Gerlus explains Haitian militarism as an economic arrangement rather than an inherited habit. Independence turned the abandoned French plantations into state property, which made the generals who held the state the country's largest landowners and made office the surest route to land. What they lacked was labour and the money to buy it. The article tracks successive attempts to force cultivators back onto large estates: decrees after 1804 binding everyone who was not a soldier to a plantation under armed supervision, Christophe's leased royal estates in the north, Petion's sales and gifts of land in the south, and Boyer's Rural Code of 1826, enforced at bayonet point on properties belonging to generals and to the president himself. Each attempt failed, because people who already held plots would not accept a quarter of the harvest and no labour market existed. Smallholders growing food became the leading force in the economy.