Every authority that governed Saint Domingue between 1789 and independence wanted the plantations working again, and each failed for the same reason. Stein follows the legislation. Polverel and Sonthonax's proclamation of May 1793 enforced the protective clauses of the Code Noir and made owners answerable for the rising; the emancipation decrees tied freedmen to their estates for a year in return for a third of revenues; Polverel granted abandoned properties in common, then issued codes on garden plots and on a discipline that replaced the whip with fines and dismissal. Hedouville imposed three-year labour contracts and six months in gaol for the unemployed. Louverture put army officers over the fields and in 1801 forbade the sale of small parcels. Field workers had taken their provision gardens as the model of what liberty meant. Petion and Boyer, long blamed for abandoning the plantation economy, were conceding what the majority of Haitians had wanted all along.