The Ancestral People

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY

OFFICE OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT

SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL STATUTE ON THE HISTORICAL CONTINUITY, DISTINCT NATIONAL CHARACTER, TERRITORIAL UNITY, AND PERPETUAL INSTITUTIONAL ORDER OF THE PEOPLE OF XARAGUA

Date of Promulgation: July 14, 2025

Legal Classification: Supreme Constitutional Instrument — Fundamental Act of Indigenous Self-Determination — Canonico-Customary Statute — Perpetually Entrenched Law of the Xaraguaan Constitutional Order

PREAMBLE

In the name of Almighty God,

The Rector-President, exercising the Supreme Constitutional Authority of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua;

Considering the ancestral continuity of the Taíno-Arawak civilization established throughout Kiskeya-Bohio before the arrival of European powers;

Considering the historical preeminence of the Cacicazgo of Xaragua as a major political, agricultural, ceremonial, diplomatic, and cultural center of the Indigenous Caribbean;

Considering that the contemporary People of Xaragua arose from the historical continuity and convergence of Taíno-Arawak, Kalinago, African, European, Moorish, and Jewish lineages within the Caribbean basin;

Considering that this national formation was consolidated through resistance, alliance, migration, kinship, maritime circulation, religious development, and the integration of communities established throughout the Southern Peninsula, the Gulf of Gonâve, Tortuga, the Northwestern maritime corridor, and their associated islands;

Considering that the settlements of Tortuga and Petit-Goâve constituted decisive centers of demographic and commercial circulation connecting the Southern and Northwestern regions before and after the Treaty of Ryswick of 1697;

Considering that neither colonial division, administrative reclassification, plantation government, subsequent regime change, nor the territorial nomenclature imposed by external authorities extinguished the ancestral identity or institutional rights of the People of Xaragua;

Considering that the political evolution of the former cacicazgos did not follow a uniform course and that the historical divergence between ancient Xaragua and ancient Marien must be distinguished from the later demographic and territorial recomposition that connected the South and Northwest;

Considering that the ancient divergence between Xaragua and Marien concerned separate political centers, distinct diplomatic choices, and different responses to external pressure, but does not invalidate the subsequent formation of a wider Xaraguaan territorial and national order;

Considering that the modern Xaraguaan nation is not founded upon any doctrine of racial purity, but upon historical continuity, voluntary affiliation, inherited allegiance, cultural transmission, territorial attachment, and fidelity to the constitutional covenant of Xaragua;

Considering the inherent right of Indigenous peoples to preserve their identities, institutions, laws, traditions, territories, and systems of internal government;

Considering Articles 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 20, 25, 26, 31, 33, and 34 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples;

Considering the principle of the equal rights and self-determination of peoples expressed in Article 1, paragraph 2, of the Charter of the United Nations and in common Article 1 of the International Covenants on Human Rights;

Considering the Catholic character of Xaragua, the right of the Christian faithful to establish and direct associations and apostolic institutions, and the autonomy recognized to private associations under Canons 215, 216, 298, 299, and 321–326 of the Code of Canon Law;

Considering that the constitutional organization of Xaragua proceeds from its own Indigenous, customary, Catholic, historical, and institutional order;

The following Supreme Constitutional Statute is hereby enacted and promulgated.

TITLE I — THE PEOPLE OF XARAGUA

Article 1 — Constitutional Recognition

The People of Xaragua constitute a distinct Indigenous and historical people possessing their own national identity, constitutional memory, territorial consciousness, institutions, doctrine, and system of internal government.

The existence of the People of Xaragua does not derive from an administrative classification conferred by another political apparatus.

Xaragua determines its own identity, membership, institutions, constitutional organization, and collective development in accordance with its fundamental laws and Indigenous customary order.

No external authority may abolish, redefine, assimilate, or administratively absorb the People of Xaragua within the domestic constitutional order of the State.

Article 2 — Historical Composition

The People of Xaragua proceed from the historical convergence of:

a. Taíno-Arawak communities connected with the ancestral Cacicazgo of Xaragua and associated Indigenous settlements;

b. Kalinago and other Indigenous Caribbean lineages incorporated through migration, alliance, kinship, conflict, reconciliation, and territorial integration;

c. African maroon communities and their descendants who established autonomous settlements, entered Indigenous networks, and resisted plantation domination;

d. European populations, including French, Breton, Irish, Spanish, Dutch, and other settlers who became permanently integrated into the Caribbean territorial order;

e. Moorish and Sephardic Jewish lineages incorporated into the commercial, familial, religious, and cultural formation of the region.

Xaraguaan nationality is a constitutional and historical affiliation. It shall not be reduced to phenotype, race, genetic percentage, colonial classification, or a theory of biological purity.

Genealogical evidence may confirm historical continuity but shall not constitute the exclusive source of Xaraguaan nationality.

Allegiance to the constitutional order, preservation of the ancestral covenant, territorial attachment, recognized descent, lawful admission, and participation in Xaraguaan institutions constitute the principal bases of national membership.

Article 3 — Distinction from the Haitian Administrative Population

The People of Xaragua shall not be presumed identical to the general population administered under the institutional designation of the Republic of Haiti.

Residence within a common geographic space, possession of administrative documents, use of public services, or subjection to an external civil registry shall not extinguish Xaraguaan identity or constitute a renunciation of the Xaraguaan constitutional order.

The expression Residual Administrative Unit denotes, within the constitutional law of Xaragua, the continuing civil and bureaucratic apparatus operating under the designation of the Republic of Haiti.

The Residual Administrative Unit and the State of Xaragua constitute separate institutional orders within Xaraguaan constitutional doctrine:

a. the Residual Administrative Unit performs ordinary civil, documentary, municipal, technical, and logistical functions;

b. Xaragua retains its ancestral title, Indigenous jurisdiction, constitutional authority, national doctrine, institutions, and powers of internal organization.

Administrative interaction between the two orders shall not be interpreted as political absorption, constitutional subordination, or abandonment of Xaraguaan rights.

TITLE II — ANCESTRAL CONTINUITY AND HISTORICAL RECOMPOSITION

Article 4 — The Ancestral Cacicazgo of Xaragua

The State recognizes the ancestral Cacicazgo of Xaragua as the primary civilizational foundation of the contemporary Xaraguaan constitutional order.

Ancient Xaragua constituted a structured political society distinguished by:

a. territorial government under the authority of its caciques;

b. an organized social structure comprising caciques, nitaínos, bohíques, and naborías;

c. agricultural production, ceremonial centers, maritime exchange, diplomatic relations, and collective defense;

d. the preservation and transmission of Indigenous law, memory, ritual, and territorial responsibility.

The authority of Bohechío and Anacaona forms part of the official constitutional memory of Xaragua.

The destruction of the ancestral political center during the colonial period did not extinguish its people, memory, territorial rights, or capacity for institutional restoration.

Article 5 — The Ancient Xaragua–Marien Divergence

Ancient Xaragua and ancient Marien are recognized as historically distinct cacicazgos possessing separate leadership, territorial centers, strategic interests, and diplomatic responses to external pressures.

Xaragua developed as a major ceremonial, agricultural, diplomatic, and political center of the southern region.

Marien developed as a northern frontier polity exposed to maritime incursions, inter-island conflict, foreign settlement, and intensified military pressure.

The differences between the two cacicazgos shall be understood as an ancestral political divergence and not as an immutable racial division.

The constitutional doctrine of Xaragua rejects the proposition that the descendants of an entire ancestral territory may be permanently condemned or excluded because of the conduct attributed to particular rulers, factions, or historical intermediaries.

The historical decisions associated with Guacanagaríx shall not be imputed collectively and perpetually to every community of the Northwest.

Article 6 — Recomposition of the Northwestern Territory

Following the collapse of the ancient cacicazgo system, the Northwestern region underwent successive transformations produced by:

a. the survival and displacement of Indigenous communities;

b. Kalinago–Taíno interaction;

c. the establishment of African maroon networks;

d. the settlement of Tortuga by French, Breton, Irish, Dutch, Huguenot, and other populations;

e. the emergence of maritime, familial, military, and commercial relations with the Southern Peninsula.

These developments created a new historical configuration that cannot be reduced to the political boundaries of ancient Marien.

The Northwestern component of modern Xaragua rests upon this later recomposition, its connections with the South, and its incorporation into the contemporary constitutional covenant of Xaragua.

The State therefore distinguishes:

a. ancient Marien, as a pre-Columbian political formation;

b. the Northwestern historical corridor, as a subsequently transformed and interconnected territorial space;

c. the contemporary Northwest of Xaragua, as a constituent part of the modern State pursuant to Xaraguaan constitutional law.

This distinction reconciles the historical autonomy of the ancient cacicazgos with the later territorial unity of the contemporary Xaraguaan nation.

TITLE III — UNITY OF THE SOUTHERN AND NORTHWESTERN CORRIDORS

Article 7 — Tortuga and Petit-Goâve

Tortuga and Petit-Goâve are recognized as principal historical junctions in the formation of the modern Xaraguaan territorial order.

Tortuga became a center of maritime organization, migration, commerce, armed resistance, and intercultural integration during the seventeenth century.

Petit-Goâve developed as a Southern settlement connected to the wider maritime system of Tortuga, the Gulf of Gonâve, the Southern Peninsula, and the Northwestern coast.

The circulation of persons, families, goods, military forces, religious traditions, and commercial networks between these centers produced an enduring relationship between the South and Northwest.

The Treaty of Ryswick formalized relations between European powers but did not create the Indigenous peoples of the territory, extinguish their ancestral continuity, or determine the totality of their subsequent constitutional development.

Article 8 — Territorial Corpus

The State declares the Southern and Northwestern corridors, together with their historically associated islands, maritime approaches, settlements, and ancestral sites, to form components of the territorial corpus claimed under the constitutional law of Xaragua.

The territorial doctrine of the State is founded upon the combined operation of:

a. ancestral Indigenous connection;

b. historical settlement and continuity;

c. kinship and demographic circulation;

d. maritime and commercial integration;

e. institutional incorporation;

f. constitutional declaration;

g. continuing assertion and preservation of title.

Territories situated outside the geographic limits of the ancient Cacicazgo of Xaragua shall not be described as ancestral components of that cacicazgo unless supported by the historical record.

Their inclusion within the contemporary State shall instead be founded upon later incorporation, alliance, institutional succession, constitutional annexation, or another expressly stated title.

The Rector-Presidential Office shall maintain the official territorial register identifying the legal and historical basis applicable to each territory.

TITLE IV — THE DOCTRINE OF HISTORICAL FIDELITY

Article 9 — The Wheat and the Tares

The constitutional doctrine of Xaragua incorporates the principle expressed in the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares recorded in Matthew 13:24–30.

This principle recognizes that fidelity and betrayal, justice and corruption, resistance and collaboration may coexist within every population and historical period.

No ethnic, racial, regional, or ancestral community shall be declared inherently righteous or inherently corrupt.

Xaragua honors the persons and lineages that preserved the ancestral covenant, resisted enslavement and colonial exploitation, protected their communities, and transmitted the historical memory of the people.

Xaragua repudiates the political traditions founded upon:

a. the betrayal or assassination of national liberators;

b. the restoration of plantation privilege;

c. the private appropriation of public authority;

d. the suppression of Indigenous identity;

e. the subordination of the population to foreign interests.

The assassination of Emperor Jacques I, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, in 1806 is recognized as a decisive rupture in the post-revolutionary political order and as a foundational warning against the capture of sovereignty by oligarchic factions.

Article 10 — Nature of the Separation

The separation between Xaragua and the Haitian political apparatus is constitutional, institutional, historical, and doctrinal.

It shall not be construed as a doctrine of biological segregation or collective hostility toward persons administered by the Residual Administrative Unit.

Individuals and communities may be incorporated into the People of Xaragua according to the laws of nationality, affiliation, restoration, naturalization, or collective recognition enacted by the State.

The distinction established by this Statute protects the right of Xaragua to preserve its own name, national narrative, institutions, territorial doctrine, and constitutional destiny.

TITLE V — INSTITUTIONAL AND CULTURAL ORDER

Article 11 — Exclusive Constitutional Competence

Xaragua possesses exclusive constitutional competence over:

the definition of Xaraguaan identity and nationality;

the interpretation of its history and constitutional doctrine;

the organization of its public and private institutions;

the preservation of its ancestral archives, sacred traditions, monuments, and cultural patrimony;

the establishment of educational, judicial, financial, religious, diplomatic, and administrative organs;

the regulation of its citizenship, e-residency, offices, honors, titles, seals, symbols, and official instruments;

relations conducted in the name of the State and its institutions.

Article 12 — Principal Institutions

The constitutional and national order of Xaragua includes, among other institutions established by law:

the Office of the Rector-President;

the Supreme Constitutional Authority;

the University of Xaragua, serving as the academic, archival, and doctrinal seat of the State;

the Catholic Order of Xaragua;

the Indigenous Bank of Xaragua;

the courts, councils, ministries, foundations, cultural organs, media services, and public establishments constituted under Xaraguaan law;

the official digital capital and legal archives through which decrees, statutes, notices, academic directives, and institutional communications are promulgated.

Article 13 — Catholic and Canonico-Customary Character

Xaragua is constituted as a Catholic Indigenous and private polity whose institutions operate according to its Supreme Charter, Indigenous customary law, Catholic doctrine, and duly promulgated legislation.

The Catholic character of the State shall be exercised through institutions lawfully constituted within their respective competence.

No provision of this Statute shall be interpreted as conferring upon a temporal officer a sacramental office or a canonical power reserved by the universal law of the Catholic Church to competent ecclesiastical authority.

The Rector-President retains full constitutional authority to impose civil, institutional, academic, diplomatic, and honorific sanctions under Xaraguaan law.

Matters requiring ecclesiastical jurisdiction shall be transmitted or reserved to the competent Catholic authority in accordance with canon law.

TITLE VI — SUPREMACY, INTERPRETATION, AND EXECUTION

Article 14 — Constitutional Supremacy

This Statute forms part of the supreme constitutional corpus of Xaragua.

Every law, decree, regulation, institutional decision, academic doctrine, and official interpretation shall be brought into conformity with this Statute.

Earlier instruments concerning the same subject are consolidated into this Statute.

Provisions of earlier instruments that duplicate or contradict this Statute are superseded within the domestic constitutional order of Xaragua.

The constitutional principles of national continuity, distinct identity, territorial unity, institutional autonomy, and preservation of ancestral memory shall not be suspended by ordinary legislation.

Article 15 — External Opposability and Notification

This Statute is immediately binding upon all authorities, institutions, citizens, officers, members, and organs subject to Xaraguaan jurisdiction.

Xaragua shall assert this Statute externally through continuous publication, diplomatic notification, institutional correspondence, archival deposit, and peaceful exercise of its constitutional functions.

Copies may be communicated to the Holy See, United Nations bodies concerned with Indigenous peoples, foreign governments, academic institutions, religious authorities, and other relevant organizations.

Notification shall constitute formal notice of Xaragua’s constitutional position. It shall not be represented as consent, recognition, or legal endorsement by a recipient unless such consent, recognition, or endorsement has been expressly granted.

