Boyer's rural code needs bayonets and is ignored anyway

Gerlus reads the code as the last serious attempt to force household production back into export production, and says plainly that agriculture in post-colonial Haiti required the stimulus of the bayonet. Only a state made up of large landowners with unlimited power could have enacted it. James Franklin reported watching Haitians worked at bayonet point during the 1820s on estates belonging to generals Inginac, Gedeon and Magny, to Colonel Leurebours and to President Boyer himself. Private owners welcomed the law as a useful constraint on labourers they considered recalcitrant. Yet Gerlus concludes it stayed a paper plan. Too much land had already been distributed under Petion, earlier laws had promised ownership to anyone who would cultivate, and the government had no means of enforcement. Even raising the worker's share from a quarter to a half did not attract sharecroppers, because the offer was simply refused. Corroborated by 4 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Corrects Klooster's attribution of the rural code to Petion.

The Cour Prevotale ended abruptly. Late in 1826 an order from the metropole suppressed it, and the reaction in Martinique was anger. The governor disbanded the court reluctantly while predicting that poisonings would climb again at once, and the slaveholders who had used it, and served on it, objected. Two years later, by a royal ordinance of September 1828, France applied the Napoleonic penal code of 1810 to its remaining Caribbean colonies, a code mentioning poison only as an instance of voluntary homicide and punishing divination and similar practices with a fine and a few days in jail. In 1831 the Martinique council drafted rules for applying the new law to enslaved people. The draft kept the old fear of societies formed to poison, and made the killing of an owner by any means a parricide, and for the first time in a century it treated sorcery and medicine as separate from poison.

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 Yoruba kingdom of Oyo defeated and subjected Dahomey in a war fought between 1726 and 1730, and collected tribute from Agaja and his successors for close to a hundred years. In 1823 Gezo beat Oyo and stopped paying. His victory became a set piece in the recital of his reign, told at length by the court historians. What sat around it was much thinner. The official history admitted that Agaja had paid tribute, mentioning it only in passing as background to another story. The Oyo invasion that devastated Dahomey under Agaja does not appear in the account of his reign at all, surfacing only inside Gezo's, as a measure of how much Gezo had undone. Major wars lost against Oyo under Tegbesu and under Agonglo were left out altogether. What the palace singers kept was a record of victories, and the defeats can be recovered only from European documents written at the time they happened.