Toussaint Louverture preserved emancipation by coercing former slaves to labor

Evidence

During these years he confronted the major dilemmas that would haunt both his successors in independent Haiti and nationalist leaders elsewhere in the Caribbean. (In a 1963 afterword to his book, C. L. R. James compared him to Fidel Castro.) To preserve emancipation, Louverture decided that he must preserve the plantation economy and encourage the return of white planters who had fled. Locked in conflict with ex-slaves who had a very different vision of what freedom should mean, he maintained and perfected a coercive system that sought to keep them working on plantations. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 28

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes post-abolition labor questions in the US South and Jamaica after the apprenticeship era.