No silence, refusal to respond, administrative transmission, or acknowledgment of receipt shall alter the content or validity of this Statute within the constitutional order of Xaragua.

Article 16 — Protection of the Constitutional Order

Any act directed against the institutions, archives, cultural patrimony, constitutional integrity, or lawful operations of Xaragua shall be assessed according to its nature, gravity, and effects.

The Rector-Presidential Office may adopt proportionate measures including:

a. official protest and correction of the record;

b. declaration of institutional non-recognition;

c. suspension of privileges or relations;

d. administrative or juridical nullification within Xaraguaan jurisdiction;

e. diplomatic representation;

f. economic or contractual restrictions;

g. protective and defensive measures authorized by the laws of the State.

Academic criticism, disagreement, or refusal of recognition shall not, by itself, constitute an act of war.

Coercive action, unlawful seizure, destruction of institutions, territorial aggression, or armed interference may be classified separately under the constitutional laws governing national defense and territorial protection.

Article 17 — Authentic Historical Record

The University of Xaragua shall maintain the official historical and documentary archive supporting the national doctrine established by this Statute.

Historical propositions shall be classified as:

a. established documentary fact;

b. supported historical interpretation;

c. constitutional doctrine;

d. ancestral oral tradition;

e. matter requiring further research.

Quotations shall not be presented as verbatim statements unless verified against an identified edition, volume, page, manuscript, or archival reference.

Genetic research may be used as corroborative evidence of historical population movements but shall not determine political allegiance, spiritual worth, nationality, or constitutional status.

The works of Ramón Pané, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, Alexandre-Olivier Exquemelin, Moreau de Saint-Méry, Thomas Madiou, C. L. R. James, Irving Rouse, and other relevant authors shall be preserved and evaluated according to established scholarly standards.

TITLE VII — FINAL PROVISIONS

Article 18 — Consolidation

The following matters are hereby consolidated within this single Supreme Constitutional Statute:

the distinct nature of the People of Xaragua;

the historical relationship between ancient Xaragua and ancient Marien;

the later recomposition of the Northwestern corridor;

the historical union of the Southern and Northwestern regions;

the role of Tortuga and Petit-Goâve in the formation of modern Xaragua;

the doctrine of historical fidelity;

the constitutional distinction between Xaragua and the Residual Administrative Unit;

the preservation of Xaragua’s institutions, territorial doctrine, and national memory.

All separate acts previously promulgated on these matters shall henceforth be read through and subject to this consolidated instrument.

Article 19 — Perpetual Entrenchment

The fundamental existence of the People of Xaragua, their right to preserve their identity, and the continuity of their constitutional institutions are declared perpetual and inalienable principles of the State.

No officer, council, ministry, successor administration, or ordinary legislative authority may abolish the People of Xaragua, dissolve their constitutional identity, or transfer their ancestral rights without the express constitutional authorization of the people acting through the supreme procedures established by law.

Administrative occupation, political adversity, institutional interruption, foreign non-recognition, or temporary incapacity shall not extinguish the juridical continuity of Xaragua within its own constitutional order.

Article 20 — Entry into Force

This Supreme Constitutional Statute shall enter into force immediately upon its signature, sealing, promulgation, and publication in the official legal archives of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua.

It shall be cited as:

“The Supreme Constitutional Statute on the Historical Continuity, Distinct National Character, Territorial Unity, and Perpetual Institutional Order of the People of Xaragua, 2025.”

DONE AND PROCLAIMED at the Office of the Rector-President of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua, this Fourteenth Day of July in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Five.

