1843: (Haiti in 1843: The Epitaph of the First Forty Years): By 1843, when Boyer departed, Haiti had found its level — the fire had gone out, the country was…

1843: (Haiti in 1843: The Epitaph of the First Forty Years): By 1843, when Boyer departed, Haiti had found its level — the fire had gone out, the country was unified, its political traditions established, its place in the world fixed, its social structure solidified, and its economic life formed — but if this sounds like a recitation of progress, it was not, for stagnation and decline formed the leitmotif of the thirty-nine years from 1804 to 1843. Though he ruled Haiti for twenty-five of those years, Boyer must be judged a failure: not one of his programs succeeded, and he left behind a country ruined, stagnant, and — except in limited elite circles — contented, though himself a man of scrupulous probity who could nevertheless remark to a newly appointed collector of customs: “I’ve given you this job so you can make a little something out of it for yourself.” The plantations of Dessalines and Christophe had lapsed into a collection of truck gardens growing subsistence crops for a nation of peasant noirs with a static, village-based economy — Haiti had no need for a national market, no requirement for a nationwide transportation system, and no economic or social necessity at work to challenge its primitive Africanized folkways. Power was now firmly vested in the elite and in the army, the one almost exclusively mulâtre, the other almost wholly noir — each group self-centered, self-serving, and self-perpetuating, with loyalties personalized and paid to men, not institutions. Of the thirty-four signers of the Act of Independence in 1804, only five died natural deaths; nearly all had repeatedly conspired, betrayed, or been betrayed, mostly by each other — and such was to be the framework of Haitian politics for the next seventy-five years: intrigue, conspiracy, treachery, violence, coups, caste against caste, color against color, region against region.