Latin America's first land reform makes Haiti a nation of peasants

In 1809 Alexandre Petion, ruling the southern republic after Haiti split in two, decided to break up the large estates and distribute land to his officers and soldiers. It was the first land reform in the history of Latin America. Henry Christophe in the north followed in 1819. Petion had little choice. The French market was gone, the Napoleonic wars made trade with Britain and the United States difficult, and keeping export production going with troops standing over the workers had become too expensive. Inheritance rules taken from the Napoleonic Code gave every child an equal share, so holdings subdivided in each generation until the typical farm today runs to three quarters of a hectare or less. The reform spared Haiti the pattern of huge estates beside tiny ones found across Latin America. It also left rulers who owned no working estates with one route to an income, which was taxing the peasants.

Between May 1809 and the middle of the following January, the mayor of New Orleans, James Mather, tallied 9,059 arrivals and sent the number to the governor. Almost all had sailed from Santiago de Cuba or Baracoa, expelled from the island where they had taken shelter after fleeing Saint-Domingue. Only one vessel in the movement came from Havana. Further landings in the first months of 1810 carried the total past 10,000. The three castes of the old colonial order arrived in roughly equal numbers: white, free of colour, and enslaved. Children made up 42 percent of the free people of colour, 29 percent of the enslaved and 24 percent of the whites. Orleans Parish held 17,001 people in 1806 and 24,552 in 1810, and the refugees were 90 percent of the growth in the free coloured population. Measured against the town itself, between 10,000 and 12,000 residents in 1806 and 17,242 in 1810, the arrivals doubled New Orleans.

On 7 November 1808 General Jean Louis Ferrand marched about six hundred men toward Seybo, in eastern Santo Domingo, to put down a rising led by an officer he had once trusted with the district. He believed the sight of him would restore order and that any resistance would break easily. Waiting for him were 2,100 soldiers sent from Havana and Puerto Rico. The battle was one sided. Ferrand ordered the survivors to withdraw, said aloud that he was the victim of his own overconfidence, took a cartridge from an aide before anyone could stop him, primed his pistols and killed himself. He had soldiered for twenty five years, through the American and French revolutions, and had run the last French government in Hispaniola for almost five. His second in command, General Joseph Barquier, took over a position that was already lost. Six weeks later a junta named Juan Sanchez Ramirez governor in the name of Ferdinand VII.

Before she was called Defilee she had fought beside her two brothers, as Sanite fought beside Charles Belair and Marie-Jeanne beside Lamartiniere. Both brothers were killed in one battle and her mind gave way. She stopped recognising people, including her three children, and spent her evenings kneeling at their grave in the cemetery at Cap. By the end of 1806 she was wandering in Port-au-Prince, a scrap of green ribbon pinned to her headscarf. On 17 October 1806 at five in the afternoon she came on a crowd of soldiers, generals, onlookers and children throwing stones at a body in the road. It was Dessalines. She knelt, then collected the broken bones and the flesh, put everything into a sack, and carried it to the inner cemetery with the help of a beggar called Dauphin. The two of them were seen at nightfall kneeling over what was left of the man who had declared the country independent.