1848-1860: The Long Springtime Of Nations and The Island of Stability
1848 was to be a year of enormous change: political, social, and economic for Haiti, and for the entire world, because 1848 brought not just a change of government in Haiti, but radical revolution that ripped through many of the greatest of the great powers. Haitian political change in 1848 went back to 1843, when the Boyer dictatorship realized that it could no longer rule by authoritarian fiat. With Boyer himself aging and opposition to his clumsy personalistic dictatorship growing, the Haitian elite forced change. The aging Boyer finally introduced a proposal for a parliament of Haiti consisting of persons elected by the landed gentry. Landed voted was finally implemented in 1844. Boyer himself would continue to cling to power until 1848, when the first Haitian elections were held. The first-ever elected parliament of Haiti finally sat in Port-au-Prince in 1848, and Boyer was forced to step aside. A national unity government consisting of Haiti's embryonic parties: the Liberal party and the Conservative party, were placed in power under the new Spanish-speaking president Jacinto Albizu. Albizu was ironically the head of the pro-Armed Forces faction that Boyer himself had disbanded; doubly ironic was that Albizu never reconstituted the Haitian army.
Notionally, the parliament was divided into two factions: a Conservative party led by the landowners and the Catholic Church, joined by the military and the petite bourgeoisie, which was joined in National Unity government by the Liberal party, a conglomerate of the intelligentsia and the industrialists. There was little or no meaningful debate or opposition in the Albizu government, which would become just as stagnant as the Boyer dictatorship. Initial enthusiasm for political reform in the election of the first Haitian parliament was very high, but the reality was that the parliament was elected by a tiny landed gentry consisting of the church, tobacco plantation owners, and a small number of industrialists who owned land throughout the country. The real divide in the National Unity government came between the Catholic Church, led by Cardinal Benedicte Patenaude, and the secular patrician tobacco plantation owners, led by Camille Poirier. Virtually every major institution other than the plantations in Haiti was religious. Catholicism was the state religion. The church ran the schools. The church ran the hospitals. The plantation owners resented the vast political capital held by the Catholic Church, whose bishops and cardinals were overwhelmingly foreigners. Though nominally members of the same party, the split tween these two factions was nearly irreconcilable. Albizu struggled to keep the peace between the two factions.
Tensions between the two factions within the conservative wing of the government came to a head in 1849, when the plantation owners joined by the liberals outvoted the Catholic Church and abolished Catholicism as the state religion of Haiti, a move designed to curb the now-massive power of the church. The unintended consequence of this abolition would be that Haiti began to welcome Protestants and other non-Catholic immigrants.
Successive, massive waves of immigration broke over Haiti. People rushed into Haiti from all corners of the world. Welshman from Wales. African-Americans from the American South. Chinese people from Hong Kong and Canton, the Sioux from the American Midwest, Australians, and many many more. In fact, so many immigrants rushed into Haiti that in the 12 years between 1848 and 1860 population of Haiti would double from 750,000 to 1.5 million. Haiti, with its tiny, nascent construction industry, would struggle to absorb all of these new immigrants. They would overwhelmingly become subsistence farmers.
To understand why so many waves of immigrants rushed into Haiti, it was necessary to look beyond the island of Hispaniola and to massive geopolitical upheaval that was sweeping through the entire world. 1848 in Europe and abroad was the year of the revolution: the Springtime of Nations. 1848 was the year in which the Peoples rose up against their national oppressors throughout Europe: in France, in Germany, and Austria, in Italy, in England, and elsewhere. Nationalities of every stripe took to the barricades to try to overthrow their governments. In most countries they generated massive turmoil, with entire regions falling into public disorder, but to the very great surprise of Haitian diplomats, in only one country did the revolution succeed.
