1825–1841: (The Broken Staff: The Decay of the Army and the Color Line Under Boyer): Some historians argue that from the moment of the French settlement in 1…

1825–1841: (The Broken Staff: The Decay of the Army and the Color Line Under Boyer): Some historians argue that from the moment of the French settlement in 1825, the army — nominally 45,000 strong — took off its pack and stood at ease, but in fact the army had already been going steadily downhill even under Dessalines and later in the Kingdom of the North, as the stumbling performance of both sides in the civil war, their common inability to conduct successful offensives, and the disorganization of the Dominican forays of 1805 and 1822 all attested that in relying on the army, Boyer was — in Washington’s phrase — “leaning upon a broken staff.” Schoelcher described the army as “assuredly the most miserable in the world,” noting that at reviews in Port-au-Prince conducted by the president himself, he had seen soldiers bareheaded, barefooted, in trousers of diverse colors with torn and tattered blouses — and even remembered a grenadier whose trousers had only one leg left. The private soldier, recruited by impressment and roped with other miserable conscripts, received three gourdes every six weeks — his entire clothing-issue consisted of one blouse, while the rest of his uniform and gear he had to buy out of pocket from his commanding officer, and he was provided no barracks or rations. The only provisions of Boyer’s Code Rural that stuck were those that codified rural Haiti — the whole country outside the gates of Port-au-Prince — into the governance of the army, while a tacit division of spheres along racial lines emerged: the literate mulâtre elite monopolized politics, commerce, and bureaucracy, while for an ambitious noir without education, the army was the route to power and enrichment. Schoelcher reported with acid frankness that “the aristocracy of the high-yellow skin has been erected on the ruins of the aristocracy of the white skin.”