To defend their freedom, Haitian ex-slaves had to surrender it to the state

Evidence

But Saint-Domingue’s constitution carried within it particularly powerful contradictions. On the one hand, the project that all the people of Saint- Domingue were called on to support was a project of emancipation, of freedom from racial hierarchy, of liberty for all in a land once dominated by slavery. At the same time, ex-slaves were given very particular responsibilities that were defined by their old status: those who had once worked as slaves were now free, but they were required to work as cultivators. To defend freedom, they had to surrender their freedom to the new state. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 869

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The defining paradox of the Haitian Revolution’s outcome: freedom could only be defended by being alienated to a centralized state—a structural contradiction framing all of Haitian postindependence history.
• XREF: Parallels the state-versus-liberty tradeoff familiar from 2001/revolutionary historiography and the American founding’s freedom-for-some-but-not-others.