1776-02-15: (Jean Pierre Boyer, Born the Mulatto Son of a French Tailor and an Enslaved Woman, Who Would Reunite Haiti in 1820, Invade the Dominican Republic…

1776-02-15: (Jean Pierre Boyer, Born the Mulatto Son of a French Tailor and an Enslaved Woman, Who Would Reunite Haiti in 1820, Invade the Dominican Republic in 1822, Negotiate the Catastrophic Indemnity to France in 1825, and Rule for Twenty-Three Years Before Being Overthrown by the Peasants His Policies Had Impoverished): Jean Pierre Boyer was born on February 15, 1776, the mulatto son of a French tailor and an enslaved woman. Educated in France, he fought in the Haitian Revolution alongside fellow mulattos Pétion and Rigaud, clashing repeatedly with the Black revolutionary leadership of Louverture. Exiled to France in 1800 when Louverture’s forces drove the mulatto faction out, Boyer returned with Leclerc’s army in 1802 and, after Louverture’s capture, reconciled himself to Dessalines’s command. After Dessalines’s assassination in 1806, Boyer supported Pétion’s government in the south. The 1816 constitution made Pétion president for life and granted him the right to choose his successor. Boyer thus became president of southern Haiti upon Pétion’s death in March 1818. In 1820, after Christophe’s suicide, Boyer’s troops invaded the north and reunited the country. In 1822, he seized the recently independent Dominican Republic, placing the entire island under Haitian control, a move that poisoned Haitian-Latin American relations for decades. In 1825, to secure French diplomatic recognition and eliminate the threat of a French invasion, Boyer signed a treaty agreeing to pay France an indemnity of 150 million francs, later reduced to 90 million, a debt so catastrophic that Haiti would spend the next century paying for the privilege of its own freedom. To raise revenue, Boyer implemented the Code Rural of 1826, assigning peasants to plantation labor, but the peasants refused to comply and the military refused to enforce it. On February 13, 1843, in the wake of a devastating earthquake, economically ruined peasants overthrew him. Boyer fled to Paris, where he died on July 9, 1850. His twenty-three-year rule demonstrated that reunification, without economic justice, was merely the consolidation of a system that could not sustain itself.