Alexandre Pétion

Alexandre Sabès Pétion was born in Port-au-Prince on the second of April 1770, the son of a wealthy free Black Saint-Dominguois woman and a French father. He was educated at the École Militaire of Paris in the early 1790s and returned to Saint-Domingue as a trained military engineer.

He served in the revolutionary army under Toussaint and Dessalines, then — after Dessalines's assassination and the political split of 1807 — established the Republic of Haiti in the southern half of the island and served as its first president for the next eleven years. He governed from Port-au-Prince.

His political doctrine was the inverse of Henri Christophe's in the north. Pétion redistributed plantation land to formerly enslaved Haitians as small holdings, abolished the agrarian forced-labor system that Christophe had retained, and built a state of independent peasant farmers rather than royal plantations. The southern Haitian economy was smaller and less prosperous than the northern in his lifetime, but it produced the social structure — a republic of small farmers — that has characterized Haitian land tenure ever since.

His most consequential foreign-policy act was hosting Simón Bolívar at Port-au-Prince in 1815, after the revolutionary Bolívar's expulsion from Spanish South America. Pétion provided Bolívar with the troops, the firearms, and the ships that returned him to Venezuela on the condition that the revolutionary Bolívar abolish slavery in every territory he liberated. Bolívar took the condition. The independence of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia — and the abolition of slavery in those countries — descended directly from Pétion's Port-au-Prince counsel.

He died of yellow fever on the twenty-ninth of March 1818, age forty-seven. His successor Jean-Pierre Boyer reunified Haiti north and south two years later.

He is honored here as the president who armed Bolívar and made South American independence conditional on abolition.