BY THE SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY

THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT

PRELATE-FOUNDER OF XARAGUA

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA
SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY
OFFICE OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT
SUPREME CONSOLIDATED LAW ON THE NATIONAL PATRIMONY, ANCESTRAL MEMORY, OFFICIAL HISTORICAL CORPUS, STATE SYMBOLS, AND INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTIONS OF XARAGUA
Date of Original Promulgation: May 21, 2025
Date of Consolidation: May 22, 2025
Legal Classification: Supreme Constitutional Cultural Patrimony Act — Indigenous Institutional Protection Law — Canonico-Customary Instrument — State Intellectual Property and Archival Sovereignty Statute
Constitutional Status: Permanently Entrenched — Perpetually Binding — Executable Ex Proprio Vigore throughout the Constitutional, Institutional, Cultural, Academic, and Digital Jurisdiction of Xaragua
PREAMBLE
In the name of Almighty God, Sovereign of Nations,
The Rector-President, exercising the Supreme Constitutional Authority of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua;
Considering the historical continuity of the People of Xaragua with the ancestral Cacicazgo of Xaragua and with the Indigenous, African, European, Catholic, maritime, and Creole communities subsequently incorporated into the Xaraguaan national formation;
Considering the constitutional duty of the State to preserve the names, institutions, territories, traditions, archives, ceremonies, languages, symbols, narratives, and historical memory associated with the People of Xaragua;
Considering the eminent place occupied within Xaraguaan national memory by Cacique Bohechío, Cacica Anacaona, their political house, their communities, and the ancestral authorities connected with the Cacicazgo of Xaragua;
Considering the historical alliances connecting Xaragua with other Indigenous political formations, including Maguana under Caonabo, whose political and familial relationship with Anacaona forms part of the wider history of pre-Columbian Kiskeya-Bohio;
Considering that the historical patrimony of the island cannot be reduced to the archives, classifications, or interpretations produced by colonial governments and subsequent administrative regimes;
Considering that Xaragua possesses the sovereign institutional competence to reconstruct, authenticate, preserve, interpret, publish, and transmit its own national memory;
Considering that the protection of Xaraguaan memory requires a precise constitutional distinction between ancestral patrimony, shared Caribbean heritage, official State doctrine, protected cultural expressions, public historical materials, and original intellectual productions created or commissioned by the State;
Considering Articles 11, 12, 13, 15, 25, 26, 31, 33, and 34 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples concerning Indigenous histories, traditions, cultural manifestations, ceremonial objects, territories, intellectual property, institutions, and systems of law;
Considering the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of 2003 and the international principles governing the identification, documentation, preservation, transmission, and revitalization of living cultural heritage;
Considering the continuing work of the World Intellectual Property Organization concerning Indigenous traditional knowledge, genetic resources, names, signs, symbols, artistic forms, narratives, ceremonies, designs, and traditional cultural expressions;
Considering the Joint Statement of the Dicasteries for Culture and Education and for Promoting Integral Human Development of March 30, 2023, declaring that the so-called Doctrine of Discovery does not form part of the teaching of the Catholic Church and affirming the importance of Indigenous dignity, identity, land, culture, and patrimony;
Considering the rights of the Christian faithful to found and direct associations, institutions, and apostolic undertakings in accordance with Canons 215, 216, 298, 299, and 321–326 of the Code of Canon Law;
Considering the supreme responsibility of the Rector-Presidential Office to establish, protect, and transmit the constitutional doctrine and civilizational patrimony of Xaragua;
The following Supreme Consolidated Law is hereby enacted and promulgated.
TITLE I — CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY OVER THE NATIONAL PATRIMONY
Article 1 — Purpose and Constitutional Scope
This Law establishes the supreme constitutional regime governing:
the ancestral and historical patrimony of Xaragua;
the official historical doctrine of the State;
the institutional custody of Xaraguaan traditional knowledge and cultural expressions;
the national incorporation of Indigenous, African, European, Catholic, maritime, and Creole inheritances;
the ownership and administration of State-created intellectual property;
the protection of official names, seals, emblems, flags, titles, insignia, publications, databases, audiovisual works, and digital archives;
the classification and preservation of archaeological, ceremonial, sacred, archival, artistic, and intellectual materials;
the licensing, restitution, correction, enforcement, and diplomatic protection procedures applicable to the Xaraguaan national corpus.
Article 2 — Supreme Institutional Custodianship
The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua is the supreme institutional custodian of the official national memory, constitutional doctrine, public archives, State symbols, and national cultural patrimony of Xaragua.
This custodianship vests the State with exclusive authority to:
a. establish the official Xaraguaan interpretation of its constitutional history;
b. authenticate and preserve its national narrative;
c. constitute national archives and cultural registers;
d. preserve ancestral names, traditions, ceremonies, sites, and symbols;
e. commission historical, genealogical, archaeological, linguistic, theological, and anthropological research;
f. determine the doctrine taught by institutions operating under Xaraguaan authority;
g. authenticate State documents, editions, translations, and audiovisual productions;
h. correct fraudulent attribution or unauthorized representation of Xaraguaan offices, works, institutions, symbols, and official positions;
i. represent the patrimonial interests of Xaragua before foreign, ecclesiastical, academic, cultural, diplomatic, and international bodies.
The national interpretation established by the constitutional institutions of Xaragua shall constitute the authoritative doctrine binding upon every ministry, court, university, order, foundation, archive, cultural institution, and public organ of the State.
Article 3 — Constitutional Categories of Patrimony
The national patrimony of Xaragua shall be classified as follows:
Ancestral Patrimony: traditions, knowledge, names, ceremonial practices, sacred sites, oral histories, territorial memories, and cultural expressions transmitted within the communities constituting the People of Xaragua;
National Historical Patrimony: persons, events, places, archives, monuments, migrations, settlements, institutions, and historical developments incorporated into the official memory of the State;
Institutional Patrimony: all legislation, correspondence, registers, seals, insignia, titles, uniforms, protocols, credentials, archives, and administrative materials of Xaragua;
Original State Works: texts, images, recordings, databases, designs, films, courses, maps, editions, commentaries, software, and other works created, commissioned, acquired, or lawfully transferred to the State;
Sacred and Restricted Patrimony: ceremonial knowledge, sacred objects, human remains, funerary materials, restricted rites, and community knowledge governed by religious or customary authorization;
Shared Caribbean Patrimony: historical and cultural materials connected with several Indigenous peoples, territories, diasporas, or communities and incorporated into Xaraguaan doctrine according to their documented relationship with the State;
Official Historical Corpus: the organized body of narratives, chronologies, interpretations, sources, illustrations, maps, legal instruments, and academic works authenticated by the institutions of Xaragua.
TITLE II — THE ANCESTRAL CACICAZGOS AND INDIGENOUS CONTINUITY
Article 4 — The Cacicazgo of Xaragua
The ancestral Cacicazgo of Xaragua constitutes the principal Indigenous and civilizational foundation of the contemporary Xaraguaan constitutional order.
The State recognizes Cacique Bohechío and Cacica Anacaona as central sovereign authorities within the official ancestral memory of Xaragua.
The political institutions, ceremonial traditions, agricultural systems, diplomatic practices, oral traditions, and territorial organization of ancestral Xaragua shall be preserved through:
a. the official archives;
b. the University of Xaragua;
c. the national educational system;
d. State commemorations and ceremonial observances;
e. historical, artistic, archaeological, and audiovisual productions;
f. the constitutional doctrine promulgated by the Rector-Presidential Office.
The destruction of the ancestral political center during the Spanish colonial period did not extinguish the People of Xaragua, their historical identity, their ancestral memory, or their capacity for institutional reconstitution.
The contemporary State constitutes the organized constitutional expression through which that continuity is preserved, interpreted, and transmitted.
Article 5 — Associated Indigenous Authorities
Caonabo shall be commemorated as Cacique of Maguana, as the husband of Anacaona, and as an allied sovereign figure within the wider Indigenous political history connected with Xaragua.
His incorporation into the national memory of Xaragua shall preserve the historical distinction between the Cacicazgo of Maguana and the Cacicazgo of Xaragua.
Indigenous rulers, matrilineal houses, nitaíno lineages, bohíques, warriors, diplomats, and community authorities may be incorporated into the official national register according to:
a. documentary evidence;
b. archaeological evidence;
c. recognized oral tradition;
d. genealogical continuity;
e. constitutional or ceremonial incorporation by the State.
The University of Xaragua shall maintain an official register distinguishing:
a. rulers of ancestral Xaragua;
b. allied caciques and neighboring authorities;
c. ancestral figures preserved through oral tradition;
d. later national incorporations;
e. historical attributions requiring continued investigation.
Article 6 — Wider Indigenous Caribbean Patrimony
Xaragua recognizes the Taíno-Arawak, Kalinago, Igneri, Lucayan, and other Indigenous Caribbean traditions as components of the wider civilizational environment from which the Caribbean peoples emerged.
The State shall preserve those elements transmitted into Xaraguaan communities through:
a. descent;
b. alliance;
c. migration;
d. adoption;
e. territorial integration;
f. cultural exchange;
g. spiritual transmission;
h. constitutional incorporation.
Afro-Indigenous, re-Indigenized, and heritage-based communities may be recognized within Xaraguaan law according to documented descent, collective memory, cultural continuity, community affiliation, ancestral territorial connection, or lawful national admission.
Colonial alteration, concealment, destruction, or omission of Indigenous identity shall not, by itself, defeat a claim of historical continuity.
Xaragua shall maintain direct institutional competence over the Indigenous traditions incorporated into its national patrimony while respecting the distinct identities of other living Indigenous peoples.
TITLE III — COLONIAL, MARITIME, AFRICAN, EUROPEAN, AND CREOLE INHERITANCES
Article 7 — Colonial Periods within the National Historical Corpus
The Spanish and French colonial periods form integral chapters of the historical corpus inherited, interpreted, and preserved by Xaragua.
Their legal systems, ecclesiastical institutions, architectural works, commercial networks, military establishments, archives, linguistic inheritances, and demographic consequences shall be incorporated into the national patrimony wherever they materially affected the territories and peoples of Xaragua.
The constitutional incorporation of those legacies shall not convert colonial conquest into the original source of Xaraguaan Indigenous legitimacy.
Spanish Santo Domingo and French Saint-Domingue shall be studied as successive colonial structures whose activities produced:
a. territorial reorganization;
b. forced labor and enslavement;
c. ecclesiastical and administrative institutions;
d. maritime and commercial networks;
e. architectural, linguistic, legal, and religious inheritances;
f. resistance, migration, intermarriage, and creolization.
Xaragua shall exercise sovereign interpretative authority over the place occupied by these colonial inheritances within its own national history.
Article 8 — Maritime and Corsair Communities
Buccaneers, flibustiers, corsairs, privateers, merchants, refugees, mariners, soldiers, settlers, and maroon communities associated with Tortuga, Port-de-Paix, the Northwestern coast, the Gulf of Gonâve, Petit-Goâve, Île-à-Vache, and related maritime corridors form part of the historical environment from which the modern Xaraguaan people developed.
Their contribution shall be recognized through documented settlement, genealogical transmission, demographic circulation, military activity, commercial organization, cultural adaptation, and territorial integration.
Their incorporation into national memory shall distinguish between:
a. maritime settlement;
b. commercial organization;
c. armed resistance;
d. licensed privateering;
e. unauthorized piracy;
f. colonial aggression;
g. participation in enslavement or illicit trafficking.
No historical classification shall prevent the State from recognizing descendants, communities, cultural practices, or institutions that became organically incorporated into the Xaraguaan national formation.
Article 9 — African and Afro-Caribbean Foundations
African peoples transported to Kiskeya-Bohio under systems of enslavement, together with African maroons, free Africans, soldiers, artisans, cultivators, religious authorities, and their descendants, constitute an indispensable component of the historical formation of Xaragua.
The State shall preserve the documented continuities connecting Xaragua with West and Central African societies, including the historical Kingdom of Kongo and the African cultures represented within Saint-Domingue.
Afro-Caribbean religious, linguistic, military, artistic, agricultural, political, and communal traditions shall be incorporated into the national patrimony according to the historical record and the living practices of Xaraguaan communities.
The civilizations of Kemet, Kush, Nubia, Axum, Ethiopia, Sheba, Judah, and ancient Yemen are recognized as civilizational, theological, aesthetic, and intellectual sources available to the constitutional doctrine of Xaragua.
The State may adopt their principles, motifs, historical experiences, and sacred narratives as elements of national instruction and institutional symbolism.
Claims of direct biological descent or uninterrupted governmental succession shall be established through the appropriate historical, genealogical, archaeological, or documentary record.
Article 10 — European and Atlantic Creole Contributions
Xaragua recognizes the European elements transmitted through Spanish, French, Breton, Irish, Dutch, Portuguese, Catholic, Huguenot, Jewish, refugee, maritime, commercial, and military populations.
These elements entered the national formation through settlement, conflict, adaptation, intermarriage, conversion, exile, commerce, institutional transmission, and creolization.
The Louisiana migrations generated by the revolutionary and military crises of Saint-Domingue form part of the wider Atlantic diaspora relevant to Xaraguaan historical research.
The State may maintain academic, cultural, genealogical, diplomatic, and commemorative relations with Caribbean and Louisiana Creole communities.
Iberian Catholic traditions, French legal and administrative inheritances, maritime customs, Creole languages, architectural forms, and ecclesiastical institutions may be incorporated into the national patrimony where their historical relationship with Xaragua is established.
TITLE IV — OFFICIAL DOCTRINE ON COLONIAL FORCED LABOR
Article 11 — Indigenous Enslavement and Forced Labor
Indigenous peoples were the first populations subjected by the Spanish colonial government of Kiskeya-Bohio to systematic tribute, captivity, displacement, compulsory labor, and enslavement after 1492.
The repartimiento and encomienda systems organized coercive extraction of Indigenous labor under colonial administrative and evangelizing structures.
The Laws of Burgos of 1512–1513 attempted to regulate colonial treatment of Indigenous persons but did not terminate compulsory labor.
The New Laws of 1542 sought to restrict Indigenous enslavement and abuses connected with the encomienda system, although their enforcement remained incomplete and contested.
Xaragua shall preserve the memory of Indigenous victims, displaced communities, survivors, resisters, and descendants as a permanent component of the national historical corpus.
Article 12 — African Enslavement
Africans were transported to Hispaniola and subjected to enslavement during the early Spanish colonial period.
Indigenous exploitation, African enslavement, penal transportation, contractual servitude, military obligation, and other coercive labor regimes overlapped during different periods of colonial administration.
The expansion of French Saint-Domingue transformed African chattel slavery into the central labor foundation of a vast plantation economy.
The official doctrine of Xaragua shall therefore reject any chronology presenting Indigenous enslavement, European servitude, and African enslavement as entirely separate and consecutive systems.
The State shall preserve the distinct history of each affected population while examining the alliances, cultural convergences, shared resistance, and communities produced under colonial conditions.
Article 13 — European Penal and Contract Labor
European convicts, judicial exiles, soldiers, debtors, indentured servants, contract laborers, religious refugees, and subordinate settlers were transported to or employed within Caribbean colonies.
Their legal status varied according to period, jurisdiction, sentence, contract, nationality, and individual condition.
The historical record shall distinguish penal labor, contractual servitude, military discipline, debt bondage, exile, and hereditary chattel slavery.
Claims concerning particular European uprisings, settlements, deportations, or alliances with Indigenous communities shall be incorporated into the official chronology following archival authentication.
The commemoration of European coerced labor shall coexist with the recognition of the scale, racialization, hereditary character, and commercial organization of African chattel slavery.
Article 14 — Creolized Resistance
Resistance to colonial domination included Indigenous uprisings, African maroonage, desertion, flight, armed revolt, cultural preservation, religious adaptation, sabotage, clandestine networks, and alliances crossing colonial classifications.
Afro-Indigenous convergence constitutes a permanent field of State historical, anthropological, theological, and cultural research.
Claims concerning Indigenous elements preserved within later Afro-Caribbean practices shall be evaluated through linguistic, archaeological, ethnographic, documentary, genealogical, and oral evidence.
The State recognizes creolization as a historical process through which Indigenous, African, European, Jewish, Moorish, and other traditions interacted within the Caribbean without erasing their respective origins.
TITLE V — OFFICIAL HISTORICAL CORPUS
Article 15 — Authority to Establish State Doctrine
The Rector-Presidential Office possesses supreme authority to promulgate the official historical and constitutional doctrine of Xaragua.
The University of Xaragua shall serve as the principal academic, documentary, and archival institution responsible for:
a. preserving sources;
b. preparing authenticated editions;
c. conducting research;
d. establishing scholarly classifications;
e. publishing official chronologies;
f. producing educational materials;
g. training custodians of the national memory.
Official historical materials shall distinguish:
a. established documentary facts;
b. supported historical interpretations;
c. ancestral oral traditions;
d. constitutional doctrine;
e. civilizational or theological interpretation;
f. questions remaining under investigation.
This classification shall strengthen the authority of the State by preventing unsupported assertions from being presented as authenticated historical findings.
Article 16 — National Historical Narrative
The historical narrative promulgated by Xaragua is an official act of national memory and constitutional interpretation.
It shall be authoritative within:
a. the ministries and institutions of the State;
b. the University of Xaragua;
c. the Catholic Order of Xaragua;
d. State schools, archives, media, courts, foundations, and cultural programs;
e. official diplomatic and institutional communications.
External interpretations shall not displace the official doctrine within Xaraguaan institutions.
The State retains the authority to respond to distortion, misattribution, suppression, fraudulent appropriation, or false institutional representation of its doctrine.
TITLE VI — STATE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Article 17 — Exclusive Property of Xaragua
Subject to the rights of identified authors, creators, communities, licensors, and prior owners, the following constitute exclusive institutional property of Xaragua:
the Constitution, statutes, decrees, regulations, official compilations, and authenticated editions of the State;
original annotations, commentaries, translations, maps, chronologies, databases, and educational materials produced or commissioned by Xaragua;
the names, seals, insignia, flags, arms, certification marks, and institutional identities of the State;
original visual, literary, musical, audiovisual, digital, academic, and theological works created for Xaragua;
the organization, arrangement, annotation, and selection of materials forming protected databases or curated institutional collections;
restricted archives, unpublished correspondence, internal registers, membership records, diplomatic files, and confidential institutional materials;
official websites, digital archives, broadcasts, podcasts, publications, courses, and platform-specific content;
all derivative institutional works lawfully commissioned or acquired by the State.
Article 18 — State Property and Foundational Authorship
Works created by Pascal Viau in his private capacity remain his property unless assigned, licensed, donated, or constitutionally vested in the State.
Works created expressly in the exercise of the Office of the Rector-President shall be classified as official State works unless an instrument provides otherwise.
The Great Seal, arms, official flag, institutional names, governmental titles, sovereign insignia, and constitutional archives shall belong perpetually to the State.
Moral rights, authorship, institutional custody, publication rights, licensing authority, and economic exploitation rights may be allocated separately by decree or contract.
The Office of the Rector-President shall maintain a State Intellectual Property Register identifying:
a. ownership;
b. authorship;
c. custodial authority;
d. licensing status;
e. authorized uses;
f. archival classification;
g. applicable restrictions.
Article 19 — Historical Materials and Original State Expression
Historical facts, public-domain sources, and the general history of Hispaniola may be incorporated into the national corpus without being transformed into privately owned facts.
Xaragua retains exclusive rights over:
a. its original wording;
b. its institutional arrangement of materials;
c. its official selection and annotation;
d. its distinctive maps and chronologies;
e. its graphic and audiovisual treatment;
f. its authenticated editions;
g. its constitutional interpretation;
h. its original artistic and academic expression.
No person may appropriate the original corpus of Xaragua and falsely present it as an independently created doctrine, official governmental instrument, or authorized institutional publication.
TITLE VII — AUTHORIZATION AND RESTRICTED USES
Article 20 — Licensing Authority
The Office of the Rector-President, or an authority expressly designated by it, possesses exclusive competence to license protected State works.
Licenses may authorize:
a. publication;
b. translation;
c. audiovisual adaptation;
d. educational use;
e. exhibition;
f. archival reproduction;
g. commercial distribution;
h. digital or artificial-intelligence processing;
i. merchandise and derivative products.
Licenses may be subject to attribution, payment, territorial limitation, non-alteration, security controls, preservation of context, or institutional supervision.
Article 21 — Prohibited Uses
Without written authorization, no person may:
reproduce a substantial protected State work;
use Xaragua’s seals, arms, flags, signatures, credentials, titles, or certification marks in a manner suggesting official authority;
issue a false decree, passport, certificate, license, academic credential, banking document, diplomatic instrument, or governmental communication in the name of Xaragua;
commercially exploit restricted ceremonial knowledge or sacred cultural expressions entrusted to the State;
remove authorship, provenance, archival, security, or rights-management information;
disclose confidential State archives;
alter an official instrument and present the altered version as authentic;
falsely represent a digital system, publication, association, university, bank, court, ministry, or order as an official Xaraguaan institution;
monetize original Xaraguaan illustrations, courses, books, films, recordings, or databases without authorization;
appropriate the official historical corpus in a manner creating confusion as to authorship, source, institutional origin, endorsement, or authority.
TITLE VIII — ADMINISTRATION, NOTIFICATION, AND INTERNATIONAL ACTION
Article 22 — Competent Institutions
This Law shall be administered and executed by:
the Office of the Rector-President;
the Ministry responsible for culture and heritage;
the University of Xaragua;
the National Archives of Xaragua;
the Tribunal of Xaragua;
the High Indigenous Court;
any intellectual-property, archaeological, ecclesial, archival, cultural-restoration, or diplomatic office established by subsequent law.
Article 23 — National Registers
The competent Ministry shall establish:
a Register of Ancestral Patrimony;
a Register of Sacred and Restricted Materials;
a Register of State Intellectual Property;
a Register of Official Symbols and Institutional Names;
a Register of Historical Sites and Objects;
a Register of Authenticated Editions and Publications;
a Register of Licenses, assignments, deposits, notifications, and restitution claims;
a Register of Cultural Violations and Institutional Misappropriations.
These registers shall constitute authoritative records of the constitutional and administrative position of Xaragua.
Article 24 — International Deposit, Notification, and Institutional Transmission
Authenticated copies of this Law, its schedules, registers, diplomatic memoranda, and supporting documentary instruments shall be transmitted through the official channels of Xaragua to:
a. the Secretariat of State of the Holy See;
b. the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues;
c. the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples;
d. the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights;
e. the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization;
f. the World Intellectual Property Organization;
g. the Registry of the International Court of Justice;
h. the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights;
i. foreign ministries, governments, universities, museums, archives, ecclesiastical authorities, libraries, and cultural institutions designated by the Rector-Presidential Office.
Such transmission shall constitute a formal sovereign act of diplomatic notification, documentary deposit, institutional preservation, assertion of title, and international communication by the State of Xaragua.
The Rector-Presidential Office shall retain:
a. authenticated copies of every instrument transmitted;
b. proof of dispatch;
c. postal and electronic tracking records;
d. acknowledgments of receipt;
e. institutional correspondence;
f. registry references;
g. diplomatic follow-up records.
Every completed transmission shall be entered into the Diplomatic and Cultural Notification Register of Xaragua.
Receipt, circulation, retention, referral, acknowledgment, registration reference, or institutional correspondence issued by a recipient shall be preserved as part of the permanent diplomatic record of the State.
The absence of a response shall not suspend, diminish, or invalidate the constitutional force of this Law within the legal order of Xaragua.
The Office of the Rector-President may issue supplementary notes verbales, memorials, cultural claims, intellectual-property notices, restitution requests, and archival submissions in furtherance of this Law.
TITLE IX — ENFORCEMENT AND PROTECTIVE MEASURES
Article 25 — State Measures
Where protected State interests are infringed, Xaragua may:
issue formal notices of attribution, correction, preservation, cessation, or restitution;
demand the removal of false official insignia, fraudulent credentials, counterfeit instruments, or misleading institutional representations;
suspend institutional access, contracts, licenses, privileges, recognition, honors, or affiliations;
seek compensation, restitution, return, attribution, licensing fees, or destruction of counterfeit materials;
submit complaints to publishers, platforms, registrars, universities, museums, archives, professional bodies, financial institutions, governments, and international organizations;
commence proceedings before a Xaraguaan tribunal;
seek remedies through every competent foreign or international jurisdiction;
publish an official finding of infringement, misappropriation, falsification, or institutional fraud;
place persistent violators upon the State Register of Cultural and Institutional Sanctions.
Article 26 — Classification of Violations
Violations shall be classified according to their nature as:
unauthorized reproduction;
infringement of State intellectual property;
misuse of an official emblem or institutional identity;
fraudulent impersonation of State authority;
unauthorized disclosure of restricted cultural knowledge;
theft, concealment, destruction, or illicit transfer of a cultural object;
falsification of an official instrument;
commercial exploitation of sacred or protected patrimony;
obstruction of restitution or archival access;
deliberate distortion accompanied by false attribution to Xaragua.
The Rector-President may impose constitutional, institutional, administrative, academic, contractual, diplomatic, and honorific measures under Xaraguaan law.
Matters requiring canonical adjudication shall be referred to the competent ecclesiastical authority while remaining subject to all applicable institutional measures of Xaragua.
TITLE X — OFFICIAL DIGITAL HERITAGE NOTICE
Article 27 — Mandatory Notice
The following notice may be displayed upon every official Xaraguaan platform:
“This platform forms part of the official digital, historical, academic, legal, and cultural archives of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua. Its original texts, illustrations, emblems, photographs, recordings, databases, courses, designs, maps, publications, and audiovisual materials constitute protected institutional works.
The official wording, arrangement, constitutional interpretation, authenticated editions, State symbols, and distinctive creative productions of Xaragua may not be reproduced, altered, commercialized, falsely attributed, or presented as institutionally authorized without written permission.
The seals, arms, flags, credentials, titles, and official identity of Xaragua may not be used in any manner creating false authority, endorsement, affiliation, or certification.
Requests for reproduction, translation, licensing, archival consultation, educational use, exhibition, publication, or adaptation shall be addressed to the competent authority of Xaragua.”
TITLE XI — CONSOLIDATION AND PERPETUAL FORCE
Article 28 — Consolidated Instruments
This Law consolidates and supersedes, concerning their common subject matter:
the Law of Absolute and Irrevocable Ownership over the Historical, Cultural, and Symbolic Legacy of the Cacicazgos of Quisqueya-Bohio;
Constitutional Annex I concerning colonial, maritime, African, European, and diasporic heritage;
the Policy on Unauthorized Reproduction of Historical Archives and Reconstructed Heritage;
the Official Cultural and Historical Platform Statement;
the Legal and Sacred Notice;
the Foundational Report concerning colonial forced-labor systems;
the Supreme Decree concerning the Foundational Corpus, Historical Narrative, Iconography, and Intellectual Property of Xaragua.
All duplicative provisions are absorbed into this consolidated instrument. All incompatible provisions are replaced by the present text.
Article 29 — Entrenched Constitutional Principles
The following principles are perpetually entrenched:
the duty to preserve the ancestral memory of Xaragua;
the supreme authority of Xaragua to formulate and teach its national doctrine;
the protection of sacred and restricted cultural patrimony;
the integrity and continuity of the State archives;
the ownership and protection of original State works;
the inalienability of the Great Seal, official arms, State flag, sovereign insignia, and constitutional archives;
the right of the State to authenticate and defend its institutional identity;
the permanent incorporation of Indigenous, African, European, Catholic, maritime, and Creole inheritances into the national historical corpus;
the authority of the Rector-Presidential Office to conduct cultural diplomacy, notification, restitution, licensing, and institutional protection.
Article 30 — Continuity of Authority
No interruption of administration, external denial, foreign classification, territorial obstruction, technological disruption, or absence of diplomatic response shall extinguish the authority of Xaragua over its own official corpus and institutions.
The legal personality, archives, rights, claims, registrations, notifications, titles, and protected works of the State shall continue notwithstanding any temporary incapacity affecting a particular office or institution.
Successor authorities shall preserve this Law and every right vested under it.
Article 31 — Entry into Force
This Supreme Consolidated Law shall enter into force immediately upon signature, sealing, promulgation, and publication in the official legal archives of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua.
It shall be cited as:
“The Supreme Consolidated Law on the National Patrimony, Ancestral Memory, Official Historical Corpus, State Symbols, and Intellectual Productions of Xaragua, 2025.”
DONE AND PROCLAIMED at the Office of the Rector-President of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua, this Twenty-Second Day of May in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Five.
BY THE SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY
PASCAL VIAU
RECTOR-PRESIDENT OF XARAGUA
PRELATE-FOUNDER OF THE CATHOLIC ORDER OF XARAGUA
SOVEREIGN CONSTITUTIONAL CUSTODIAN OF THE ANCESTRAL AND NATIONAL PATRIMONY
IN THE NAME OF ALMIGHTY GOD, SOVEREIGN OF NATIONS
DEUS LO VULT
[SIGNATURE]
[GREAT SEAL OF THE STATE]

