1807–1818: (The Royal Dahomets and the King’s Iron Discipline): To enforce his regime — and Henry, unlike Pétion, Boyer, or many another Haitian ruler, never…

1807–1818: (The Royal Dahomets and the King’s Iron Discipline): To enforce his regime — and Henry, unlike Pétion, Boyer, or many another Haitian ruler, never set rules he could not and would not enforce — the King established his own combination of personal bodyguard and maréchaussée by importing 4,000 young noirs from Dahomey and organizing the Royal Corps of Dahomets, a rigidly disciplined, well-trained, and well-rewarded national gendarmerie. Each of the kingdom’s fifty-six arrondissements had a seventy-man company of Royal Dahomets under an army officer who commanded the district and acted as justice of the peace, and like the regime itself, the Royal Dahomets were incorruptible — under Henry’s express orders, they entrapped thieves by leaving money or valuables in the streets and arresting those who picked them up. Vagabondage was checked and punished, peasants entering towns were required to be decently clothed, and in place of the Frenchman’s hated lash, the liane and kokomakak rose and fell on the backs of idlers or transgressors. Behind all this system and discipline, King Henry was everywhere: inspecting, punishing, rewarding, consulting foreign advisers, strengthening the currency — no monnaie-à-serpent in the Kingdom of the North — improving marketing arrangements at home, and negotiating with merchants abroad. The annual revenue of the regime amounted to $3.5 million, the highest since 1791, proving that Henry’s attention to every detail and his economic system worked — as Toussaint and even Dessalines had understood, it was the only system for a people without the remotest experience in self-government, founded on a mass of manual laborers and an elite that supervised them, with its keystones being regularity, security, and obedience to authority.