Moïse’s refusal to enforce forced labor set him against Louverture’s plantation system

Evidence

Moïse had been one of Louverture’s strongest partisans for nearly a decade, since the days when both had served the Spanish, and had become his adopted nephew. By 1801 he was the general of the division of the Northern Province. He also occupied the position of “agricultural inspector” in the region, like Dessalines in the south and west, and was therefore in charge of overseeing and enforcing Louverture’s labor regulations. He had the reputation, however, of being “less barbarous” than Dessalines, according to one contemporary; and Louverture criticized him because production levels were lower in the north than elsewhere in the colony. The youthful Moïse responded by declaring that, despite his uncle’s orders, he could not “resolve himself” to be the “executioner of my color.” “It is always in the name of the interests of the metropole that he scolds me,” he explained, “but his interests are those of the whites, and I will love the whites only when they have given me back the eye they took from me in battle.” In addition to rejecting the use of violence against cultivators, Moïse was assiduous in his payment of them. He also advocated selling small plots of land to subaltern officers and even to soldiers, going against Louverture’s stated aim of preventing the division of plantations. Moïse was further alarmed by the 1801 constitution, particularly by its provision for the importation of Africans as cultivators. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 876

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to theme of coercion, labor, and governance post-revolution in the broader Atlantic context.
• XREF: Moïse’s land-reform radicalism inside a revolutionary military regime echoes tensions in other post-revolutionary societies (e.g., soldiers demanding land distribution in the American and French Revolutions).