1805: (The Color Question and the Seeds of Civil War): The national colors were changed from the French Tricolor remnant to red and black, and significantly,…

1805: (The Color Question and the Seeds of Civil War): The national colors were changed from the French Tricolor remnant to red and black, and significantly, no gradation of race was to be admitted: all Haitians were to be known as noirs, a declaration that masked but did not resolve the deepening schism between the Black majority and the mulâtre elite. The constitution recognized freedom of religion — which, other than perpetual freedom from slavery, was the only freedom it acknowledged — yet the Emperor controlled the diminished religious establishment, and as curé of St. Marc he appointed Félix, a retired drum major of the Légion Dessources. Whatever its imperfections, the constitution of 1805 reflected the actualities of Haiti under Dessalines, yet there was one actuality that, by renouncing, the constitution underscored: the color line between jaune and noir. In the scramble over land titles Dessalines had revoked in 1804, mulâtres asserted claims to properties once held by French fathers or other relations de la main gauche, prompting the Emperor to burst out: “And the poor noirs whose fathers are in Africa — they’ll get nothing?” Dessalines answered himself that what they had spilled their blood together to take, they would share equally — but to him, noirs were more equal, and this conviction would prove the seed of the civil war that followed his death.