[Haiti, Pioneer of Freedom]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

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Published by the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs Department of Commerce Building, Washington, D. C.
July, 1944
The famous Citadel of Christophe
pR ENCH- SPEAKING HAITI has occupied a strategic position on Caribbean
trade routes since buccaneers operated from her shores to harass Spanish shipping three centuries ago. Today that position makes Haiti ’s wartime cooperation of great value to the United Nations, as does her development of agricultural products.
For the first 200 years after its discovery by Columbus, Haiti, which shares with the Dominican Republic the island southeast of Cuba, was a part of Spain. Columbus, who landed on the north coast in November, 1492, wrote of the Indians: “So lovable, so tractable, so peaceful are these people that I swear to your Majesties that there is not in the world a better nation or a better land. ’ ’ Yet when he returned the next year he found that the forty-four men he had left behind had all been killed by the Indians. Reprisals followed, and before long few of the native population were left.
African slaves were soon introduced and, by 1518, the slave trade was so large that importations were limited to 4,000 a year. Many of the early colonists, disappointed that the wealth of the island proved to be in its very fertile soil rather than in gold, moved on to look for treasure elsewhere.
Spain restricted all New World trade to Spanish ships, and early in the seventeenth century this policy was challenged by French and English adventurers (among them the Englishman, Henry Morgan) who had settled on the island of La Tortuga
(the turtle) near the northern shore of Haiti. Known as buccaneers because they cured their meat on spits which the Indians called boucans, they made trips to Haiti to hunt cattle and raise a few crops. Despite Spanish raids, their settlements prospered and cultivation of cotton and tobacco was begun.
In 1697, Spain granted to France the western third of the island. By the middle of the eighteenth century the colony, called St. Domingue, was one of the wealthiest in the world— so wealthy that plantation owners, spending their profits in Paris, inspired the expression “rich as a Creole.” The fertile plains of the north near Cap Frangais (now Cap-Haitien), the Artibonite in Central Haiti, and the Cul-de-Sac near Port-au-Prince produced much of the world’s supply of sugar, indigo
and chocolate. Splendid roads lined with royal palms led from the plantations to the towns.
By 1790 the population was more than 519,000, of whom 452,000 were slaves and 40,000 white. Included also were 28,000 freed slaves, a group which had been growing in influence and which owned approximately 10 percent of the land. At present market values, exports in 1791 reached an estimated total of $50,000,000.
The years of great prosperity were brought to an abrupt close in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Plantation owners and French officials feared the spread of ideas from the French Revolution of 1789, while the freed men saw this as an opportunity. They revolted in 1790, but were defeated. Both groups were surprised when in August, 1791, the slaves, who had long borne the repressive treatment of the French planters, rose up in arms. In the north, large numbers of whites were killed, and horrible retaliations ensued. Many of the remaining whites fled the country.
Commissioners sent from France, then itself in the midst of revolution, proved incompetent. An invasion of the country by Spain and England on the pretext that the revolt might spread to the rest of the Indies, was repelled through the astute generalship of one of Haiti’s national heroes, Toussaint L’Ouver-ture. Born a slave, he had joined the Spanish colonial army on the island, and when he returned to Haiti a large number of his troops accompanied him.
DENSITY OF POPULATION
Each symbol represents 40 people per square mile
Toussaint had a deep faith in his mission to lead his people and, under his rule as supreme commander, the slaves, although free, returned to work on the plantations. However, in 1802, Napoleon sent an expedition under his brother-in-law, Leclerc,-to retake St. Domingue. Henri Christophe, Toussaint’s commander, was defeated and Toussaint himself, lured by a dinner invitation from Leclerc’s aide, was seized and sent to France, where he died in prison. The Haitians fought heroically, and yellow fever struck the French forces. By late 1803, all but 6,000 of the 43,000 French, including Leclerc himself, had died in battle or from fever. The survivors fled to Jamaica, where they were interned by the British.
On January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, one of Toussaint’s generals, declared the independence of the country and named it Haiti, an Indian word meaning mountainous. Haiti thus became the first of the other American republics to be free, and the world’s first Negro republic. Fearing French attempts at reconquest, Dessalines built forts and maintained a large army and, under his rule, the former slaves were again bound to the land. He was murdered near Port-au-Prince on October
General Christophe, another ex-slave, was made president, but his powers were soon limited by a new constitution. After an indecisive clash qf arms with General Alexandre Petion in 1807, Christophe set up an independent “State of Haiti” in the north, while Petion was made president of the “Republic of Haiti” in the south. Christophe’s rule, as president until 1811 and as King Henri I until his suicide in 1820, proved to be Haiti’s most dramatic. Despite high taxes necessary to maintain the army and his court, the north prospered. Land, largely
LARGER CITIES AND COMMUNICATIONS
now in the hands of the government, was leased each five years to the highest bidder. A quarter of the crops went to the state and another quarter to the workers, bound to the land much like serfs. His great fortress stronghold, the Citadel, and his lovely palace of San Souci are enduring monuments to Christophe’s tiny state.
