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1770-04-02

1770-04-02: (Alexandre Pétion, Born in Port-au-Prince, the Mulatto Revolutionary Who Would Become President of Southern Haiti, Dismantle the Plantation Syste…

Haitian

1770-04-02: (Alexandre Pétion, Born in Port-au-Prince, the Mulatto Revolutionary Who Would Become President of Southern Haiti, Dismantle the Plantation System, Distribute Land to Peasants, Arm Simón Bolívar on the Condition He Abolish Slavery, and Die in Office as President for Life): Alexandre Pétion was born on April 2, 1770, in Port-au-Prince, the mulatto son of a wealthy white colonist. Educated at the Military Academy in France, he returned to fight in the Haitian Revolution alongside fellow mulattos André Rigaud and Jean Pierre Boyer, all three of whom frequently clashed with the Black revolutionary leadership of Louverture. In March 1800, Louverture’s forces drove Pétion, Rigaud, and Boyer into exile in France. The three returned with Leclerc’s expeditionary army in early 1802, but after the French captured Louverture, Pétion joined the liberation struggle under Dessalines. When Dessalines was assassinated in 1806, Pétion refused to submit to the authority of his rival Christophe. Haiti split in two, and Pétion took the south. He promulgated constitutions in 1806 and 1816, the latter making him president for life with the right to choose his successor. His most consequential domestic decision was to dismantle the southern plantations and distribute the land to his supporters and the peasantry. The peasants turned to subsistence farming, agricultural exports collapsed, and government revenue dried up. It was a policy that prioritized human dignity over economic output, and its consequences shaped Haitian agriculture for generations. His most consequential international act came in December 1815, when Simón Bolívar, denied aid by British Jamaica, arrived in Port-au-Prince. Pétion gave Bolívar four thousand guns and fifteen thousand pounds of gunpowder on one condition: that Bolívar abolish slavery in any lands he liberated. Bolívar returned to Venezuela in 1816, proclaimed independence, and freed the enslaved. Pétion died on March 29, 1818, and was succeeded by Boyer. The suburb of Pétionville, established in 1831 in the hills above Port-au-Prince, was named in his honor.