Haiti’s Rural Code: History, Boyer, and Why the Narrative Still Divides the Island

Hear this article here: https://speechify.app.link/e/ooTuIg1p80b

When I created a video talking about Jean-Pierre Boyer and the unification that many Dominicans forget or don’t take into consideration when discussing the history of the island before it became two countries, I received a comment: You left out the rural code.

I took this comment to mean that I had purposefully left something out, which, if I hadn’t, I would have aligned with the commenter’s ideology or reasoning. So I assumed that this was a Dominican person who believes that certain historical events give us the right to mistreat, demonize, or rationalize the inhumane treatment of our neighbors.

Like I said in the video, history is complex, or at least much more complex than bad vs good. In the video I explained that based on the research, Boyer’s plan was to unify the island so that the eastern side, which will later become the Dominican Republic wouldn’t be vulnerable to European powers coming back to either take over that side or come through that side to take over the western side (what is now called Haiti) or take over the entire island.

At this point, the west side of the island had fought for its freedom from the French, and when they marched toward the east, they abolished slavery and freed that side as well. During that time, the eastern side had been abandoned by Spain like a side chick that gets ghosted. This is something that usually is not mentioned. Did you know that that period of abandonment is called ‘España Boba’?

https://youtu.be/ULLqxtdapFI?si=PikKzAMipRI-lAc9

España Boba (1809-1821)

After a brief French control of the eastern side of the island (what would be called Dominican Republic), Spain regained Santo Domingo in 1809.

But Spain was struggling:

• Napoleon had invaded Spain
• There were independence wars happening across Latin America
• There was economic exhaustion trying to contain all of this

So, during this time, the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo was neglected. The colony stagnated economically and politically. This left that side vulnerable and for one person, created the perfect circumstance to break away from Spain.

Hear this article in a different format https://speechify.app.link/Sg8EOS7A80b

The Ephemeral Independence (November 30, 1821)

José Núñez de Cáceres was an educated creole elite born in 1772 in Santo Domingo. He was educated in colonial legal tradition and served within the Spanish colonial administration. So he knew Spain’s problems at the time and figured it was a good time to extract the colony from Spain. On November 30, 1821, he declared independence from Spain. But here’s the kicker. He did not have:

• A Military
• Popular support
• Strong institutional backing
• international recognition

So two months later, someone else comes marching in. But José Núñez de Cáceres idea that ‘we can govern ourselves’ stayed in some people’s minds. So much so that decades later when eastern side is betrayed by their own and annexed back to Spain in 1861, the whole ‘we can govern ourselves,’ comes back into focus and in 1863-1865 The Dominican Restoration War ensues with echoes of the same frustrations from back in 1821: Self-governance.

But let’s get back to 1821…

The Unification by Jean-Pierre Boyer

Remember, the west side of the island was free at this time. Everyone knew Spain was weak, and that José Núñez de Cáceres didn’t have a good chance of sticking because he lacked military power. European powers were constantly circling the Caribbean. So, strategically, a divided island with one side open/weak was a neglectful vulnerability that affected everyone in the island of Haiti. If a European power decided to explore that vulnerability, it could box the west side and take over all of it. So unifying the island under one government created a buffer and thus secured the entire island. And guess who had a battle-tested military that could do just that? The west side of the island, which had fought and won its freedom.

Four months after José Núñez de Cáceres declared Spanish Haiti independent of Spain on February 9, 1822, Jean-Pierre Boyer entered the eastern side of the island. This was a culture shock to say the least because at this point the eastern side of the island had been heavily indoctrinated in Spanish customs and traditions, which were heavily influenced by the church. Thus, good or bad, this early indoctrination became the seed that would later lead to rejecting the changes that Boyer instituted.

