1838–1841: (What Disorder, What General Ruin: The Domestic Legacy of Boyer): Boyer’s great diplomatic success — the fruit of two decades of patient diplomacy…

1838–1841: (What Disorder, What General Ruin: The Domestic Legacy of Boyer): Boyer’s great diplomatic success — the fruit of two decades of patient diplomacy pursued from weakness rather than strength — won scant appreciation, for people remembered the humiliation of 1825 and disregarded the reconciliation of 1838. In 1841, the French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher described Port-au-Prince after twenty-three years of Boyer’s administration as a capital of foul public squares, ruined monuments, dwellings of plank and thatch, stove-in quays, tottering wharves, no names on the streets, no numbers on the doorways, no street lights at night, no paving anywhere, with the ground underfoot composed of dust and excrement. In the countryside, where thousands of tons of sugar had been produced under slavery, Haitians now grew only kitchen vegetables and bits of cane to crush into syrup for tafia, and the fields — never replanted, never burned off, never cleared — produced only stunted, puny cane invaded by rampant cactus. As early as 1827, the British consul general Mackenzie visited Habitation Laborde outside Les Cayes — which in 1789 had been worked by 1,400 slaves producing 6,000 tons of refined sugar a year — and found the place in ruins, with no cane growing, a handful of peasant squatters cultivating truck gardens, and half-wild cattle grazing on overgrown pastures. The dead fields and ruined towns represented the legacy of Pétion’s land distribution: whether he was a realist who accepted the inevitable or an impractical dreamer who let national discipline slip through his fingers will never be settled to the satisfaction of all.