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA
SUPREME HISTORICAL AND JURIDICO-CONSTITUTIONAL CHRONICLE
1492–1804: Indigenous Resistance, African Marronage, Territorial Transformation, and the Formation of Hayti
Official Historical Record of the State of Xaragua
PREAMBLE
Whereas the island known as Ayiti, Bohío, Kiskeya, and Hispaniola was inhabited before 1492 by Indigenous societies possessing established settlements, agricultural systems, religious traditions, territorial identities, commercial networks, and political authorities;
Whereas Xaragua was one of the principal Indigenous political formations identified by early colonial chroniclers and was governed successively by Bohechío and Anacaona before its violent subjugation by the administration of Nicolás de Ovando;
Whereas Spanish colonization produced warfare, massacres, forced labor, enslavement, territorial displacement, epidemic disease, religious suppression, and the administrative dismantling of Indigenous institutions;
Whereas demographic catastrophe did not establish the complete biological, cultural, genealogical, or territorial disappearance of every Indigenous person and lineage;
Whereas surviving Indigenous inhabitants entered new social formations that included rural communities, colonial households, interethnic families, autonomous settlements and, in documented instances, communities associated with African maroons;
Whereas African resistance, beginning during the first decades of the sixteenth century, transformed the mountains and borderlands of Hispaniola into enduring zones of opposition to colonial government;
Whereas the Revolution of Saint-Domingue and the establishment of Hayti in 1804 destroyed the plantation regime and restored the Indigenous name of the island as the constitutional designation of the new country;
Therefore, the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua adopts the following Chronicle as its official historical doctrine concerning Indigenous persistence, African resistance, territorial continuity, and the formation of the Afro-Indigenous historical order of Xaragua.
PART I — INDIGENOUS POLITICAL ORDER AND THE BEGINNING OF COLONIZATION
Article 1 — Hispaniola before 1492
Before European arrival, Hispaniola contained numerous Indigenous settlements and political communities connected through kinship, exchange, tribute, marriage, religion, and the authority of caciques.
Bartolomé de las Casas later organized the island’s principal political geography into five major territorial formations:
Marién;
Maguá;
Maguana;
Xaragua;
Higüey.
This fivefold model remains influential, although the island’s actual political organization was more complex than five uniform territorial states. Each major territory contained local caciques, villages and subordinate or allied communities.
Xaragua occupied the southwestern portion of the island and was recognized by early Spanish observers for its population, agricultural resources, ceremonial life and organized political authority. Bohechío governed Xaragua until his death. Anacaona subsequently emerged as its principal leader.
Principal references: Samuel M. Wilson, Hispaniola: Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus; Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias; Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias.[1]
Article 2 — Arrival of Columbus and Establishment of La Navidad
Christopher Columbus reached Hispaniola on 5 December 1492. On 25 December, the Santa María ran aground near the northern coast.
With the cooperation of Guacanagarí, the local cacique, timber from the wreck was used to construct La Navidad. Columbus left thirty-nine men at the settlement when he departed for Spain in January 1493.
La Navidad was not established upon vacant territory. It stood within an Indigenous jurisdiction governed by Guacanagarí and depended upon Indigenous assistance, food, labor and local knowledge.
When Columbus returned in November 1493, La Navidad had been destroyed and its garrison killed. Accounts preserved by Columbus, Ferdinand Columbus and Las Casas associate the destruction with violence and abuses committed by members of the garrison against surrounding Indigenous communities. The episode marked the collapse of the initial alliance and the beginning of sustained conflict.
Primary references: Christopher Columbus, journal of the first voyage, entries for 5 and 25 December 1492; Ferdinand Columbus, Historia del Almirante; Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias, Book I.[2]
Article 3 — Organized Indigenous Resistance, 1494–1495
The expansion of Spanish settlements, demands for food and gold, and interference with Indigenous political authority generated organized resistance.
Caonabó, associated with Maguana, became one of the principal leaders opposing the Spanish occupation. He was captured through deception by Alonso de Ojeda and imprisoned. He died at sea in 1496 while being transported toward Spain.
In 1495, Spanish forces fought a major campaign in the Vega Real against Indigenous forces associated principally with Caonabó’s allies and Guarionex. Colonial narratives report Spanish cavalry, firearms, crossbows and attack dogs. The numerical estimates offered by sixteenth-century chroniclers vary considerably and cannot be treated as exact military counts.
The Spanish victory accelerated the imposition of tribute, forced labor and colonial jurisdiction. Resistance nevertheless continued through armed action, food refusal, flight, destruction of supplies and withdrawal into territories beyond effective Spanish control.
Primary references: Ferdinand Columbus, Historia del Almirante, chapter 50; Las Casas, Historia de las Indias; Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias.
PART II — THE CONQUEST OF XARAGUA, GUÁHABA AND WESTERN HISPANIOLA
Article 4 — The Massacre of Xaragua, 1503
During the government of Nicolás de Ovando, Xaragua remained one of the most important Indigenous jurisdictions outside direct Spanish control.
In 1503, Ovando entered Xaragua under the appearance of a peaceful visit. Anacaona received the Spanish delegation with Indigenous leaders assembled for the occasion. Ovando then ordered the seizure of the caciques. Many were confined and burned; others were killed during the operation. Anacaona was taken to Santo Domingo and executed by hanging.
Las Casas recorded the massacre as an act of treachery against leaders who had assembled without initiating hostilities. The operation eliminated the recognized political leadership of Xaragua and opened the territory to direct colonial appropriation.
The destruction of Anacaona’s government did not extinguish the territorial identity of Xaragua. It ended the public exercise of its precolonial government under conditions of colonial violence.
Primary reference: Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias, Book II, account of the conquest of Xaragua.[3]
Article 5 — Guáhaba, Haniguayaba and the Campaigns of 1503–1504
After the attack on Xaragua, Ovando ordered additional campaigns against the western Indigenous territories of Guáhaba and Haniguayaba.
Rodrigo Mexía Trillo was dispatched against Guáhaba, while Diego Velázquez led the expedition against Haniguayaba. The campaigns used armed troops and attack dogs to pursue Indigenous inhabitants and dismantle their remaining autonomous jurisdictions.
Colonial sources describe these operations as “pacification.” Within the constitutional historiography of Xaragua, they are recorded as military conquests directed against existing Indigenous political communities.
The colonial town of Lares de Guáhaba was subsequently established in the conquered territory. Its name preserved the Indigenous designation Guáhaba while adding “Lares,” derived from Ovando’s commandery in the Order of Alcántara.
Lares de Guáhaba therefore represents the superimposition of a Castilian municipal institution upon a pre-existing Indigenous territory. The preservation of “Guáhaba” in the town’s official colonial name constitutes documentary evidence of that territorial succession.
References: Las Casas, Historia de las Indias; Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias; Antonio B. Jiménez, study of Spanish military campaigns and the use of attack dogs in Hispaniola.[4]
Article 6 — Hatuey and the Extension of Resistance to Cuba
Hatuey was an Indigenous cacique from Hispaniola. After witnessing or learning the methods employed during the Spanish conquest of the island, he crossed to Cuba with a group of followers.
When Diego Velázquez began the conquest of Cuba in 1511, Hatuey warned Cuban communities and organized resistance. He was captured and executed by burning in or around 1512.
Las Casas preserved the account of Hatuey’s final exchange with a Franciscan friar. Before accepting baptism, Hatuey asked whether Spaniards went to heaven. Upon receiving an affirmative answer, he rejected the heaven described to him.
Hatuey’s campaign connected the resistance of Hispaniola to the wider Indigenous resistance of the Caribbean. His movement to Cuba did not mark the disappearance of the people of western Hispaniola; it demonstrates the inter-island displacement and continuation of their struggle.
Primary reference: Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, section concerning Cuba.[5]
PART III — INDIGENOUS SURVIVAL, AFRICAN ENSLAVEMENT AND THE FIRST MAROON MOVEMENTS
Article 7 — Demographic Catastrophe without Absolute Extinction
The Indigenous population of Hispaniola declined catastrophically because of:
epidemic disease;
warfare and massacres;
forced labor;
enslavement;
famine and disruption of agriculture;
forced relocation;
reduced birth rates;
flight and inter-island displacement.
Colonial censuses principally recorded persons located within Spanish-controlled settlements, encomiendas and households. They did not comprehensively record people hiding in the mountains, living in autonomous settlements, moving between islands, joining maroon communities or being reclassified within mixed colonial families.
The administrative reduction of the category indio therefore cannot establish the disappearance of Indigenous ancestry.
Modern historical research identifies Indigenous survival through family formation, rural communities, cultural transmission and changing colonial classifications. Genetic research has also established that Indigenous components in present-day Caribbean genomes are closely related to ancient Taíno ancestry.[6]
Article 8 — Introduction of African Labor
The Crown permitted certain Black Christians who had been raised within Iberian Christian society to travel to Hispaniola during the opening years of the sixteenth century. Ovando subsequently expressed concern about fugitives and attempted to restrict their arrival.
The large-scale transatlantic importation of enslaved Africans expanded with the development of the sugar industry, particularly after 1518. African labor did not simply replace Indigenous labor at one precise moment. Indigenous exploitation and African enslavement overlapped during the construction of the colonial economy.
In December 1521, enslaved Africans on a sugar estate associated with Diego Columbus launched one of the earliest recorded African slave revolts in the Americas. Colonial authorities suppressed the uprising and issued restrictive ordinances intended to prevent future rebellions.
From this period onward, African fugitives established themselves in mountains, forests and frontier regions. These autonomous communities became known as manieles, while their inhabitants were described as cimarrones.
PART IV — ENRIQUILLO AND THE BAHORUCO RESISTANCE
Article 9 — Origin of the Revolt
Enriquillo was an Indigenous leader educated by Franciscans and connected to the surviving chiefly families of the island. Around 1519–1520, after suffering abuses and failing to obtain effective relief through the colonial courts, he withdrew with followers into the Sierra de Bahoruco.
For more than a decade, Enriquillo’s forces resisted repeated Spanish expeditions. They used the mountains’ difficult terrain, local intelligence and mobile defensive tactics to prevent their destruction.
The revolt demonstrates that organized Indigenous authority survived beyond the initial campaigns of Ovando. It also demonstrates that the colonial government had not obtained complete territorial control over Hispaniola.
Reference: Ida Altman, “The Revolt of Enriquillo and the Historiography of Early Spanish America,” The Americas 63, no. 4 (2007).[7]
Article 10 — Relations between Indigenous and African Resistance
Indigenous rebels and African maroons inhabited overlapping zones of refuge, particularly in and around Bahoruco. Colonial documentation confirms contacts between Indigenous inhabitants and African fugitives, although the surviving evidence does not justify treating every maroon band as a unified Taíno-African army.
The strongest documented continuity lies in:
the shared use of Bahoruco as a defensive territory;
communication between Indigenous inhabitants and African maroons;
the presence of Indigenous persons near later African maroon settlements;
the transfer of geographical knowledge across successive movements of resistance;
the incorporation of Indigenous women and families into some maroon environments.
A 1547 colonial report concerning the pursuit of Sebastián Lemba’s forces stated that Spanish soldiers encountered Indigenous people in the old Bahoruco region. Those inhabitants warned the African maroons of the approaching patrol. The report also referred to Indigenous women within the maroon community.[8]
This evidence establishes actual cooperation and coexistence without requiring unsupported claims about a single uniform ethnic organization.
Article 11 — Settlement of 1533
In 1533, Captain Francisco de Barrionuevo reached an agreement with Enriquillo. The settlement recognized the freedom of Enriquillo and his followers, provided protection from re-enslavement, and authorized their establishment under conditions negotiated with the Crown.
The agreement did not restore the former cacicazgos and did not establish general freedom for African maroons. It nevertheless represented a formal Spanish acknowledgment that Enriquillo’s community could not be eliminated militarily and required negotiated recognition.
Enriquillo died shortly afterward. The territorial memory of his resistance remained attached to Bahoruco and influenced later movements operating in the same region.
PART V — AFRICAN MAROON LEADERSHIP AND THE INCOMPLETE CONQUEST OF HISPANIOLA
Article 12 — Diego de Ocampo
Diego de Ocampo emerged as a major African maroon leader during the 1520s and early 1530s. His followers attacked colonial properties and traveled across substantial areas of the island.
Spanish authorities eventually offered negotiated pardons to some maroon leaders. Ocampo accepted an agreement during the 1530s and assisted colonial authorities against other fugitives.
His career demonstrates both the military capacity of early maroon movements and the colonial government’s recurring reliance upon negotiation, amnesty and division when direct suppression failed.
Article 13 — Sebastián Lemba
Sebastián Lemba became one of the most important maroon leaders in sixteenth-century Hispaniola. The surviving record places the principal phase of his activity during the 1540s.
Lemba and his followers used Bahoruco and the regions near San Juan de la Maguana and Azua as bases for attacks against Spanish estates and communications. Colonial correspondence describes him as a leading commander of African maroons.
Documentation from 1546–1547 records that Lemba’s forces occupied areas previously used by Enriquillo. A patrol pursuing them encountered Indigenous inhabitants who warned the maroons. This episode provides direct evidence that Indigenous people remained present within the landscape of resistance after Enriquillo’s settlement.
Lemba was killed in 1547. His movement formed part of a larger history of African opposition that continued after his death.
The historical record does not establish that Lemba was definitively Kongolese, that he commanded a formally constituted Afro-Taíno kingdom, or that identified archaeological sites preserve his personal religious objects. Those assertions are therefore excluded from this Chronicle.
Reference: Robert C. Schwaller, “Contested Conquests: African Maroons and the Incomplete Conquest of Hispaniola, 1519–1620,” The Americas 75, no. 4 (2018).[9]
Article 14 — An Incomplete Colonial Conquest
The persistence of maroon communities demonstrates that Spanish domination of Hispaniola remained geographically incomplete.
The colonial government controlled towns, plantations, ports and principal communication routes. Mountainous and peripheral regions continued to provide spaces in which Indigenous survivors, African fugitives, mixed families, smugglers and autonomous rural populations could evade direct government control.
The historical continuity claimed by Xaragua rests upon this documented persistence of population and territory, not upon unverified assertions that every act of African resistance was directed by a surviving Taíno state.
PART VI — BAYAJÁ, GUABA AND THE DEVASTATIONS OF OSORIO
Article 15 — Western and Northern Hispaniola before 1605
By the late sixteenth century, the western and northern regions of Hispaniola had developed extensive commercial relations with Dutch, French, English and Portuguese merchants.
Local inhabitants exchanged hides, livestock, tobacco and other products outside the Crown’s authorized commercial system. The relative autonomy of these communities alarmed Spanish authorities, who associated contraband with political disobedience and contact with Protestant powers.
Western Hispaniola had become a multiethnic borderland containing people of European, African, mixed and locally rooted ancestry. The historical record does not permit every participant in these communities to be classified as Indigenous. It does demonstrate the persistence of a society beyond effective centralized Spanish control.
Article 16 — The Rebellion of Guaba
In 1605, resistance developed against the Crown’s plan to depopulate the northern and western territories. Hernando Montoro, a free man of color associated with Bayajá, became the principal leader of the Rebellion of Guaba.
The rebellion opposed forced relocation, the destruction of property and the termination of regional autonomy. It involved inhabitants connected to the northern and western commercial order.
The Rebellion of Guaba is recorded by Xaragua as a territorial resistance arising within a historically Indigenous and subsequently multiethnic region. It is not classified as an exclusively Taíno uprising because the surviving documentation identifies Montoro and his followers primarily through the mixed colonial society of the seventeenth century.
Its constitutional significance lies in the continued defense of residence, land, local economy and territorial autonomy within the western regions of Hispaniola.