Listen to the article here

The Changes

• Abolishing Slavery: Although it had declined by 1821, slavery was still legal on the eastern side of the island.
• Integration into the Haitian Constitution: This is where some of the propaganda and misrepresentation come from because at this point, the eastern side did NOT have a ratified constitution. So Boyer absorbed a newly declared, unstable state; he did not try to steal Dominican identity as there was none at that time. However, what the eastern side had was:
  • A declaration of independence
  • A provisional government
  • Spanish legal remnants still embedded in their systems
• Confiscation of church and the elite lands: This is misrepresented as well. The dominant narritive that came from the population of people that lost the most power, paint themselves as victims and leaves the fact that their land and thus wealth had been amassed through the enslavement of some and the killing of others. The reorganization of that land tried to balance the power structure. Since the eastern side was entrenched in catholic institutional identity and Spanish colonial traditions (even though it didn’t benefit the enslaved people or Afro-descendant people), this change was a big cultural shock to them, and it is what is remembered today.
• Military presence and Administrative Reorganization: Haitian military forces remained to enforce unification. Boyer reorganized provinces and installed Haitian officials to ensure that systems and processes were carried out in a manner needed for a unified island. This is a common strategy where a new government places trusted people from the center to ensure stabilization. However, from the local perspective, it often feels like an occupation, and this is how today is being described in the Dominican Republic.

But freedom came at a cost because France demanded an absurd amount of money from Haiti as recompense for the damage they caused through their freedom. Through today’s mindset, we know France’s actions were absurd, but back then, Haiti was trying to maintain its freedom at all costs.

The Cost of Freedom

Haiti agreed to pay France 150 million francs in 1825. This was later reduced. Thus, the entire island’s resources were used to support the debt. Remember that by now the entire island was under Boyer’s presidency, and he had unified as a strategy to maintain freedom and mitigate recolonization. To pay back the debt, Boyer’s administration comes up with another strategy.

The 1826 Rural Code

The goal was economic survival through export production. The rural code required:

• Agricultural labor contracts
• Restricted movement without permission
• Military enforcement of farm productivity
• Criminal penalties for abandoning land

Was this slavery again? No. But in the eastern region, where rural life was less plantation-centered and more cattle-based and decentralized, this was a heavy-handed enforcement of labor.

The Results of this Massive Cultural Shift in Spanish Haiti

Today, this period is noted as occupation and for some, enslavement. This framework was instituted mostly by the elite who had lost power through Boyer’s strategy.

On the eastern side of the island, power largely sat with:

• Peninsulares
• Criollos
• The Catholic Church
• Large landholders

Even during José Núñez de Cáceres, leadership came from the creole elite class. So political authority was not broadly democratic. It was concentrated.

What did the Unification Disrupt?

When Jean-Pierre Boyer unified the island in 1822, he:

• Replaced Spanish colonial law with Haitian law
• Confiscated church lands
• Reduced ecclesiastical power
• Centralized authority in Port-au-Prince
• Installed Haitian officials in administrative roles
• Abolished legal remnants of slavery

That directly weakened:

• Spanish-born officials
• Creole landholding elites
• Church institutional authority

The people who previously governed were no longer at the center of power, and that’s not a small shift. That is a whole structural change that created resentment from the class that lost power. I know you often hear that “history is written by the victors,” but the losing side frequently attempts to shape the narrative. A good example of this is the southern-confederacy of the United States of America. Following the civil war the Southern planter class largely succeeded in creating the “Lost Cause” narrative, which reframed the war’s purpose and was widely accepted for decades. In the same way the eilites in Spanish Haiti influenced the perception of Boyer’s unification.

As a matter of fact, the early Dominican nationalist intellectual tradition came largely from:

• Literate elites
• Urban political actors
• Families with pre-unification status

If your family lost land, legal influence, or church authority during unification, this becomes a memory of grievance and hardship. Over time, this memory becomes the narrative, and this narrative becomes nationalism. But the elites weren’t the only disgruntled individuals. As I said, nothing is as simple as good Vs evil.

Listen to the article here

The Disgruntlement of the Rural People

Rural communities were closer to the results of the Rural Code. They felt and lived through:

• The military presence
• Taxation tied to Haiti’s indemnity to France

But the framing we see now came from educated elites who had access to propagate the sentiment and influence others. So they framed it as: cultural displacement, loss of autonomy, and civilizational difference.

Yesterday’s Framing, Today

From Boyer’s Unification and subsequent Rural Code, one may hear or read:

“They enslaved us.”

“They tried to erase our culture.”

