1820–1828: (The Mulâtre Consolidation and the Suppression of Noir Education): Although Sanders did not make the point in so many words, Boyer’s regime — comp…

1820–1828: (The Mulâtre Consolidation and the Suppression of Noir Education): Although Sanders did not make the point in so many words, Boyer’s regime — composed mainly of literate mulâtres from the West and South — was already buttressing its elite status by denying literacy and education to the noir masses of the North and the Artibonite and, in general, to peasants and cultivators everywhere. The observation was by no means unique to Sanders: only five years later, the English observer James Franklin remarked that the present government seemed to consider the poverty and ignorance of the people as the best safeguards of the security and permanence of their own property and power. It took just three years for Boyer and the men of Port-au-Prince to run through the surplus inherited from Henry: in 1823 the republic’s treasury was empty, and in the following year the government spent more than it took in. A century would elapse before Haiti again enjoyed a balanced budget or a fiscal surplus. The systematic dismantling of Henry’s educational and economic infrastructure represented not merely a change of regime but a deliberate mulâtre strategy to maintain political control by keeping the noir majority in a state of enforced ignorance.