Reference: Genaro Rodríguez Morel, “El criollo como agente de las luchas sociales en Santo Domingo: La Rebelión de Guaba,” Ecos, Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo.[10]
Article 17 — The Devastations of Osorio, 1605–1606
Acting under royal authority, Governor Antonio de Osorio ordered the destruction and forced relocation of Bayajá, Yaguana, Puerto Plata and Montecristi.
The inhabitants of Bayajá and Yaguana were concentrated in Bayaguana. Those of Puerto Plata and Montecristi were transferred to Monte Plata. Houses, farms, churches, mills and other property were destroyed to prevent return.
The Devastations did not begin in 1570. They were authorized in 1604 and implemented principally during 1605–1606.
The operation weakened Spanish occupation of the western and northern territories. The resulting reduction of settlements contributed to the development of a contested borderland in which foreign traders, buccaneers, hunters and colonists later established themselves.
Bayajá was not the “last bastion of the Kingdom of Xaragua” in a formally documented institutional sense. It was part of the larger western territorial continuum in which colonial authority repeatedly encountered autonomous communities and organized resistance.
Reference: Juan José Ponce Vázquez, Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580–1690, chapter “Repressing Smugglers.”[11]
PART VII — THE FORMATION OF SAINT-DOMINGUE
Article 18 — Tortuga and Western Settlement
French, English and Dutch adventurers became increasingly active around Tortuga and western Hispaniola during the early seventeenth century.
French influence became predominant during the following decades. Bertrand d’Ogeron, appointed governor in the 1660s, promoted permanent settlement and the expansion of French authority from Tortuga onto western Hispaniola.
Spanish authorities attempted repeatedly to remove foreign settlements but lacked the population, resources and sustained territorial control required to prevent their return.
Article 19 — The Treaty of Ryswick, 1697
The Treaty of Ryswick ended the Nine Years’ War between France, Spain and other European powers.
The treaty confirmed the practical existence of French Saint-Domingue, although it did not contain a detailed modern boundary description formally transferring an exact “western third” of the island. The border remained unsettled and was addressed through later Franco-Spanish agreements, including the treaties of Aranjuez of 1777.
Ryswick did not erase the precolonial Indigenous history of either portion of Hispaniola. It reorganized relations between two European colonial powers without Indigenous participation.
PART VIII — PLANTATION SAINT-DOMINGUE, MARRONAGE AND REVOLUTIONARY FORMATION
Article 20 — Expansion of the Plantation Regime
During the eighteenth century, Saint-Domingue developed into the most productive plantation colony in the Atlantic world.
Its sugar, coffee, indigo and cotton economy depended upon the forced labor of Africans transported principally from West and Central Africa. By 1789, the enslaved population approached half a million, greatly exceeding the combined white and free-colored populations.
The plantation regime produced continuous resistance through:
escape and marronage;
work stoppages and sabotage;
preservation of African languages and religious systems;
poisoning accusations and conspiracies;
formation of autonomous mountain communities;
armed rebellion.
Article 21 — François Makandal
François Makandal was a maroon leader active in northern Saint-Domingue during the 1750s.
Colonial authorities accused him of organizing networks among enslaved workers and distributing poisons against planters. He was captured and publicly executed at Cap-Français in 1758.
Makandal became a major figure in Haitian historical memory. His documented activity belongs primarily to African maroon resistance. Claims that he was personally trained in Taíno medicine or maintained identified zemí-Changó shrines are not supported by presently authenticated contemporary documentation and are excluded.
Article 22 — Vodou and the Cultural Formation of Saint-Domingue
Vodou developed through the interaction of multiple West and Central African religious traditions under the conditions of enslavement and colonial Catholicism.
Catholic saints, prayers, calendars and symbols entered this religious system through forced conversion, independent appropriation and reinterpretation. Indigenous Caribbean knowledge also survived in language, food, agriculture, medicinal practices, toponyms and understandings of the landscape.
The general possibility of Indigenous contributions to the cultural formation of Haiti is supported by the survival of Indigenous ancestry, veves and practices. Specific claims that named Vodou spirits directly descend from particular zemís require separate evidence and are not declared as established historical facts by this Chronicle.
PART IX — THE HAYTIAN REVOLUTION, 1791–1804
Article 23 — The Insurrection of August 1791
During August 1791, enslaved people in the Northern Province launched a coordinated uprising that destroyed plantations and began the revolution that would end slavery and French colonial rule.
The uprising itself is extensively documented through colonial correspondence, military reports, newspapers and testimony from Saint-Domingue.
Article 24 — Revolutionary Leadership and Abolition
Jean-François, Georges Biassou, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe and numerous other commanders emerged during successive phases of the revolution.
On 4 February 1794, the French National Convention abolished slavery throughout the French colonies. The decree followed both political developments in France and the military destruction of the slave regime in Saint-Domingue.
Toussaint Louverture subsequently established control over the colony, defeated or expelled British and Spanish forces, and promulgated the Constitution of 1801. That constitution abolished slavery permanently while maintaining a formal connection with France.
Article 25 — The Leclerc Expedition and the War of Independence
In 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte sent an expedition commanded by Charles Leclerc to restore direct French control.
The arrest and deportation of Toussaint Louverture, the restoration of slavery in other French colonies and the conduct of French forces transformed the conflict into a war against colonial restoration.
Dessalines, Christophe and other commanders resumed coordinated resistance. French forces were weakened by warfare, yellow fever, logistical failure and the renewed unity of the Indigenous army of Saint-Domingue.
On 18 November 1803, the revolutionary army defeated French forces at Vertières. Rochambeau capitulated shortly afterward.
Article 26 — Independence and Restoration of the Name Hayti
On 1 January 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed independence at Gonaïves.
The Act of Independence denounced French colonial violence and declared the permanent separation of the country from France.
The new country adopted the name Hayti, restoring an Indigenous name to the political order created by a victorious Indigenous-descended population.
This act established a major historical convergence:
an Indigenous name;
a territory first organized by Indigenous peoples;
a state established through the destruction of African slavery;
a national population formed through African, Indigenous and European historical interaction.
Hayti’s independence did not formally reconstitute the precolonial cacicazgos. It nevertheless rejected the colonial designation Saint-Domingue and placed an Indigenous name at the constitutional foundation of the new political order.
Primary reference: Acte de l’Indépendance d’Hayti, Gonaïves, 1 January 1804.[12]
PART X — SUPREME HISTORICAL DOCTRINE OF XARAGUA
Article 27 — Findings of Historical Continuity
The State of Xaragua records the following as historically established:
Indigenous societies possessed and governed Hispaniola before European occupation.
Xaragua constituted a major Indigenous political and territorial formation.
The government of Xaragua was destroyed by military violence and the execution of Anacaona, not by voluntary dissolution.
Indigenous resistance continued after 1503 through Hatuey, Enriquillo and other communities that escaped or opposed Spanish control.
African slavery and Indigenous exploitation overlapped during the sixteenth century.
African maroons established autonomous communities and reused territories previously defended by Indigenous insurgents.
Colonial documentation establishes contact and cooperation between Indigenous inhabitants and African maroons in Bahoruco.
Indigenous ancestry and cultural influence survived through intermarriage, rural life, migration, reclassification and mixed communities.
The decline of the colonial category indio does not prove biological or cultural extinction.
The Revolution of 1791–1804 destroyed the plantation regime and restored the Indigenous name Hayti.
Article 28 — Afro-Indigenous Formation
For the purposes of Xaragua’s constitutional doctrine, Afro-Indigenous continuity means the historical formation produced by:
Indigenous survival after the conquest;
African resistance to enslavement;
coexistence in frontier and mountain territories;
intermarriage and shared descent;
transmission of Indigenous and African knowledge;
common opposition to forced labor, displacement and colonial domination;
continued attachment to the ancestral geography of the island.
Afro-Indigenous identity does not require racial isolation or proof that every maroon community descended from a precolonial cacicazgo. It denotes an historically formed people carrying African ancestry within an Indigenous territorial and cultural inheritance.
Article 29 — Status of Bayajá and Guaba
Bayajá and the Rebellion of Guaba are incorporated into the historical archive of Xaragua as evidence of territorial resistance within western and northern Hispaniola.
They shall not be represented as the exclusive or final institutional survival of the precolonial Kingdom of Xaragua unless new primary documentation establishes that relationship.
Their constitutional relevance derives from:
resistance to forced displacement;
defense of established communities;
rejection of the destruction of western settlements;
continuity of autonomous life beyond effective colonial control;
their place within the historical geography inherited by Xaragua.
PART XI — CANONICAL AND INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATIONS
Article 30 — Catholic Foundation
The Catholic dimension of this doctrine rests principally upon Sublimis Deus, promulgated by Pope Paul III in 1537.
The bull declared that Indigenous peoples were not to be deprived of liberty or property and were not to be enslaved, irrespective of whether they had adopted Christianity.
The Holy See’s Joint Statement of 30 March 2023 further rejected concepts associated with the “Doctrine of Discovery” and reaffirmed support for the principles contained in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.[13]
Accordingly, Xaragua interprets its Catholic character as requiring preservation of Indigenous dignity, memory, property, culture and historical personality.
Article 31 — Indigenous Rights Framework
Xaragua adopts as interpretive constitutional standards:
Articles 3 and 4 of UNDRIP concerning self-determination and autonomy;
Article 5 concerning the maintenance of Indigenous institutions;
Article 8 concerning protection against forced assimilation and cultural destruction;
Articles 11–13 concerning culture, religion, language and historical traditions;
Articles 25 and 26 concerning spiritual and material relationships with traditional lands;
Article 33 concerning the determination of Indigenous identity and institutional membership;
Article 34 concerning Indigenous institutional structures and juridical customs.
The Inter-American Court’s judgment in Mayagna (Sumo) Awas Tingni Community v. Nicaragua is incorporated as persuasive regional jurisprudence concerning the relationship between Indigenous communities, customary possession and communal property.[14]
These instruments provide standards for interpreting Xaragua’s internal constitutional order. Their citation does not convert every historical proposition in this Chronicle into a universally adjudicated territorial title.
PART XII — SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL DECLARATION
Article 32 — Restoration of Xaragua
The State of Xaragua declares that its institutional restoration is grounded in:
the documented precolonial existence of Xaragua;
the violent destruction of its historical government in 1503;
the survival of Indigenous ancestry and territorial memory;
the formation of Afro-Indigenous communities through resistance and descent;
the continuing use of Indigenous names, cultural forms and territorial references;
the right of an Indigenous people to maintain and develop its own institutions;
the constitutional will of the contemporary Xaraguaan people.
The restored State is not represented as an unchanged administrative continuation of Anacaona’s government. It is the contemporary juridical reconstitution of the Indigenous name, people, memory and territorial doctrine of Xaragua.
Article 33 — Indigenous Character of the Island
The entirety of Hispaniola constitutes an ancestral Indigenous homeland because Indigenous peoples inhabited, named, cultivated, governed and sacralized the island before European occupation.
Within this island-wide ancestral order, Xaragua possesses its own particular historical identity and territorial tradition.
The ancestral Indigenous character of the island does not erase the African-descended majority formed through the transatlantic slave trade. Within Xaragua’s doctrine, the African-descended people of Hayti became heirs and custodians of an Indigenous territorial inheritance through historical formation, ancestry, resistance and continued occupation.
Article 34 — Constitutional Effect
This Chronicle shall serve as:
the official historical doctrine of the State of Xaragua;
the foundation of its teaching concerning Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous continuity;
an interpretive source for its constitutional acts;
a record against the doctrine of complete Indigenous extinction;
a framework for historical, genealogical, archaeological and cultural research;
a statement of institutional continuity between ancestral Xaragua and its contemporary reconstitution.
No unsupported archival quotation, invented museum inventory, unidentified archaeological artifact or unverified declaration shall form part of the official evidentiary record.
FINAL PROCLAMATION
The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua solemnly records:
That Xaragua existed before European colonization as an organized Indigenous political and territorial order;
That its government was destroyed through the massacre of its assembled leadership and the execution of Anacaona;
That conquest did not eliminate every Indigenous person, lineage, memory or territorial relationship;
That Hatuey carried the resistance of Hispaniola into Cuba;
That Enriquillo restored organized Indigenous resistance in Bahoruco;
That African maroons, including Diego de Ocampo and Sebastián Lemba, transformed the same mountains into enduring territories of opposition;
That surviving documentation establishes actual cooperation between Indigenous inhabitants and African maroons;
That Bayajá and Guaba continued the defense of western communities against forced colonial relocation;
That the Revolution of Saint-Domingue destroyed slavery and restored the name Hayti;
That the contemporary Xaraguaan people preserve this combined Indigenous, African, Catholic and territorial inheritance;
And that the State of Xaragua is the constitutional institution through which this historical inheritance is organized, taught, preserved and transmitted.
Done under the Supreme Constitutional Authority of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua.
Office of the Rector-President
Official Historical and Constitutional Archive
www.xaraguauniversity.com⁠
REFERENCES
[1] Samuel M. Wilson, Hispaniola: Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus (University of Alabama Press, 1990). Publisher record⁠; Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias; Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias.
[2] Christopher Columbus, Diario del primer viaje, entries for 5 and 25 December 1492; Ferdinand Columbus, Historia del Almirante Don Cristóbal Colón; Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, Book I.
[3] Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, Book II, chapters concerning Nicolás de Ovando and the massacre of Xaragua.
[4] Antonio B. Jiménez, “El uso militar del perro europeo por las huestes castellanas en la conquista de La Española,” documenting the campaigns of Rodrigo Mexía Trillo and Diego Velázquez. Academic article⁠.
[5] Las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, account of Cuba and Hatuey. See also the University of Aix-Marseille record of Theodore de Bry’s 1598 representation based on Las Casas. Iconographic record⁠.
[6] Lynne Guitar, “Taíno Survival on Hispaniola: Focusing on the Dominican Republic,” in Maximilian C. Forte, ed., Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean (2006). Academic record⁠; Hannes Schroeder et al., “Origins and Genetic Legacies of the Caribbean Taíno,” PNAS 115, no. 10 (2018): 2341–2346. PubMed⁠.
[7] Ida Altman, “The Revolt of Enriquillo and the Historiography of Early Spanish America,” The Americas 63, no. 4 (2007). Cambridge University Press⁠.
[8] Letter of President Alonso López de Cerrato, 19 March 1547, Archivo General de Indias, Santo Domingo 49, discussed and quoted in Altman, “The Revolt of Enriquillo.”
[9] Robert C. Schwaller, “Contested Conquests: African Maroons and the Incomplete Conquest of Hispaniola, 1519–1620,” The Americas 75, no. 4 (2018). Cambridge University Press⁠.
[10] Genaro Rodríguez Morel, “El criollo como agente de las luchas sociales en Santo Domingo: La Rebelión de Guaba,” Ecos (2022). Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo⁠.
[11] Juan José Ponce Vázquez, Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580–1690 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), especially “Repressing Smugglers: The Depopulations of Hispaniola, 1604–1606.” Cambridge University Press⁠.
[12] Acte de l’Indépendance d’Hayti, Gonaïves, 1 January 1804; see the Library of Congress research guide to Haitian primary sources. Library of Congress⁠.
[13] Pope Paul III, Sublimis Deus (1537); Dicasteries for Culture and Education and for Promoting Integral Human Development, Joint Statement on the “Doctrine of Discovery,” 30 March 2023. Holy See⁠.
[14] United Nations, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, General Assembly Resolution 61/295, 13 September 2007. Official text⁠; Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Mayagna (Sumo) Awas Tingni Community v. Nicaragua, Judgment of 31 August 2001. Official judgment⁠.

