Louverture’s plantation labor system reproduced slavery’s coercion despite wages.

Evidence

What Louverture was proposing was alarmingly similar in many ways to the old order he was disavowing. There were important differences, of course, most notably the fact that cultivators were to be paid for their work. But the unflinching threat of physical punishment issued by Louverture, finessed by the comparison made to the disciplining of soldiers, meant that ex-slaves were pushed to work as much through fear of violence as through the promise of payment. Not surprisingly, some claimed that it was Louverture’s ultimate intention to reestablish slavery. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 850

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The emancipator recreating the coercive structure of the old regime under new justifications, with the soldier-discipline framing to soften physical punishment, is a dense portrait of how revolutions reproduce what they overthrow.
• ADDENDUM: Complements ‘On Sacrifice’ themes of leaders imposing order through coercion; also echoes the tradeoff between individual freedom and productive output in emancipation regimes.