A Bowdoin graduate makes Haiti the subject of his commencement address

Russwurm delivered his commencement address at Bowdoin College on the condition and prospects of Haiti, and the speech was carried in Maine and Boston papers within the week. The following year he and Samuel Cornish founded Freedom's Journal, which reached white as well as black readers in the northern and some southern states and in England, Canada and Haiti, and which they began partly to oppose the American Colonization Society. Its treatment of the revolution argued that few recorded events had produced more extraordinary effects, that the black character had burst upon the world in its original greatness, and that given liberty, independence and education the race would not be found wanting in minds capable of wielding the sword and swaying the rod of empire. David Walker's Appeal followed in 1828.

The Cour Prevotale sat in Martinique from 1822 to 1827 and tried nobody except enslaved people and free people of colour, and nothing except poisoning. Governor Donzelot had called for extraordinary measures to satisfy justice and produce a beneficial terror, citing the tribunal of Villaret-Joyeuse as precedent. Relaxing the rules of evidence produced the largest poison crisis anywhere in this history, in a colony then at peace. Across some thirty cases, most of them omnibus trials covering many defendants from a single district, the court tried 368 people, convicted 289 and executed 104. Its composition marks a turning point. Medical practitioners were only 7 per cent of the accused, references to spells appear in three trials, and mineral poisons figure in 40 per cent of the cases. Arsenic worried Donzelot enough that he restricted its sale. The suspected poisoner was now the trusted house servant.

The most violent of the rural codes written by the Haitian state was the one promulgated by President Jean Pierre Boyer in 1826. It bound peasants who owned nothing, or owned a fragment of land, to three years of compulsory labour on a large estate. It forbade them to move freely outside their rural section. It placed their work under the supervision of the army. The estates in question had belonged to French colonists who were killed or fled, and after independence they were divided among the black and mulatto generals and the senior officials of the new state. A succession of Haitian governments issued codes of this kind and they resembled one another closely, because they all answered the same problem: how to make people who had just stopped being slaves produce export crops on somebody else's land.

Algeria was conquered by the Ottomans shortly after the Spanish reconquest of Granada in 1492, and Ottoman rule lasted until about 1830, when the country fell into French hands. The change was larger than a change of rulers. Under the French, Algeria entered the imperial domain of western capitalism, which the Ottoman sultanate had never belonged to, and it was governed by the same machinery of racial classification and economic extraction that had been assembled in the Americas. Settlers took the land. The people already there became a category to be administered. Haiti had been independent for twenty six years when this happened, and the French army that crossed to Algiers belonged to the state that was at that moment collecting the indemnity it had imposed on Haiti in 1825. The war that ended French rule in Algeria ran from 1954 to 1962.