Ex-slaves seized land and market freedoms that administrators then tried to roll back.

Evidence

Building on the policies of Sonthonax and Polverel, Louverture committed himself to forcing former slaves to keep working on the plantations. The decision put him in conflict with the aspirations of many of the newly freed people of the colony. … The daily struggles that took place on the plantations during this period were, for the most part, undocumented. But in February 1794, just a few months after he had emancipated the slaves, Polverel issued a new set of regulations revising his earlier policies on plantation labor. By looking at what Polverel outlawed, we can gain a sense of what the former slaves had been doing in the intervening months. On many plantations abandoned by their former masters, ex-slaves expanded the size of their garden plots and also took over other parts of the plantation to cultivate for their own subsistence and profit. They felled wood and gathered fruit in and around the plantations, and many harvested the produce grown on the provision grounds and sold it in town markets, using plantation horses and mules to transport it, as well as for “personal pleasure.” Some migrated and settled on abandoned plantations. One group “cut down and burned” a coffee grove in order to “build houses for themselves in its place.” Throughout the colony, the former slaves had taken to heart the idea that they deserved portions of the land. To dispel the confusion that he himself had encouraged the year before, Polverel announced in his decree: “This land does not belong to you. It belongs to those who have bought it or inherited it from those who first acquired it.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 639

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The freed people’s own vision of liberty—control of land and labor, market independence—collides with Louverture’s coercive plantation regime. This tension between elite and popular freedom shapes Haiti’s whole trajectory.
• SEED: An essay on how the Haitian Revolution’s promise was already contested from within—emancipation versus land redistribution—as early as 1794.