Petion governed constitutionally and, by selling or giving small plots of land to members of the army, created a nation of small subsistence farmers. With few export crops, national income declined, budgetary deficits rose, but the bulk of the people enjoyed a new freedom. His successor, Jean Pierre Boyer, not only ruled a united Haiti (after Christophe’s death), but seized control of the newly liberated Spanish colony to the east. During his administration, from 1818-1843 (the longest of any Haitian president) he attempted briefly but unsuccessfully to re-establish large plantations worked by serfs. A year after his overthrow the Spanish-speaking section of the island
revolted and became the Dominican Republic.
In the ensuing seventy-two years, Haiti had twenty-two heads of state, of whom but few served out their terms of office. On July 28, 1915, after the latest president had been deposed, United States marines landed at Port-au-Prince to forestall rumored German plans for the seizure of customs, and to protect United States’ and other foreign interests. The military occupation continued until 1934, and the United States budget supervisor left in 1941. An orderly financial administration was established, along with the peaceful election of presidents, improvement in roads, and in health and sanitation. To the Haitians, after their long struggle for independence, the occupation was onerous and deeply wounding to national pride; but it brought to an end the large and expensive standing army which, since independence, had had great political power, and lifted the constitutional ban on white ownership of land.
Three mountain ranges, running from east to west, divide Haiti into a series of isolated valleys which, like the plains which skirt the coast and the lower mountain slopes are broken up into
(est.) (est.)
MAJOR EXPORTS OF HAITI 1939-40
Each symbol represents $200,000
many small parcels of land, largely individually owned. Since rail and road communication are insufficient, there is a lively coastwise trade among the numerous seaports.
The most important railroad runs north along the coast from Port-au-Prince and inland up the Artibonite valley to Verrettes. There are almost 30,000 miles pf roads and trails, including an all-weather road from Port-au-Prince to Ciudad Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Bus services connect the important towns, but since few roads are passable in the rainy season, the five large plains tend to exist as separate economic units.
Since the days of the French, when sugar, coffee, indigo and cacao made Haiti’s trade of greater value than that of the thirteen English colonies put together, agricultural production has radically changed. The switch from large plantations to small farms resulted in a concentration on various food products and the abandonment of sugar and cacao. The coffee bushes of the old plantations continue to grow wild, reseeding themselves, and the farmer has only to collect the crop. Coffee, of a mild variety which brings a high price, made up most of Haiti’s exports after independence and, even in 1942, was 40 percent of total export values.
In an effort to decrease Haiti’s dependence on coffee and
cotton, long the two chief export items, new crops including bananas and sisal have been introduced. Bananas were planted as early as 1515, but little attention was given to their commercial development. Since 1935, their cultivation has been revived on small farms so successfully that by 1941 banana exports were second only to coffee. The importance of sisal, for marine cords and ropes, has increased with the needs of the war and the loss of sisal production in the Far East. First exported in small quantities in 1926, sisal by 1941 accounted for $1,690,000, or about a fourth, of the total exports. Haitian imports consist chiefly of textiles (especially blue denim for work clothes), wheat flour, fish, soap, machinery, automobiles and petroleum. Manufacturing has been limited by the comparatively small market. Such agricultural products as coffee, sugar and sisal are processed in Haiti, and small factories make lard, furniture, soap, cigarettes, bricks and rum. J
Since the founding of the republic, free education has been one of the chief tenets of all Haitian governments. Rural education is carried on by the Department of Agriculture, and urban education by the Department of Public Instruction. Although education is compulsory for all children from 7 to 14, the lack of a sufficient number of schools and of trained teachers, and, in rural districts, the use of children on the land, have contributed to the difficulty of putting this into practice. There were 85,000 children enrolled in primary schools—rural, urban, and private—in 1941. Much work remains to be done, particularly in revising curricula (now based on French classical education) to include vocational training and in providing more adequate normal school training for teachers. There is, however, a growing awareness of the need for increased education, and for specialized training in agriculture among rural children.
For sale by Superintendent of Documents, U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington 25, D. C.