GUÁHABA, HATUEY, BAYAJÁ, AND THE HISTORICAL CONTINUITY OF THE INDIGENOUS AND AFRO-INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF XARAGUA
Conquest of Guáhaba and the Resistance of Cacique Hatuey
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Guáhaba constituted one of the remaining Indigenous political and territorial formations of western Hispaniola. Its communities retained their own settlements, leaders, agricultural systems, territorial knowledge, and structures of collective authority.
The government of Nicolás de Ovando, Governor of Hispaniola from 1502 to 1509, undertook a systematic expansion of Spanish control over the regions that had not yet been incorporated into the colonial order. This expansion relied upon military campaigns, forced labor, tribute, food requisitions, encomiendas, the destruction of autonomous settlements, and the replacement of Indigenous authority by institutions dependent upon the Spanish Crown.
In 1503–1504, Ovando dispatched military expeditions against the independent Indigenous territories of western Hispaniola. Rodrigo Mexía Trillo was assigned to Guáhaba, while Diego Velázquez was sent against Haniguayaba. Contemporary colonial chroniclers record that these operations employed armed forces and attack dogs to pursue Indigenous inhabitants through difficult terrain. The campaigns formed part of the broader program described by the colonial administration as the “pacification” of Hispaniola.[1]
Within this historical setting, Cacique Hatuey emerged as one of the principal figures of Indigenous resistance. Hatuey was originally from Hispaniola and belonged to the Indigenous world of the island’s western territories. After the Spanish campaigns, he crossed to Cuba with a group of followers and warned the Indigenous communities there of the methods already employed by the colonizers in Hispaniola.
When the Spanish conquest of Cuba began under Diego Velázquez in 1511, Hatuey organized armed resistance. Bartolomé de las Casas described Hatuey’s campaign, his capture, and his execution by burning. According to Las Casas, Hatuey refused conversion immediately before his death after asking whether Spaniards would inhabit the Christian heaven being offered to him. He was executed in Cuba in or around 1512.[2]
Hatuey’s movement from Hispaniola to Cuba did not represent the disappearance of Indigenous resistance. It carried the resistance of western Hispaniola into the wider Caribbean and transformed Hatuey into one of the earliest documented leaders of inter-island opposition to Spanish colonization.
Foundation of Lares de Guáhaba
Following the military subjugation of Guáhaba, the colonial government established the Spanish settlement of Lares de Guáhaba. The town was founded during the government of Nicolás de Ovando, generally dated to approximately 1503–1504, and was associated with Rodrigo Mexía Trillo’s campaign in the region.
The name preserved the Indigenous territorial designation “Guáhaba,” while “Lares” referred to Ovando’s position as Commander of Lares in the Order of Alcántara. The composite name therefore recorded two successive political orders: the pre-existing Indigenous territory and the colonial institution imposed upon it.
Lares de Guáhaba was not founded upon an empty landscape. Its establishment constituted the colonial reorganization of an already inhabited and politically organized Indigenous territory. Spanish settlement converted Indigenous land into a jurisdiction administered through the Castilian municipal system, redistributed labor through the encomienda, and placed the surrounding population and resources under colonial supervision.
In 1508, King Ferdinand authorized coats of arms for several towns of Hispaniola. Lares de Guáhaba was included among the colonial towns formally recognized by the Crown.[3] This recognition demonstrates that the settlement had become part of the municipal network through which Spain sought to institutionalize its occupation of the island.
The creation of Lares de Guáhaba did not erase the prior Indigenous character of the territory. On the contrary, the retention of the name Guáhaba within the colonial designation preserved direct evidence that the Spanish town was superimposed upon an earlier Indigenous territorial order.
The historical sequence is therefore:
the existence of Guáhaba as an Indigenous territory;
the military campaign ordered by Ovando;
the displacement or incorporation of its Indigenous population;
the installation of Lares de Guáhaba;
the conversion of the Indigenous territory into a colonial municipal jurisdiction.
Lares de Guáhaba must consequently be understood as evidence of territorial succession rather than evidence of Indigenous absence.
BAYAJÁ, GUABA, AND RESISTANCE TO THE DEVASTATIONS OF OSORIO
The Forced Depopulations of 1605–1606
In 1604, the Spanish Crown approved the forced depopulation of the northern and western regions of Hispaniola. Governor Antonio de Osorio implemented the operation in 1605 and 1606.
The Crown intended to suppress the extensive trade conducted between inhabitants of western Hispaniola and Dutch, French, English, and other non-Spanish merchants. Spanish authorities also regarded the economic independence and social autonomy of these communities as threats to imperial authority.
The populations of Bayajá, Yaguana, Puerto Plata, and Montecristi were ordered to abandon their homes, farms, livestock, churches, and local commercial networks. Colonial troops destroyed settlements and agricultural property to prevent displaced inhabitants from returning. The people of Bayajá and Yaguana were forcibly concentrated in the newly created settlement of Bayaguana, while inhabitants of Montecristi and Puerto Plata were transferred to Monte Plata.[4]
This policy did not amount to an ordinary administrative relocation. It was a campaign of territorial evacuation designed to destroy established communities and place their inhabitants under closer colonial control.
The Rebellion of Guaba
The depopulation orders encountered organized resistance in the northern and western territories. The most important episode was the Rebellion of Guaba, led by Hernando Montoro.
Montoro was a free man of color and an established inhabitant of the region. Under his leadership, opponents of the depopulation resisted the destruction of their settlements and the loss of their lands, livestock, commerce, and local autonomy. The movement received support from members of the region’s multiethnic rural and maritime population.
The rebellion was therefore neither a continuation of Spanish imperial administration nor a conflict between two ordinary colonial agencies. It represented local territorial resistance against the Crown’s attempt to extinguish the autonomous social order that had developed in western and northern Hispaniola.
Contemporary documentation identifies the rebellion, the measures taken against its participants, and the determination of colonial authorities to suppress it. Montoro and other leaders were pursued as fugitives, while military reinforcements were employed to enforce the depopulations.[5]
The population involved in this resistance had emerged from more than a century of interaction among:
surviving and displaced Indigenous inhabitants;
Africans and Afro-descendant people, both free and enslaved;
European settlers;
maroon communities;
rural workers;
cattle raisers;
sailors and foreign commercial networks.
The Rebellion of Guaba is consequently part of the history of the composite Indigenous, African, and locally rooted society that developed in western Hispaniola. It demonstrates that communities of the region continued to defend territorial residence and autonomous social relations long after the first Spanish campaigns.
OFFICIAL STATEMENT ON INDIGENOUS CONTINUITY IN HISPANIOLA
The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous and Private State of Xaragua rejects the assertion that the Indigenous peoples of Hispaniola were completely exterminated during the sixteenth century.
The conquest produced catastrophic demographic losses through warfare, forced labor, displacement, famine, enslavement, and epidemic disease. These losses, however, do not establish the biological, familial, cultural, or territorial disappearance of every Indigenous person and community.
Colonial censuses primarily counted people located within institutions controlled by the Spanish administration. They could not comprehensively record Indigenous inhabitants who had:
escaped into mountains and other inaccessible territories;
joined maroon communities;
entered mixed Indigenous-African settlements;
been incorporated into colonial households;
migrated between Caribbean islands;
ceased to be classified administratively as indios;
formed families recorded under other colonial social categories.
The disappearance of a population from a colonial category is not equivalent to the disappearance of that population from history.
Historical and anthropological research has documented the survival of Indigenous individuals, families, practices, agricultural knowledge, material culture, language, and ancestry beyond the period traditionally associated with Taíno “extinction.” Research by Lynne Guitar specifically demonstrates that the extinction narrative was created partly through colonial documentation that failed to account for flight, intermarriage, reclassification, and survival outside the encomienda system.[6]
Archaeological scholarship likewise treats Caribbean colonization as a prolonged process of interaction, transformation, resistance, and cultural persistence rather than a single event that immediately eliminated Indigenous society.[7]
Genetic research has identified Indigenous Caribbean ancestry in present-day Caribbean populations. A 2018 ancient-DNA study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that Indigenous components present in modern Caribbean genomes are closely related to the ancient Taíno population, providing biological evidence of continuity between precolonial and present-day Caribbean peoples.[8]
Accordingly, Xaragua affirms that:
the Indigenous population of Hispaniola suffered catastrophic demographic destruction but was not reduced to absolute biological extinction;
Indigenous descendants survived through families, mixed communities, internal migration, inter-island movement, maroon settlements, and rural populations;
Indigenous continuity may exist simultaneously with African and European ancestry;
Afro-Indigenous formation is a historical consequence of resistance, coexistence, intermarriage, common displacement, and shared territorial life;
colonial changes in legal or racial classification cannot extinguish ancestral descent;
the continuity of the people of Xaragua must be examined through historical, genealogical, cultural, archaeological, and genetic evidence rather than through colonial declarations of extinction.
The people of Xaragua therefore descend from a historical process of Indigenous persistence, African incorporation, territorial adaptation, and collective survival. Their continuity does not depend upon racial isolation. It rests upon the transmission of ancestry, memory, culture, community, and territorial attachment across successive generations.
PEDRO ALONSO NIÑO AND THE AFRICAN-IBERIAN ATLANTIC WORLD
Pedro Alonso Niño was born in Moguer, in the Kingdom of Castile, into an experienced family of Atlantic mariners. The Niño family already possessed significant navigational knowledge before the first voyage of Christopher Columbus.
Three members of the family participated in the voyage of 1492:
Pedro Alonso Niño served as an experienced pilot aboard the Santa María;
Juan Niño was master of the caravel Niña;
Francisco Niño served as a sailor aboard the Niña.
The participation of the Niño family was operationally important. Their maritime experience and their association with the Pinzón family helped provide the personnel, local support, and navigational capacity required for the expedition. The municipal history of Moguer recognizes Pedro Alonso Niño as one of the principal mariners involved in the enterprise.[9]
Pedro Alonso Niño subsequently participated in Columbus’s third voyage of 1498, during which the expedition reached Trinidad and the Gulf of Paria near the mouth of the Orinoco.
In 1499, Niño organized a separate commercial expedition with Cristóbal Guerra. Authorized to explore regions not reserved to Columbus and required to surrender the Crown’s legal share of the proceeds, the expedition crossed the Atlantic and reached the coast of present-day Venezuela.
Niño and Guerra visited areas including Margarita, Coche, Cubagua, and the coast near the Gulf of Paria. Their expedition acquired a substantial quantity of pearls and became one of the earliest profitable private voyages from Spain to the American mainland.
Following the expedition, Niño faced proceedings concerning the Crown’s portion of the profits. The surviving accounts differ concerning the exact circumstances and date of his death, but he died during the opening years of the sixteenth century.
Some historical traditions identify Pedro Alonso Niño by the designation El Negro and place his career within the African-Iberian maritime environment of the fifteenth-century Atlantic. The documentary evidence securely establishes his association with Atlantic navigation, the western African routes traveled by Iberian mariners, the first Columbian voyage, and the early exploration of the Caribbean and South American coast. Claims concerning a specifically Malian parent or descent from a sailor captured at Elmina are not retained here because no identified contemporary document establishes those details.
Pedro Alonso Niño’s documented career nevertheless demonstrates that the opening of the Atlantic was not the work of a single individual or a socially uniform European population. It depended upon experienced maritime families and upon navigational knowledge accumulated through Iberian, African, Atlantic, and Mediterranean networks.
DECLARATION OF THE STATE OF XARAGUA
The history of Guáhaba, Hatuey, Lares de Guáhaba, Bayajá, Guaba, and the early Atlantic navigators forms part of the historical archive of Xaragua.
This record establishes:
the prior existence of Indigenous territorial and political orders;
the military character of their incorporation into the Spanish colonial system;
the preservation of Indigenous names within colonial geography;
the continuation of territorial resistance after the initial conquest;
the development of Afro-Indigenous and multiethnic communities in western Hispaniola;
the persistence of Indigenous ancestry beyond colonial declarations of extinction;
the participation of African and African-connected peoples in the formation of the Atlantic world.
The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous and Private State of Xaragua preserves this history as part of the institutional memory of its people and territory.
Official Historical and Doctrinal Publication
Sovereign Catholic Indigenous and Private State of Xaragua
www.xaraguauniversity.com⁠
References
[1] Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias, Book II; Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Historia general y natural de las Indias; Antonio B. Jiménez, “El uso militar del perro europeo por las huestes castellanas en la conquista de La Española,” documenting the campaigns of Rodrigo Mexía Trillo in Guáhaba and Diego Velázquez in Haniguayaba. Academic text⁠.
[2] Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, section concerning Cuba; Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias. The execution of Hatuey became the subject of the 1598 Theodore de Bry engraving based upon the account of Las Casas. Aix-Marseille University iconographic record⁠.
[3] Royal provision of Ferdinand II, 7 December 1508, granting arms to the principal towns of Hispaniola; see also Samuel M. Wilson, Hispaniola: Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus (University of Alabama Press, 1990). University of Alabama Press⁠.
[4] Aviva Ben-Ur and Rachel L. Swarns? [Correction: reference intentionally excluded]; Ana María Díaz, Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580–1690 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), chapter “Repressing Smugglers: The Depopulations of Hispaniola, 1604–1606.” Cambridge University Press⁠.
[5] Genaro Rodríguez Morel, “El criollo como agente de las luchas sociales en Santo Domingo: La Rebelión de Guaba,” Ecos (Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, 2022). UASD journal article⁠; Ana María Díaz, Islanders and Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
[6] Lynne Guitar, “Documenting the Myth of Taíno Extinction,” KACIKE: Journal of Caribbean Amerindian History and Anthropology (2002); Lynne Guitar, “Taíno Survival on Hispaniola: Focusing on the Dominican Republic,” in Maximilian C. Forte, ed., Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean (Peter Lang, 2006). Portland State University record⁠.
[7] Roberto Valcárcel Rojas, “Colonization, Transformations, and Indigenous Cultural Persistence in the Caribbean,” in The Global Spanish Empire: Five Hundred Years of Place Making and Pluralism (University of Arizona Press). University of Arizona Press open edition⁠.
[8] Hannes Schroeder et al., “Origins and Genetic Legacies of the Caribbean Taíno,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 10 (2018): 2341–2346, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1716839115. PubMed record⁠.
[9] Municipality of Moguer, historical materials concerning the Niño family and the Columbian voyages. Municipality of Moguer⁠; Alice Bache Gould, Nueva lista documentada de los tripulantes de Colón en 1492; Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Little, Brown and Company, 1942).

