1826, May 1: (The Code Rural and the Irrelevance of Restoration): By 1825, Boyer, his bureaucrats, and the elite recognized that something had to be done to …

1826, May 1: (The Code Rural and the Irrelevance of Restoration): By 1825, Boyer, his bureaucrats, and the elite recognized that something had to be done to rescue Haiti from its economic trough, and their answer — drafted primarily by Inginac — was the Code Rural, which Boyer submitted and the Senate duly enacted on May 1, 1826, somewhat ironically the date of Haiti’s annual Fête d’Agriculture. The code was essentially an attempt to freshen up the fermage systems of Toussaint, Dessalines, and most recently Henry, with its central provision being that all Haitians — except for categories briefly comprehended in two words, “elite” and “army” — were cultivators attached to the soil with an enforceable obligation to work it. In his magisterial analysis of the code’s defects, the historian Leyburn pointed out that even if every literate person in the state had been drafted for service, Boyer could not have filled all the offices provided by the Code — it was at best “a good piece of office-work.” What foredoomed the code was that by 1826 it was irrelevant: Pétion had already dealt the plantation system a mortal blow by breaking up estates into smallholdings, and more than half the land was already in the hands of peasant freeholders — mainly former soldiers of the War of Independence — who had no intention of being legislated back into serfdom. The greatest irony of all was that just as the code was being drafted, Haiti’s most compelling pressure for national discipline — fear that the French would someday come back — was lifted by the ordinance of Charles X.