1818–1820: (They Do Not Know the People I Have to Govern: The Paradox of Henry’s Rule): Like Macbeth, Henry Christophe had vaulting ambition as his spur, but…

1818–1820: (They Do Not Know the People I Have to Govern: The Paradox of Henry’s Rule): Like Macbeth, Henry Christophe had vaulting ambition as his spur, but it was ambition for his people, his country, his posterity, and his race — an English visitor in 1818 noted that he was certainly bringing to a fair trial the great question of whether Black people possess sufficient reasoning powers to govern themselves. Toward the end of the King’s life, his Scottish doctor Duncan Stewart recalled that Henry seemed sensible that he had used his people harshly and ought to have been more liberal with his soldiers, but that he had a very correct knowledge of the character of the people he governed and how necessary occasional severities were. In 1811, the King had asked a British naval officer whether England thought the laws he governed his people by were severe, and when the visitor answered yes, Henry rejoined: “They do not know the people I have to govern.” While Henry the Black autocrat enforced his rule upon the North, Pétion the supple mulâtre gave people what they wanted — no matter that the North flourished while the West and South declined, for the cultivators of the North were unhappy while the peasants of the republic were at ease, and Pétion’s policy was simply to undercut King Henry and his absolutism by giving the peasants license to settle into a congenial, unambitious style of life. When word reached Sans Souci — with its great terraces, state chambers, and spy holes through which the cooks could be watched to prevent poisoning — that Pétion was dead, Henry sent emissaries to Port-au-Prince urging unification, but Boyer’s answer was to put his army in readiness for renewed warfare and to subdue Goman, Henry’s surrogate in the Grand’Anse, while Henry’s cultivators in the Artibonite continued to vote with their feet by slipping southward into the easier life of the republic.