Claude Moise's Le projet national de Toussaint Louverture et la Constitution de 1801 is rather short yet raises some important questions. Since Toussaint Louverture, by the time he promulgated the 1801 Constitution, was the most powerful person on the island of Hispaniola and therefore needed a constitution to legitimize and protect the administrative structure he headed, one can see the seeds of future Haitian governments in the text and the practice of government. In addition, Toussaint must have seen the importance of establishing a clear government structure for Saint-Domingue as largely autonomous but still attached to the metropole. Such an attachment was likely believed to be necessary given the possible threat of maritime powers such as England, Spain, or the US, not to mention other cultural and economic ties to France that likely weighed in consideration. For Moise, what Toussaint envisioned was comparable to the free state association of Puerto Rico with the United States, although it is possible that if his regime had endured, independence may have become more attractive.
Unfortunately, Toussaint Louverture's Constitution symbolized the failure to reconcile irreconcilable conflicts of interest. Former slaves who believed liberty and freedom entailed more individual liberties and control of their labor unsurprisingly butted heads with the government and planters (both the colons and the nouveaux libres elites who gained control of estates). The attempts to limit smallholder proprietorship of land and to regulate the movement of ex-slaves through the militarized administrative structure of the administration undoubtedly fueled discontent and continual marronage (vagabondage). Indeed, according to Moise, this is what led to the rebellion associated with Toussaint Louverture's nephew, Moise. Although the author suggests that Moise himself was not directly involved in orchestrating the revolt, his sympathetic words and inaction in suppressing it warranted his punishment by Toussaint Louverture. However, this impasse imperiled the longevity of the type of state envisioned by Toussaint and maintained by his successors in independent Haiti.
Despite these fundamental contradictions of the social order of the Louverturian regime, independent Haiti endeavored to follow it. Of course, without the whites or colons as an integral part of the imagined Haitian nation. Nonetheless, Henri Christophe's government may be the best indication of what Louverture's vision of Saint Domingue would have looked like had it survived. The survival of large estates, the use of the military to police rural laborers, and the commitment to antislavery, educational reforms, and attempts to inculcate values approved of by the government in the masses certainly resemble the goals of the Louverturian regime. However, would Toussaint have taken the step to declare himself a king in a future Saint Domingue or Haiti had the autonomous relationship with France become more of a burden or threat?
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