It was England. In the United Kingdom, to their surprise as much as everyone else, the workers overthrew the ancient British monarchy, storming the palaces at Westminster, Buckingham Palace, and Balmoral. The monarchy was abolished. The British crown and its landed aristocrats were left to flee the British Isles in terror. A worker's counsel was brought in as the government of Britain the very first socialist-communist government in the history of the world. As the chaotic worker's councils organized themselves, in Trafalgar square, a triumphant Karl Marx and Engels spoke of this revolution as the inevitable force of history and ultimate fate of Das Kapital. Overseas, most British colonies remained with Britain, but the British East India Company became independent - a shocking antithesis of the socialist ideals that Marx espoused. The East India Company was now the world's largest corporation, with corporate governance effectively ruling India by investors and corporate board of directors.
As revolution boiled abroad, Haiti remain shockingly stable the elected. Albizu's government, which was first brought in with a mandate for reform, proved to be just as lethargic and stagnant as the Boyer dictatorship that had preceeded it, greatly disappointing the intellectuals who had thought that landed voting and the presence of the gentry in government would finally bring in reform for the state. Instead, stability reigned. With the Catholic Church effectively defeated in the political power struggle for control of the Albizu government, Albizu and his liberal-conservative coalition were elected to power again and again and the government started to look like little more than a stagnant swamp. Nevertheless, the stagnation brought sort of stability with it, and Haiti never fell into the kind of turmoil that devastated the rest of the world. The British revolution sent a wave of Welsh immigration, and American turmoil sent American natives and former African slaves scrambling to reach stability in Haiti. The ports of Port-au-Prince swelled with thousands of immigrants every week.
Economically, Haiti grew during these turbulent years, with intensive farming, agricultural, farming tools, and forestry equipment modernizing practices that had previously been entirely by hand. This growth never kept up with Haitian population growth. A split also emerged between French-speaking Haiti and Spanish-speaking Santo Domingo. The Albizu government had changed its decrees to promote manufacturing in Haiti while agriculture was promoted in Santo Domingo. Santo Domingo became home to huge rice farms, coffee plantations, and ranches, while Haiti hosted tool makers, textile mills, furniture factories, and glassblowers. Port-au-Prince became an increasingly modern industrial hub as Santo Domingo remainded a rural backwater. A food industry, canning Haitian fish and sweetening pastry with Haitian sugar, sprang up in Port-au-Prince. This food industry would become increasingly important in Haiti's future as demand for these food products grew.
During these years, the main economic tension in Haiti was around Haiti's severely limited port capacity. Haiti's plantation owners wanted to use this very limited capacity to export tobacco whereas the industrialists desperately needed to import dyes for their textiles, coal for their machinery, lead for their glass, and iron for their tools. Expansion of the port was very expensive due to Haiti's severely limited budget, and expansion came only slowly. This trade constraint more than anything else slowed Haiti's economic growth during this period. By 1860 the size of the Haitian economy had increased half again to 4.7 million pounds, up 50% from the 2.7 million pound GDP Haiti had enjoyed in 1848. But population had doubled. GDP had not kept pace with the population explosion, and the standard of living was no better than it had been in 1848.
If the intellectuals had hoped that the Albizu government would be reformist, then they were disappointed. After the abolition of Catholicism as the state religion in 1849, no further reform would come until 1855 when the National Unity government abolished the much hated, discriminatory colored laws which were causing huge tensions with the now massive Haitian migrant population. By 1858, the clamor for reform had become so great that Albizu could no longer ignore it. Census suffrage was brought in, under pressure from the general population and from the Liberal party. Political power was no longer held by a handful of rich landowners and industrialists.
But what Haiti needed more than political reform was economic reform, for Haiti had struggled to absorb the massive new wave of immigrants and Haitian economic growth had stagnated. Whether new elections would end the Albizu government and empower Haiti to reach the top of the economic pyramid remained to be seen.
((A small out-of-character note here. I goofed in a previous post when I said the French indemnity was 2000 pounds per day. Of course, it is 2000 pounds a week, and that has now been edited in previous posts.
I'll try to make future updates shorter than this one, as this was too wordy and took a really long time to write.))
