Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division

Jean-Pierre Boyer (1776-1850), a free man, served with André Rigaud's French republican forces during the Haitian Revolution. Boyer was an aide to republican president Alexandre Pétion after Haitian independence and replaced Pétion as president after his death in 1818. Boyer initially followed Pétion's republican ideals but in 1826 he introduced a system of forced labor. Growing dissatisfaction with Boyer's autocratic rule led a group of Romantic writers, including the Nau brothers Ignace and Emile, the Ardouin brothers Coriolan and Beaubrun, and others to voice their criticism. Their attacks laid the groundwork for the 1843 Haitian Revolution, a political upheaval that anticipated France's 1848 revolution. Like Romantic writers in Haiti and France, Afro-Creole literary artists in New Orleans employed their writing talents to protest an increasingly oppressive American racial order.