president.  In fact, Inginac proved as faithful to Boyer, as Boyer had been to Pétion— but longer.  Whereas Boyer served Pétion from 1806 to 1818, Inginac was inseparable from Boyer from the start until his overthrown in 1843. Inginac left his marks of erudition in most, if not in all of the new president’s correspondence and writing. After years of debilitating civil war, Boyer had come to embody Haitians hopes of harmony and prosperity. This shows how much Boyer had inherited and learned from Pétion. He watched while in 1816 Pétión assisted Simón Bolivar and prodded him against slavery.  Like his tutor, Boyer quickly discovered the convenience of being a President-for-Life rather than a King, as oppose to Christophe, his rival to the north. Like Pétion, Boyer quickly snubbed the idea of a truly but weak democratic president. Instead, like Pétion, Boyer distributed land to win the hearts of the people.

In 1822, shortly after becoming the master of the entire island of Hispaniola Boyer launched his modernization project. He aimed to consolidate the gains of the revolution and to cast Haiti to the world as a genuine modern nation. He performed surgical land distributions designed to increase both political approval and agricultural production.  He tried to navigate an imaginary middle between allotting land for commercial cultivation and subsistence agriculture. He eliminated slavery on the east and faced off against the Church. The number of Spanish slaves had never been as high as those of the French in Saint-Domingue, but the mere existence of slavery on the island threatened Haiti’s existence.  Boyer was not alone on his stand against the Church.  Liberals throughout the hemisphere also viewed its extensive holdings, hefty salaries and cultural monopoly, as the main obstacles toward reengineering modern society.  With an unprecedented amount of land and political capital Boyer then consolidated power and redistributed land among his soldiers and peasants.  In 1824 he even sent Jonathas Granville to the U.S. to negotiate the immigration of thousands of free blacks whom he then resettled throughout the island.

The last yet most important French offensive came in 1825.  Former masters arrived exacting profits lost to the revolution. With warships bullying Haitian ports, Boyer bowed down, and accepted the colossal indemnity of 150 million francs for trading rights and official recognition. The deal opened the doors to Haitian products in France, which had yet to find eager legal buyers on the international market. Boyer’s hope was that with a loyal, happier, and more productive population at home, Haiti would finally spring out of poverty and oblivion.  And in fact, with the treaty Boyer lifted forever the French menace, but left the nation scrambling for money to pay the debt.  Boyer’s plan for revenue was also his most important legal contribution. In 1826 the Senate approved Boyer’s Rural Code, which was to transform the Haitian economy into a modern industrial agricultural society. Though abolitionists abroad hailed it as an example of Haitian ingenuity, in reality the code was a sort of liberal serfdom.  It outlawed vagrancy and allowed certain level of subsistence agriculture, but the emphasis was on keeping peasants tied to the land. The objective was to produce great quantities of cash crop for exportation.

Unforeseen circumstances took Boyer’s plans in the opposite direction when Haitian and Dominican peasants appreciated the redistribution of land, but rejected his enthusiasm for commercial agriculture. The army, which was supposed to police peasants, readily admitted failure, and retired, like the rest, to tend their plot of land instead. Production of coffee, cacao, sugar and tobacco for export plunged severely hurting the government’s coffers. Only lumber continued its exporting frenzy curtailing dramatically the number of forests even while Boyer’s government decried it. While the peasantry became the vast anti-modern sector, the commercial urban class prospered with its new trade freedom, and through a money-less economy. Tax policies meant to exploit a large agricultural production that never happened, quickly trickled down to the peasantry, which sought in turn increasing isolation from government as well as from the middling groups. The commercial class, particularly the Dominicans, presented Boyer with its most difficult opposition.  They opposed sharing the French debt and his increasing authoritarian measures. Additionally, Boyer’s diplomatic efforts yielded only minor achievements, leaving him without the international validation and trade contracts he desperately needed to stabilize his government.  Under these circumstances the French debt became such an unsettling burden that Boyer and many of his successors spent their tenures trying unsuccessfully to tackle it.

Political upheaval followed discontent toward the French debt and Rural Code.  The mood was such that in 1830 Boyer prohibited political meetings to safeguard his damaged authority. That same year a drought curtailed the nation’s agricultural production limiting even further the government’s ability to manage public works. Mounting disappointment with Boyer’s regime brewed, but without public venues the opposition submerged and fragmented. It was not until 1838 when the first significant conspiracies developed. Juan Pablo Duarte led the Dominican bourgeois opposition and helped create the secret society La Trinitaria. Haitian liberals formed The Society for the Rights of Man and Citizen. The insurgents organized, educated and waited for the most opportune moment to strike. The opening came in 1842 when a devastating earthquake shocked the entire island and revealed the extent of Boyer’s crippled and unresponsive government.  Because of isolation and the government’s inability to assist those that the earthquake have dislodged, common people perceived Boyer as cruel. In January 1843 the conspirators declared against the regime, and southern peasants supported the coup by denying food to soldiers. Without a functional army, Boyer fled the country on March 13 aboard a British schooner. A year later Dominicans declared independence and create the Dominican Republic. After 25 years of leading Haiti through most of its post-revolutionary period, Boyer spent his last days in France, the same country that facilitated his political demise.

Select Bibliography

Coupeau, Steeve. The history of Haiti. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008.

Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Harvard University Press, 2005.

Nicholls, David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race Colour, and National Independence in Haiti. Rutgers University Press; Revised edition, 1995)

Pons, Frank M. History of the Caribbean: Plantations, Trade, and War in the Atlantic World. Markus Wiener Publishers, 2007.