Independence brought continued dictatorship, racial conflict, and grinding peasant poverty

Evidence

The years of conflict left other, more enduring scars: impulses toward democracy would long run up against autocratic and militaristic political traditions, and the social and racial conflicts of the revolutionary years would continue unabated. While some elites rebuilt parts of the colony’s plantation economy, producing and profiting from coffee during the nineteenth century, many ex-slaves and their descendants chose what they saw as the true independence of peasant agriculture over the limits of wage labor. In the middle of the century, peasant movements struggled against autocratic governments, seeking to fulfill some of the unachieved promises of the Haitian Revolution, but were ultimately defeated. Burdened by heavy taxes and confronted with the cumulative consequences of environmental degradation, their struggle for a decent life was a difficult one, leaving many in a grinding poverty that impelled migrations to the nation’s cities and beyond. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 1063