Republican emancipation turned slave plantations into participatory salaried farms

Evidence

Polverel, however, did go further than Sonthonax in assuring plantation laborers some control over their labor. He gave them the right to participate in the selection of managers and to elect their drivers in plantation assemblies. Women—banned from voting in political assemblies of Saint-Domingue, as they were France—were given the right to vote in these elections. Polverel also gave the cultivators six months to move to a new plantation if they wished. Polverel’s regulations promised a dramatic transformation meant to turn plantations once operated through a brutal hierarchy into farms worked by salaried workers and run with their active participation. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 568

Categorization

• XREF: Links to Polverel’s land-distribution plan and the earlier chapter’s discussion of the commissioners’ policies; also parallels other emancipation schemes in the Atlantic, e.g., later U.S. Reconstuction debates over freedmen’s land and labor.