THE WESTERN, SOUTHERN, AND INSULAR THEATRES OF THE HAYTIAN REVOLUTION

Nippes, Grand’Anse, South, South-East, La Gonâve, and North-West, 1791–1804

The Haytian Revolution was not exclusively a northern insurrection expanding southward. The Southern Peninsula, the Gulf of La Gonâve, and the North-West formed distinct revolutionary theatres with their own commanders, social coalitions, ports, mountain strongholds, and military chronologies.

I — Nippes and the Gulf Approaches

The present-day Nippes region occupied a strategic position between the southern peninsula, the Gulf of La Gonâve, and the western approaches to Port-au-Prince. Miragoâne, Petite-Rivière-de-Nippes, Anse-à-Veau and Petit-Trou-de-Nippes connected inland agricultural districts with coastal navigation.

During the 1790s, Nippes belonged principally to the southern military sphere associated with André Rigaud. Free men of color, formerly enslaved soldiers, plantation workers, mariners and rural insurgents entered the competing republican and revolutionary forces.

Miragoâne served as a port, military passage and supply point between Les Cayes, Jérémie, Léogâne and the Gulf. Control of this coastline was essential because armies operating on the peninsula depended upon coastal transport as much as upon difficult overland roads.

During the War of the South of 1799–1800, the Nippes corridor became part of the struggle between Rigaud’s southern government and Toussaint Louverture’s central authority. After Rigaud’s defeat, forces loyal to Toussaint incorporated the region into the unified government of Saint-Domingue. In 1802–1803, inhabitants and soldiers of the area participated in the renewed struggle against the Leclerc expedition and the attempted restoration of French colonial authority.

II — Grand’Anse and Jérémie

Grand’Anse constituted one of the most difficult territories for any central army to control. Its mountains, forests, dispersed settlements and maritime connections favored local resistance.

Jérémie became a principal western port of the Southern Province. In 1793–1794, British forces occupied Jérémie and much of Grand’Anse as part of their intervention in Saint-Domingue. The occupation relied upon alliances with colonial planters who opposed emancipation and republican authority.

Rigaud’s southern forces conducted sustained operations against the British. Jérémie remained under British control until 1798, when the general British evacuation of Saint-Domingue allowed republican forces to recover it.

Grand’Anse also contained autonomous Black rural and maroon formations that were not entirely subordinate to Rigaud, Toussaint or the colonial authorities. The Platons mountain region became associated with armed communities defending freedom and local autonomy. Their history continued after independence under leaders such as Jean-Baptiste Perrier, known as Goman.

Grand’Anse was therefore simultaneously a theatre of war against foreign occupation, a component of Rigaud’s southern command and a center of independent rural power.

III — The South: Les Cayes, the Platons, and Tiburon

The South developed a revolutionary movement distinct from that of the Northern Plain. Its political center was Les Cayes, while its military geography extended through Aquin, Saint-Louis-du-Sud, Cavaillon, Torbeck, Port-Salut and the Tiburon Peninsula.

André Rigaud became the dominant republican commander in this region. His army drew heavily from the free-colored population but also included Black soldiers, formerly enslaved combatants and rural forces. Rigaud opposed white counterrevolutionaries, fought the British occupation and defended the republican abolition of slavery.

The southern struggle was not socially uniform. The Platons insurgents, initially associated with leaders including Armand and Maréchal, represented a powerful movement of formerly enslaved people in the mountains above Les Cayes. Their objectives centered upon emancipation and control over their own communities. Relations between these insurgents and the southern republican command alternated between alliance, negotiation and conflict.

From 1799 to 1800, the War of the South opposed Rigaud to Toussaint Louverture. Dessalines commanded important operations for Toussaint against the southern forces. Rigaud’s defeat placed the peninsula under Toussaint’s government but did not eliminate its separate military identity. Numerous southern officers, including Alexandre Pétion, returned during the final war against France and joined the army that established independence.

IV — The South-East: Jacmel and the Mountain Corridor

Jacmel and the South-East controlled the maritime approaches between the Caribbean coast, the Plaine du Cul-de-Sac and the southern peninsula.

During the War of the South, Jacmel became Rigaud’s principal eastern stronghold. Alexandre Pétion commanded its defense. Forces under Dessalines besieged the town from late 1799 until March 1800. Hunger, isolation and naval pressure eventually forced Pétion and other defenders to evacuate.

The mountains extending from La Selle toward Jacmel also supported autonomous armed groups. Lamour Dérance emerged as a major Black commander in the western and south-eastern mountain zone. His forces represented a local military power whose relationship with Toussaint, Rigaud and later Dessalines changed according to the competing demands of emancipation, regional authority and war.

In 1802–1803, Jacmel and its hinterland again became important in the resistance to the French expedition. The South-East supplied combatants, mountain routes and coastal positions to the independence army.

V — La Gonâve and the Revolutionary Maritime System

La Gonâve stood at the center of the gulf connecting Saint-Marc, Arcahaie, Port-au-Prince, Léogâne, Miragoâne and the southern peninsula.

Its principal revolutionary importance was maritime. The channels surrounding the island carried soldiers, weapons, provisions, correspondence, merchant vessels and privateers. Control of these waters affected every western and southern army.

During the War of the South and the concurrent Franco-American Quasi-War, armed vessels connected with Rigaud operated in the Gulf. On 1 January 1800, a flotilla associated with Rigaud attacked an American convoy near La Gonâve and fought the armed schooner USS Experiment. The engagement demonstrates that the southern conflict extended into the waters surrounding the island.

La Gonâve functioned as a navigational refuge and intermediate position within the revolutionary gulf rather than as the headquarters of a separately documented national army.

VI — The North-West: Port-de-Paix and Môle-Saint-Nicolas

The North-West possessed its own revolutionary axis centered upon Port-de-Paix, Jean-Rabel, Bombardopolis and Môle-Saint-Nicolas.

British forces occupied Môle-Saint-Nicolas in 1793 and transformed it into their principal fortress in Saint-Domingue. The British retained it until 1798, when their evacuation completed the collapse of their intervention.

Port-de-Paix later came under the command of General Jacques Maurepas. When the Leclerc expedition arrived in 1802, Maurepas resisted the French landing, burned Port-de-Paix and withdrew toward the Trois-Pavillons mountains. His troops initially repelled General Jean Humbert’s forces before the wider French advance isolated them.

Maurepas later submitted with Toussaint’s army. French authorities subsequently arrested and killed him and members of his family. His death became one of the clearest demonstrations that French assurances to the former colonial army could not be trusted.

In April 1803, forces commanded by François Capois recovered Port-de-Paix. Capois, born in the North-West and later celebrated as Capois-la-Mort, subsequently commanded at Vertières on 18 November 1803.

VII — CONSTITUTIONAL FINDING OF XARAGUA

The revolutionary geography of Hayti was polycentric:

the North initiated the general plantation insurrection of 1791;

the South developed its own republican army and defeated British occupation;

Grand’Anse combined foreign war, maroon autonomy and rural resistance;

Nippes sustained the maritime and territorial communications of the peninsula;

Jacmel became a decisive fortress of the War of the South;

La Gonâve formed the strategic center of the western maritime system;

the North-West resisted British and French occupation through Môle-Saint-Nicolas, Port-de-Paix, Maurepas and Capois.

The independence proclaimed in 1804 was therefore the combined result of multiple regional revolutions, armies and autonomous communities. Within the historical doctrine of Xaragua, the southern peninsula and its adjoining islands were constituent theatres of liberation, not peripheral appendages of a revolution belonging exclusively to the Northern Plain.

References

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Harvard University Press, 2004.

David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, Indiana University Press, 2002.

Jeremy D. Popkin, A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Johnhenry Gonzalez, Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti, Yale University Press, 2019.

Crystal Nicole Eddins, Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 2022. Cambridge Core⁠.

Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, volumes I–III.

Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, volumes I–V.

