[6] "The Reconciliation of Government with Liberty" by John Burgess, 1915. The whole volume, Especially pp. 148-149.
The Haitian "people," then, employing the word in the popular sense were but recently from barbarism, and the little education they had received politically had been obtained through war; an excellent school perhaps for the training of leaders in the mere matters of preservation and order, but of almost no benefit in the development of the common people; although it is related by St. Remy, that Rigaud established schools in his army to have his soldiers taught to read and write. This ex-slave population of half a million souls, had been replaced during the later period of its existence as slaves, about every twenty years with fresh arrivals from Africa.[7]
[7] "Roosevelt et Haiti." A. Firmin p. 245.
No one expected the self-liberated people of Haiti to set up and maintain a stable government. All history was against such a phenomenon. If it required for England, the most fortunately situated of all the modern nations a period of nearly ten centuries to reach stable government, how could Haiti with its population of ex-barbarians and ex-slaves be expected to perform at once so brilliant a feat? Is Haiti, because it is black, expected to do the impossible? Firmin says at the time of which we speak, there was scarcely a person who did not ridicule the idea that Dessalines and his associates should even think they could create a country and govern it independent of foreign control. The statesmen of France were so sure that these people would fail, simply because of racial weakness, that they confidently expected the colony to return to France. They had not given up this hope ten years later; for in 1814 when the island was divided in government, these statesmen proposed to both Christophe who governed in the North, and to Petion who governed in the West that they should return the island to the mother country. They offered to these two colored rulers the highest grades in the French army and large sums of money; but neither Christophe nor Petion could be bought.[8] In this connection, I may remark on the authority of Professor Sloan (his standard work--Life of Napoleon) that it was the heroic resistance of Toussaint L'Ouverture and his compatriots that defeated Bonaparte's plan for the Western Hemisphere and gave us Louisiana. In a letter written by Robert G. Harper in March 1799,[9] which has just reached my hands through the American Historical Society, I find the following: "Last summer, while Mr. Gerry was still in Paris, and the Directory was employing every artifice to keep him there, Hedouville was preparing to invade the southern states from St. Domingo, with an army of blacks; which was to be landed with a large supply of officers, arms and ammunition, to excite an insurrection among the Negroes by means of missionaries previously sent, and first to subjugate the country by their assistance, then plunder and lay it waste. For the execution of this scheme, he waited only till the English should evacuate a certain port in the island which lay most convenient for the expedition; but he was interrupted by a black general of the name of Toussaint, who drove him from the island, compelled him to embark for France and took the whole authority into his own hands."