Haiti After Independence: Consolidation, Isolation, and a Model for Spanish America

Shortly after independence, Dessalines ordered the killing of most remaining French whites in Haitian territory, a campaign historians estimate cost between 3,000 and 5,000 lives between February and April 1804 and that Dessalines himself justified as retribution for the terror of Rochambeau's campaign. Dessalines proclaimed himself Emperor Jacques I in October 1804, but growing peasant discontent with his regime of compulsory agricultural labor and rivalry between his centralized power and the mulatto elite of the south led to his assassination at Pont-Rouge on 17 October 1806. The country then split for fourteen years between Henri Christophe's monarchy in the north — which crowned itself in 1811, built the great fortress of the Citadelle Laferrière, and imposed strict forced-labor discipline — and Alexandre Pétion's republic in the south and west, which instead redistributed small plots of land to soldiers and peasants, founding Haiti's smallholding peasantry.