Emancipation in Saint-Domingue demanded renewed compulsory labor from the freed

Evidence

Louverture’s constitution represented, as one scholar has argued, the articulation of a “social contract” for Saint-Domingue, one that would have a profound impact on the structuring of postindependence Haitian society. … It rested on the idea that “all citizens owe their services to the land which feeds them and in which they were born, to the maintenance of liberty and equality, of property, whenever the law calls on them to defend it.” … But Saint-Domingue’s constitution carried within it particularly powerful contradictions. On the one hand, the project that all the people of Saint- Domingue were called on to support was a project of emancipation, of freedom from racial hierarchy, of liberty for all in a land once dominated by slavery. At the same time, ex-slaves were given very particular responsibilities that were defined by their old status: those who had once worked as slaves were now free, but they were required to work as cultivators. To defend freedom, they had to surrender their freedom to the new state. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 869

Categorization

• XREF: The emancipate-and-coerce core contradiction parallels what the reader tracks in the standing directives and echoes colonial labor-coercion patterns elsewhere in Atlantic history.
• QUESTION: How did Haitian contemporaries reconcile ‘liberty for all’ with mandatory cultivation, and did later constitutions retain the labor clause?