Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [111]
If the damage to and deterioration of the plantations during the war years was problematic, the stability of the workforce was still more so. The majority of the newly freed slaves had been born in Africa, and once they were relieved of their grand blanc masters their natural inclination was to revert to practices of African village life, which was based on subsistence agriculture, not plantation labor. Toussaint Louverture was perturbed by this trend and by the tendency of many nouveaux libres (especially those who had come of age since 1791 and so never experienced slave labor) to adopt a wandering manner of life which Toussaint saw as an abuse of freedom and formally denounced as vagabondage.
Toussaint had objected that the labor policy Hedouville pursued was tantamount to slavery, but he himself was as determined to “make the Blacks work well” as he exhorted Bayon de Libertat to be. In October 1800, he decreed a labor policy still more stern than that proposed by Hedouville; it was based on the military model and enforced by the army. This decree was reiterated and reinforced by the constitution Toussaint created for the colony in 1801, which defined the plantation as a “family, whose father is necessarily the owner of the land or his representative.”17 Here was paternalism of the strictest sort: the “father” had unlimited authority to discipline his “family.” Cultivators were to all intents and purposes confined to their plantations and subject to severe penalties if they wandered away or slacked in their work— though now they were to be paid for their labors.
“I have never thought liberty to be license,” Toussaint pronounced in an 1801 address, “or that men become free can deliver themselves without consequence to sloth and disorder; my most formal intention is that cultivators remain attached to their respective plantations; that they enjoy a quarter of the income; that no one can be unjust to them without consequences; but at the same time I want them to work still more than in the old days; that they should be submissive, that they exactly fulfill their duties; [I am] well resolved to punish severely whomever avoids them.”18 To many so brusquely subjected to it, this regime looked all too much like slavery.
Most of the black army officers (even those who, like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, were hostile to the return of the white planters) embraced the labor policy, which was designed, among other things, to help them enrich themselves. Dessalines, given broad authority to enforce the labor rules in the west and the south, soon made himself notorious as a more rigorous taskmaster than the grands blancs ofthe bad old days. He put his opinion very simply: “Blacks don't know how to work if you don't force them.”19
The whip, as such, had been abolished, but Dessalines substituted canes. Often he administered the punishment with his own hand: a beating on the buttocks so severe that the victim could not move for several days afterward. Dessalines caned recalcitrant workers without prejudice, and sometimes unproductive overseers were also beaten. White proprietors on underproducing plantations might be flogged as well—to prove that Dessalines