Louverture’s constitution reframed plantations as families with owner-fathers

Evidence

Residents of Saint-Domingue were invited to take part in another kind of family, one not defined by blood. “Every plantation is a factory that requires the union of cultivators and workers; it is the tranquil refuge of an active and loyal family, whose father is necessarily the owner of the soil or his representative.” Each “cultivator,” the constitution continued, was a “member of this family,” and therefore had a right to a part of the plantation’s revenues. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 867

Categorization

• DEFINE: The plantation-as-family metaphor is the constitution’s core ideological device reconciling freedom with forced labor.
• XREF: connects to: James I fused patriarchal fatherhood into head-of-state ideology — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 351