1809–1818: (Pétion’s Great Mistake: The Land Distribution and the Death of the Plantation Economy): In the republic, Pétion’s regime continued its effortless…

1809–1818: (Pétion’s Great Mistake: The Land Distribution and the Death of the Plantation Economy): In the republic, Pétion’s regime continued its effortless decline, and his crucial decision — in retrospect his great mistake — had been to distribute land in smallholdings, beginning in 1809 in the first large-scale land distribution in the hemisphere, with his regime already foundering in a sea of worthless paper and counterfeit coinage. Senior officers got large grants, every major received 35 carreaux (an old French land unit equal to 3.15 acres), captains received 30, lieutenants 25, sub-lieutenants 20, and by 1814 each soldier ended with his tiny plot of 3 carreaux, and the republic had effectively become a nation of smallholding peasants rather than of serfs and plantations. The effects were fundamental: fragmentation of the latifundia took out of production land used for money crops — sugar, coffee, indigo, and cotton — and put it into truck gardens and subsistence farming, while coffee superseded sugar as the primary crop because the peasant could strip wild bushes on every hillside, dry the beans, and bring them to market with never a care for pruning or cultivation. In 1801 under Toussaint, Haiti had exported 13,250 tons of sugar, but by 1822 sugar exports plummeted to 326 tons, and from that year until 1916 sugar exports ceased entirely — while coffee went from 14,750 tons in 1801 to 18,599 tons in 1822 and 30,500 tons by 1860, a quantity barely short of that exported almost a century later in 1952. In March 1815, Pétion again re-elected himself with a rump of only five senators, and within a year a committee at Grand-Goâve produced a new constitution naming him président-à-vie with power to choose his successor, controlling all executive powers while a Senate of fourteen and a Lower House of twenty-nine merely ratified his actions. (15)