Dessalines is killed over land reform and the peasants withdraw

Mocombe treats the killing as the decisive turning point rather than a palace coup. Between 1804 and 1806, he argues, the purposive-rationality of the enslaved and maroon population formed part of how the new state actually worked, and that ended on the day Dessalines was assassinated. He names the cause as land. Dessalines had attempted an equitable redistribution among the population and had focused on fortification, national production, food security and growing food for local consumption, and the Affranchis assassinated him over that land reform. The consequence he identifies is a withdrawal rather than a defeat. The African majority left for the mountains and the provinces, where they organised the subsistence and communal arrangements he calls the counter-plantation system, while productive land was divided between mulatto elites and the black commanding officers of the revolution. Corroborated by 3 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Mocombe makes land redistribution, rather than colour politics or Dessalines's autocracy, the motive for the assassination, and dates the loss of African influence over the state to it.

People fleeing the war in Saint-Domingue landed in the Spanish province of Santiago de Cuba and brought a crop with them. In 1800 the whole island of Cuba carried about sixty coffee plantations. In 1803 the province had eight worth listing. During 1804 alone another 54 were established, holding more than half a million plants. The district of Dos Bocas went from 73,000 plants before 1803 to 305,000 in 1804, then 362,000, 289,000 and 162,000 over the following three years. Guanian rose from 10,000 plants in 1803 to 538,000 in 1807. Before the refugees arrived the provincial harvest had never reached 8,000 arrobes. By 1805 it was 80,000, and 300,000 in the years after. Governor Kindelan reckoned the province harvested 10,000 quintals in 1807, twice that the next year, at least 30,000 by 1809, and looked for 40,000 in 1810. Land, houses and enslaved people were advertised for sale payable in coffee.

The earliest known written use of the word Candomble comes from a police raid in 1807 near Santo Amaro in Bahia. The charge had nothing to do with healing or with causing harm. The accusation was that the house sheltered runaways and held gunpowder and arms. That is the shape repression took in these decades. Police looked at houses of worship and saw gatherings of people of African descent that might become a rising, and after the revolts of the early nineteenth century they treated any African associated object as a threat in itself. In another raid in 1830 they charged a Candomble leader with being partly responsible for four hundred runaways in his district. Poison accusations had meanwhile nearly vanished from the record. Of eighty two usable police investigations from Cachoeira between 1820 and 1839, four concerned poison, and three of those were enslaved people who killed themselves with arsenic.

When Bonaparte received news of the 1801 constitution he sent a large military mission under his brother-in-law to restore metropolitan control and to co-opt, expel or eliminate Louverture and the generals under his command. After three months of fighting, known as the three months war, Louverture surrendered, was trapped and deported to France, and died in prison at Fort de Joux. The editors state the causal chain without hedging: promulgating the constitution provoked the events that finally led to the creation of the Haitian state and to the drafting of its first national constitution. Resistance to the French army continued after the deportation, and under Dessalines the country won an independence formally declared on the first of January 1804. The editors also record what the constitution had formalised in the meantime, describing it as extending a structure of governance already essentially in place under his rule.