Emancipation left most ex-slaves landless laborers under new militarized overseers
Evidence
Some ex-slaves garnered enough money to purchase land outside their plantations, or else headed into the hills and simply claimed it for themselves. But many—probably the majority—toiled away as laborers on the plantations where they had once been slaves. In the 1950s the ethnographer Odette Menesson-Rigaud recorded a Vodou song, a lament that seems to date from the period of the Haitian Revolution, probably from 1800. At the time Saint-Domingue was in the midst of a civil war, and Louverture’s general Dessalines was leading troops against André Rigaud in the south. The two enemies had something in common: both were leaders of militarized labor regimes in the areas they controlled. Indeed, Dessalines himself, a former slave, controlled several large plantations. If, in much of Saint-Domingue, the old white masters had gone, the vast majority of ex-slaves still had no claim to the land that they, and often their ancestors, had worked. The Vodou song recorded in the 1950s perhaps provides us with a trace of the irony the ex-slaves registered about the situation, and the sorrow they felt as they came to see that the land they worked was not to be theirs. “Mister Rigaud, Mister Dessalines,” the song announced, “this land is not for us. Understand? It’s for the whites.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 666
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the broader pattern in post-emancipation Atlantic societies (and later Haiti’s own class structure) of freedom without land redistribution — plantations persisting under new masters.
- DEEPTHINKING: The Vodou lament condenses post-revolution disappointment in a few lines: even the revolution’s own generals presided over regimes where the land stayed out of ex-slaves’ hands.
- SEED: The irony of revolutionary leaders becoming militarized labor-enforcement masters is a strong angle for an essay on how revolutions can reproduce the very structures they overthrow.