Constitution of Saint-Domingue of 1801

Saint-Domingue's first constitution had been promulgated on 28 May 1790 by a colonial assembly that excluded the free people of colour. After the abolition of slavery in 1793–1794 and the expulsion of the British and Spanish, Toussaint, now governor for the French Republic, obtained an armistice with the British in 1798 and a trade agreement with British and American merchants in 1799, while Napoleon, in power from November 1799, ordered on 4 May 1801 that 3,600 soldiers be gathered at Brest as the core of a future expedition. In March 1801 Toussaint convened a central assembly composed chiefly of white planters to draft a constitution. The text signed by its president Borgella and others was dated at Port-Républicain (Port-au-Prince) on 19 Floréal Year IX, and Toussaint promulgated it at Cap-Français with the approval, "The invitation of the Central Assembly is an order for me; consequently I shall transmit it to the French government to obtain its sanction." Sources date the promulgation to 14 Messidor (3 July, the French article), 7 July (the English biography) or 12 July (the expedition article). Of its 77 articles in 13 titles, Article 1 declared that Saint-Domingue and the adjacent islands formed "a single colony, which forms part of the French Empire, but is subject to particular laws"; Article 3 that "there cannot exist slaves in this territory; servitude is forever abolished; all men are born, live and die free and French"; and Article 4 that every man, whatever his colour, was eligible for all posts. Several articles were copied from the French constitution of 13 December 1799.

Yet Article 6 made the Catholic faith the only publicly professed religion, Article 10 forbade divorce, and Article 17 did not prohibit recourse to the slave trade to obtain new labour. Title VIII placed power under the governor's control, with censorship under Article 39, and Articles 67 and 68 barred freedom of association and of teaching. Title VI kept the paternalist plantation system, making the owner of the soil "necessarily the father" of its cultivators, and Articles 75 to 77 of Title XIII all but attached the cultivators to the land and allowed forced labour, to the point that historians have spoken of serfdom. The historian Jeremy Popkin wrote that "the society Toussaint was building was a strongly hierarchical society, with a peasantry subjected to repressive control, exercised by a military caste that was monopolising landed property". Toussaint charged Colonel Vincent, who opposed the draft, with carrying it to Napoleon, and Vincent was briefly exiled to Elba for his pains. The absence of any provision for French officials, the lack of trade advantages and the breach of protocol in publishing the text before submitting it to Paris told against it, and Napoleon took it as the pretext for organising, under the influence of the slave owners, the Saint-Domingue expedition of 30,000 men. When a rising of cultivators against forced labour broke out in the north in October 1801, Toussaint had his nephew Moïse, who had supported it, shot at Le Cap on 21 November, and the memory of that revolt was one reason the Black generals of the north found it hard to keep in touch with the cultivated lowlands when the expedition arrived in 1802.