Three years of forced labour and no leaving your rural section

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.

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.

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.