What you are hearing or reading are layers of:

• Elite displacement and resentment.
• Economic coercion
• Religious disruption
• Political centralization

Compressed into one moral narrative.

And because elites historically shaped textbooks, speeches, and intellectual discourse, their framing became dominant.

That doesn’t mean the grievances were fake. However, it does mean that the lens through which we see this was shaped by those who lost the most influential power. So we must take this into consideration when coming to conclusions or using this as a tool to judge or demonize Haiti and Haitians.

Not Everyone Wanted Boyer Out

One must also understand that NOT everyone was unhappy about the unification. Some wanted and saw the benefits of unification; however, those voices have been drowned out by the dominant narrative. Those who would have welcomed Boyer or saw the unification as a good/necessary change would have been:

• Enslaved people
• Elites who preferred unification over recolonization. Remember, Spain had abandoned the colony, so they weren’t getting anything from them, and they didn’t want to take their chances with another European power.
• Before the rural code, some rural populations benefited from the unification. The eastern side at that time was sparsely populated and had limited centralized infrastructure, so the Haitian governance would have given them an administrative structure, integration into a functioning republic, and island-wide abolition of slavery

Listen to the article here

My Take

History is layered and contradictory. But layered stories don’t travel as easily as simple ones. Nuance slows people down. It forces reflection. It resists easy heroes and villains. And power does not thrive in reflection. It thrives in clarity. In certainty. In a clean narrative people can rally behind. So leaders often flatten history. They remove its contradictions and reduce it to something digestible.

Something repeatable.

Something chantable.

Because complexity divides attention, but simplicity unites crowds.

And collective agreement is the foundation of power.

So what we see in Dominican nationalism is the framing that reduces the complexity of the history of the island of Haiti.

Why do I call the island Haiti?

Because that was the name the Taínos used for it. And when José Núñez de Cáceres declared independence from Spain in 1821, he called the eastern side “Spanish Haiti” to distinguish it from the French colony in the west. The name itself tells us something. The island was understood as one land, even when divided by empires.

But national identity does not thrive on layered truths.

It thrives on clarity.

Every national story needs a defining struggle. A rupture. A moment of separation. And in the Dominican narrative, that rupture became Jean-Pierre Boyer.

Through Trujillo, that story hardened. It was racialized. Institutionalized. Embedded into textbooks, speeches, borders, and bloodlines. The villain was no longer just a political figure. The villain became Haiti itself.

From that point forward, history was filtered through that lens.

Boyer’s unification became an occupation.
Abolition became erasure.
Stabilization became domination.

And February 27, 1844, became framed not simply as a political separation from a unifying government, but as liberation from an existential racial threat. Leaving out the Ephemeral Independence, re-annexation to Spain in 1861, and the restoration war which resulted in a permanent separation and finally self-governance for Dominican Republic on 16 August 1865.

What also disappears in that simplification is the full picture.

That slavery was abolished under Haitian rule.
That the unification of the island was, in part, an attempt to prevent European re-colonization.
That Dominican and Haitian histories are deeply intertwined long before Trujillo drew ideological lines in blood.

You see? There’s nuance here. But as it happens nuance is an obstacle to flattening history.

Nuance complicates pride.
But pride without nuance turns into myth.

And myths are powerful.

They create cohesion. They create identity. They create belonging.

But they can also create distance. And sometimes, hostility and that’s what we are seeing today, a hostility that has become dangerous, as it has demonized and dehumanized Haitians.

The question is not whether Dominicans deserve a national identity. Of course we do. Having a national identity instills pride and unity.

The question is whether that identity must rely on a simplified villain to survive. This kind of identity resembles the kind of pride that depends on comparison. It’s like the kind that feels strong only because someone else is positioned as lesser.

But pride rooted in opposition is not the same as pride rooted in self-definition. One needs a villain for its definition. The other stands on its own.

And perhaps what we are protecting is not just pride, but fear.

Fear that if we hold the full truth, something will be taken from us. That acknowledging complexity will make us smaller. That seeing our neighbors not as villains, but as human beings with shared history, will dilute who we are.

But history, in its fullness, does not erase Dominican sovereignty.

It simply asks us to hold more than one truth at once.

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