In lieu of the recent disaster it might be helpful to examine the origins and resultant lessons of this chronically Third World nation.
The island of Hispaniola was inhabited by the Arawaksprior to the arrival of Columbus in 1492. Disease, ill treatment, andexecution by the Spaniards decimated the Arawaks, who gave Haiti (“landof mountains”) its name. While establishing plantations in E Hispaniola(now the Dominican Republic), however, the Spanish largely ignored thewestern part of the island, which by the 17th cent. became a base forFrench and English buccaneers. Gradually French colonists, importingAfrican slaves, developed sugar plantations on the northern coast.Unable to support its claim to the region, Spain ceded Haiti (thencalled Saint-Dominque) to France in 1697.
Haitibecame France’s most prosperous colony in the Americas and one of theworld’s chief coffee and sugar producers. The pattern of settlementtook the French south in the 18th cent. and society became stratifiedinto Frenchmen, Creoles, freed blacks, and black slaves. Between theblacks and the French and Creoles were the mulattoes, whose socialstatus was indeterminate.
When French-descended Creole planters sought to preventmulatto representation in the French National Assembly and in localassemblies in Saint-Dominque, the mulattoes revolted under theleadership of Vincent Ogé. This rebellion destroyed the rigid structure of Haitian society. The blacks formed guerrilla bands led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, a former slave who had been made an officer of the French forces on Hispaniola.
Whenthe English invaded Haiti in 1793 during the Napoleonic Wars, Toussaintmaintained an uneasy alliance with the mulatto André Rigaudand cooperated with the remnant of French governmental authority. In1795, Spain ceded its part of the island to France, and in 1801Toussaint conquered it, abolished slavery, and proclaimed himselfgovernor-general of an autonomous government over all Hispaniola.Napoleon sent his brother-in-law, Gen. Charles Leclerc, with a huge punitive force to restore order in 1802, but he was unable to conquer the interior.