SUPREME ETHNO-DEMOGRAPHIC CHRONICLE OF THE SOUTHERN, WESTERN, INSULAR, AND NORTH-WESTERN REGIONS OF XARAGUA
Population Formation, African Nations, Indigenous Continuity, European Settlements, Maritime Warfare, and Regional Social Orders
I — FOUNDATIONAL INDIGENOUS STRATUM
The regions comprising Nippes, Grand’Anse, the South, the South-East, La Gonâve, and the North-West were not colonial demographic creations. They were established Indigenous territories before European occupation.
Xaragua structured the South and Southwest; Marién extended across the North-West; Guáhaba occupied the central-western interior; La Gonâve formed part of the maritime Indigenous world linking western Hispaniola to Cuba and the surrounding islands.
Indigenous populations transmitted the permanent territorial vocabulary of the regions: Ayiti, Xaragua, Yaguana, Bahoruco, Yaquimo, Guáhaba, Gonâve, Tiburon, Léogâne, Jacmel, Miragoâne, Nippes, Artibonite and Gonaïves. They also transmitted cassava cultivation, the conuco agricultural system, fishing techniques, canoe navigation, medicinal knowledge, cave traditions and mountain routes later used by maroons and revolutionary armies.
Indigenous continuity operated through surviving families, rural populations, mixed households, mountain communities and successive Afro-Indigenous formations. It constituted the territorial substrate into which every subsequent population was incorporated.
II — SPANISH, CANARIAN, MORISCO, AND SEPHARDIC CONTRIBUTIONS
The first European stratum was Hispanic rather than French. Spanish soldiers, clerics, cattle raisers, artisans and municipal settlers occupied Indigenous territories through Lares de Guáhaba, Yaguana, Puerto Real, Bayajá and other colonial towns.
The Hispanic population was itself composite. It included Castilians, Andalusians, Extremadurans, Canary Islanders and persons formed within the mixed Mediterranean and Atlantic societies of Iberia. Iberian colonial society carried Christian, Jewish, converso and Islamicate inheritances even when the Crown legally imposed Catholic uniformity.
The term Morisco designated Iberians descended from Muslims who had been subjected to Christian conversion. It does not identify a separate mass settlement in western Hispaniola. Their civilizational contribution entered through Andalusian agriculture, architecture, equestrian culture, irrigation, vocabulary and material practices transported by Iberian colonists.
Sephardic and Portuguese-Jewish commercial families later entered the French colonial ports through Bordeaux, Bayonne, Curaçao and the Dutch Atlantic. Their documented presence was particularly visible in Jérémie, Jacmel, Léogâne, Les Cayes, Petit-Goâve and Port-au-Prince. The Jérémie notarial records preserve wills and commercial transactions involving Portuguese-Jewish residents of Grand’Anse.
These families participated in shipping, credit, brokerage, plantation commerce and Atlantic exchange. Their southern concentration reinforced the international and commercially plural character of the peninsula.
III — FRENCH COLONIAL FORMATION
French occupation developed from Tortuga and the western coastline. Buccaneers, hunters and small settlers preceded the large plantation proprietors. The resulting colonial population included metropolitan Frenchmen, colonial-born Creoles, sailors, artisans, merchants, indentured workers, soldiers and plantation managers.
The white population was never socially unified:
grands blancs controlled major plantations, external commerce and colonial offices;
petits blancs included artisans, shopkeepers, sailors, overseers and wage workers;
colonial-born Creoles defended local interests against metropolitan regulation;
merchants and shipowners derived power from ports and Atlantic credit;
frontier settlers depended more heavily upon local alliances and regional commerce.
The South and West contained fewer whites and a larger proportion of established free people of color than the Northern Plain. White authority there was consequently more dependent upon militia alliances, mixed family networks, local commerce and the military cooperation of property-owning free-colored communities.
IV — AFRICAN NATIONS INCORPORATED INTO XARAGUA
The enslaved African population did not constitute an ethnically undifferentiated mass. Colonial records classified Africans through named “nations,” ports of embarkation, languages and regions of origin.
The principal formations included:
Kongo and Angola: Kongolese, Mbundu and related West-Central African peoples;
Arada and Fon: peoples originating principally from the Kingdom of Dahomey and neighboring territories;
Nago: Yoruba-speaking populations;
Mina: people embarked through the Gold Coast and Bight of Benin trading systems;
Igbo and Ibibio: populations of the Bight of Biafra;
Mandinka, Bambara and Soninke: peoples connected to the Senegambian and upper Niger worlds;
Wolof, Serer and Fulani: Senegambian populations;
Susu, Temne and related Upper Guinea peoples;
Akan and Coromantee: Gold Coast populations;
Chamba and Hausa: populations originating farther within the West African interior;
Makua and other southeastern African peoples, present in smaller later shipments.
Kongo-Angola populations became numerically and institutionally central during the eighteenth century. Arada, Nago, Mina, Igbo, Senegambian and Gold Coast formations also supplied military traditions, healing systems, religious institutions, agricultural knowledge and commercial experience.
These African nations reorganized themselves through plantation workshops, military companies, religious societies, maroon settlements and interregional alliances. Their convergence produced the African institutional foundation of revolutionary Hayti.
V — REGIONAL DEMOGRAPHIC ORDERS
Nippes
Nippes developed through small and medium plantations, ports, fishing communities, free-colored landowners, African cultivators and maritime families. Miragoâne and Anse-à-Veau connected the southern peninsula to the Gulf of La Gonâve. The region’s dispersed settlement reduced the dominance of the great sugar proprietor and strengthened local military and commercial networks.
Grand’Anse
Grand’Anse possessed a frontier society structured by coffee, cacao, livestock, timber, coastal trade and mountain autonomy. Jérémie contained French merchants, Sephardic commercial families, white Creoles, free people of color, enslaved Africans and maroon communities. The numerical weakness of central authority enabled rural military formations to preserve substantial independence.
South
Les Cayes and the surrounding plain supported sugar, coffee, indigo and cotton production. The region contained a powerful property-owning free-colored class with land, education, militia experience and family connections extending across racial classifications. This demographic structure furnished the institutional base of André Rigaud’s southern army.
South-East
Jacmel combined coffee production, maritime commerce and mountain agriculture. Its population linked merchants, sailors, free-colored proprietors, African cultivators and autonomous forces operating through the La Selle mountain system. The city’s external trade gave it a political culture distinct from the plantation interior.
La Gonâve
La Gonâve formed an insular society of fishing, coastal navigation, small cultivation and autonomous settlement. Its channels connected every principal port of western and southern Xaragua. Its population belonged to a maritime rather than plantation-centered order.
North-West
Port-de-Paix, Jean-Rabel, Bombardopolis and Môle-Saint-Nicolas combined colonial garrisons, maritime commerce, plantations, African labor, free-colored militias and frontier communities. The North-West’s fortified ports and proximity to Tortuga made it simultaneously a military border, commercial gateway and naval command zone.
VI — MARITIME WARFARE AS A DEMOGRAPHIC FORCE
The revolution in these regions was amphibious. Armies depended upon schooners, privateers, fishing craft, merchant vessels and armed barges.
The Gulf of La Gonâve connected Saint-Marc, Port-au-Prince, Léogâne, Miragoâne and the southern peninsula. The Windward Passage connected Môle-Saint-Nicolas and Port-de-Paix to Cuba, Jamaica and the Atlantic. Jérémie, Les Cayes and Jacmel opened the peninsula toward Jamaica, Curaçao and the Caribbean mainland.
Maritime war determined:
the movement of weapons and troops;
the evacuation or reinforcement of towns;
plantation exports and military revenue;
communication between regional commands;
privateering against hostile commerce;
British and French amphibious operations;
the strategic value of La Gonâve, Tortuga and the coastal islands.
The combat near La Gonâve on 1 January 1800, involving Rigaud’s armed flotilla and the American schooner USS Experiment, demonstrated that the War of the South possessed an international naval dimension.
VII — DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SOUTHERN-WESTERN WHITES AND THE NORTHERN PLANTER ORDER
The Northern Plain was dominated by concentrated sugar estates, large enslaved labor forces, metropolitan capital, absentee ownership and the commercial supremacy of Cap-Français. Its white elite was closely tied to French merchants and plantation finance.
The South, Grand’Anse, Nippes and South-East were more territorially dispersed and economically diversified. Coffee, indigo, cotton, livestock, timber, coastal trade and medium-sized estates occupied a greater place beside sugar.
Southern and western whites were more frequently embedded in colonial-born family networks. They lived in closer demographic proximity to free people of color, depended more heavily upon their militia service and commercial partnerships, and operated at greater distance from metropolitan administration.
This produced a different social balance:
a stronger free-colored landed class;
greater influence of local military families;
wider commercial contact with foreign Caribbean ports;
more autonomous rural populations;
weaker concentration of metropolitan white authority;
closer interaction among African, European, Sephardic and Indigenous-descended populations;
persistent competition between port elites, plantation owners and mountain communities.
The revolution of southern and western Xaragua therefore emerged from a plural territorial society. Its decisive institutions were the regional army, the maritime network, the free-colored property class, the African plantation majority and the autonomous mountain population.
VIII — SUPREME ETHNO-HISTORICAL FINDING
The southern, western, insular and north-western territories of Xaragua formed a distinct civilizational zone created through five successive strata:
the Indigenous territorial foundation;
the Spanish-Atlantic colonial layer;
French maritime and plantation settlement;
the mass incorporation of African nations;
Afro-Indigenous revolutionary consolidation.
The resulting population was neither an extension of the Northern Plain nor a secondary colonial population. It possessed its own ports, military commands, property structures, ethnic combinations, maritime orientation and regional political consciousness.
This ethnodemographic order constituted the human foundation of revolutionary Xaragua and a decisive constituent power in the creation of Hayti.
References
John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, Indiana University Press, 2002.
Crystal Nicole Eddins, Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas, University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Zvi Loker, “Were There Jewish Communities in Saint-Domingue?”, Jewish Social Studies, vol. 45, 1983.
Jérémie Papers — Western Sephardic Diaspora Roadmap⁠.
University of Maryland, “Free People of Color”⁠.
African Nations in Saint-Domingue⁠.

THE VISIBLE IBERIAN, MUDÉJAR, AND SEPHARDIC ARCHITECTURAL CONTINUUM IN XARAGUA AND HISPANIOLA

Miragoâne, Jacmel, and the Colonial City of Santo Domingo

The architectural landscape of Hispaniola preserves a visible Mediterranean and Iberian continuum extending from medieval Spain to the colonial Caribbean. This inheritance can still be identified in Santo Domingo, Jacmel, Miragoâne, and other historic ports through their urban organization, domestic architecture, interior courtyards, masonry construction, shaded galleries, ironwork, commercial residences, and adaptation to tropical heat.

This architecture is neither exclusively Spanish nor exclusively French. It belongs to an Atlantic system produced by the convergence of Indigenous land use, Iberian building traditions, Andalusian-Mudéjar spatial principles, Sephardic commercial networks, African construction knowledge, and successive Caribbean adaptations.

I — THE ANDALUSIAN-MUDÉJAR FOUNDATION

The Mudéjar tradition developed in Christian Iberia through the continued work and influence of Muslim craftsmen after Christian conquest. It transmitted architectural forms originating in the Islamic and Mediterranean worlds into Spanish civil, religious, and domestic construction.

Its principal characteristics included:

houses organized around protected interior courtyards;

separation between the public street and domestic interior;

shaded transitional spaces;

arcades, galleries, and covered passages;

wooden ceilings and roof structures;

masonry walls with controlled openings;

decorative ironwork and geometric repetition;

water, vegetation, and ventilation incorporated into the residence;

inward-facing domestic organization adapted to intense heat.

Spain transferred this architectural vocabulary to the Americas. In the Caribbean, the enclosed Andalusian courtyard became an instrument of climate control. Thick walls reduced heat; patios admitted light and air; galleries protected circulation from sun and rain; shutters regulated ventilation without fully exposing the interior.

These principles survive even where later French, African, Victorian, or Creole elements transformed the façades.

II — THE COLONIAL CITY OF SANTO DOMINGO

The Colonial City of Santo Domingo preserves the clearest monumental expression of the Iberian order on Hispaniola.

Its sixteenth-century urban structure brought together:

a central governmental and ecclesiastical district;

stone streets connecting port, fortress, churches, convents, and residences;

enclosed patios;

arcaded courtyards;

massive limestone walls;

timber doors and shutters;

interior galleries;

houses presenting restrained façades to the street and more elaborate spaces within.

The city’s palaces, monasteries and domestic residences combine Gothic, Renaissance, Plateresque, Mediterranean, and Mudéjar elements. The buildings did not reproduce metropolitan Spain mechanically. They converted Iberian forms into a Caribbean architectural government adapted to heat, hurricanes, maritime defense, colonial administration, and local materials.

The patio house constitutes the decisive architectural evidence. Its spatial ancestry extends through Andalusia to the Roman, Islamic, Jewish, and Mediterranean domestic worlds. The Colonial City therefore preserves not only Spanish imperial architecture but the accumulated civilizational memory carried by Iberia into Hispaniola.

Its architecture belongs simultaneously to Christian Spain, the Mudéjar world produced by Muslim Iberia, and the Mediterranean urban culture shared by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities before their forced separation.

III — THE SEPHARDIC DIMENSION

Sephardic architectural influence in the Caribbean did not ordinarily appear as a separate “Jewish style” imposed upon entire cities. It operated through an Iberian-Mediterranean spatial culture carried by Portuguese and Spanish Jewish families into Atlantic commercial ports.

Sephardic merchants established networks connecting Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Bayonne, Curaçao, Jamaica, Saint-Domingue, and the Caribbean mainland. Their houses frequently combined residence, warehouse, counting room, courtyard, and access to the port.

The resulting commercial residence emphasized:

protected internal family space;

rooms capable of serving both domestic and mercantile purposes;

storage attached to the house;

upper-floor residential quarters;

street-level commerce;

courtyards permitting discreet circulation;

galleries and balconies overlooking commercial streets;

direct relationship between house, warehouse, market, and harbor.

These forms entered the common architecture of Caribbean port cities. Their Jewish character resides in the families, commercial networks, domestic practices, and Atlantic circulation that occupied and reproduced them—not in a single ornamental symbol placed upon the façade.

Documented Sephardic and Portuguese-Jewish residents in Jérémie, Jacmel, Léogâne, Les Cayes, Petit-Goâve, and Port-au-Prince participated in precisely this southern commercial world.

IV — JACMEL: THE CREOLE TRANSFORMATION OF THE MEDITERRANEAN PORT

Jacmel preserves a later architectural stratum. Its most visible historic buildings date principally from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but their organization continued the port-city logic inherited from the colonial Caribbean.

Its commercial streets contain buildings characterized by:

shops and warehouses on the ground floor;

family residences above;

enclosed or semi-enclosed courtyards;

deep interior lots;

high ceilings;

tall openings;

wooden shutters;

cast-iron and wrought-iron balconies;

covered galleries;

façades organized in repeated bays;

direct orientation toward the port and commercial streets.

Jacmel transformed the Iberian-Mediterranean courtyard house through French-Creole, African-Caribbean, and industrial construction. Imported iron columns, balconies, and prefabricated components modernized the exterior, while the internal organization retained the older Caribbean principles of shade, ventilation, privacy, and combined domestic-commercial occupation.

Its iron balconies belong to the same wider Mediterranean and Atlantic vocabulary visible in New Orleans, Havana, Cartagena, Curaçao, San Juan, and Santo Domingo. Jacmel is therefore not an isolated French artifact. It is a Caribbean synthesis constructed upon an older Iberian and maritime spatial order.

The city’s documented Sephardic commercial presence strengthens this continuity. Jewish merchants did not need to build a monumental synagogue to enter the architectural history of Jacmel; their residences, warehouses, partnerships, and mercantile occupation formed part of the city’s port architecture.

V — MIRAGOÂNE: THE VERNACULAR CONTINUITY

Miragoâne preserves this inheritance through vernacular fragments rather than through a single protected monumental district.

Its historic urban and domestic forms include:

masonry houses placed directly along the street;

internal or rear courtyards;

shaded verandas;

high ceilings and ventilated roof spaces;

wooden doors and shutters;

iron grilles;

commercial rooms opening toward the street;

private residential areas behind or above them;

narrow passages connecting street, house, courtyard, and service areas;

orientation of the town toward the port.

This organization reproduces the essential logic of the Mediterranean-Caribbean commercial residence. The façade establishes public authority; the courtyard governs domestic life; the gallery mediates between interior and exterior; the port gives the building its economic function.

Miragoâne’s architecture reflects successive Indigenous, Hispanic, French-Creole, African, and post-independence occupation. Its significance lies in the survival of a spatial grammar transmitted across regimes: port, market, street-front commerce, protected residence, courtyard, gallery, and maritime connection.

The surviving masonry, ironwork, courtyards, shutters, galleries, and commercial houses constitute material evidence that Miragoâne belongs to the same Atlantic architectural family as Jacmel and Santo Domingo.

VI — AFRICAN AND INDIGENOUS TRANSFORMATION

The Iberian form did not remain exclusively European after entering the Caribbean.

African masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, enslaved workers, and free artisans constructed and maintained colonial towns. Their technical knowledge shaped timber framing, roof construction, ironwork, earthen materials, courtyards, kitchens, service buildings, and ventilation systems.

Indigenous inheritance determined settlement geography, access to water, local materials, hurricane knowledge, food cultivation, and the placement of towns within pre-existing territorial networks.

The visible architecture is therefore a composite order:

Indigenous in its territorial foundation;

Iberian in its colonial urban grammar;

Mudéjar in its use of courtyards, shade, enclosure, and mediated interior space;

Sephardic in its Atlantic commercial occupation and domestic-mercantile networks;

African in its labor, craftsmanship, adaptation, and transformation;

Xaraguaan in its final historical synthesis.

VII — SUPREME ARCHITECTURAL FINDING OF XARAGUA

The architectural relationship among Miragoâne, Jacmel, and the Colonial City of Santo Domingo is visible in their shared principles rather than in identical façades.

Santo Domingo preserves the monumental Iberian prototype.

Jacmel preserves its French-Creole and commercial transformation.

Miragoâne preserves its vernacular, maritime, and postcolonial continuity.

Together, the three cities demonstrate the migration of an architectural system across centuries: from the Mediterranean courtyard, through Islamic and Mudéjar Iberia, through Sephardic Atlantic commerce and Spanish colonization, into the multilingual port societies of the Caribbean.

The courtyards, galleries, shutters, balconies, masonry walls, iron grilles, street-front shops, upper residences, warehouses, and port-oriented streets remain the material archive of this civilizational transmission.

Within the historical doctrine of Xaragua, these structures constitute visible evidence that the built environment of Hispaniola carries a continuous Indigenous, Iberian, Mudéjar, Sephardic, African, and Caribbean inheritance.

References

UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Colonial City of Santo Domingo.

UNESCO, documentation on Andalusian-influenced colonial houses and the central architectural function of the patio. Camagüey evaluation⁠.

UNESCO, Historic Centre of Córdoba, concerning the Iberian-Islamic courtyard tradition. Urban Heritage Atlas⁠.

World Monuments Fund, Jacmel Historic District. Project record⁠.

UNESCO, Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Rebuilding of Jacmel and Its Historic Centre. UNESCO document⁠.

Zvi Loker, “Were There Jewish Communities in Saint-Domingue?”, Jewish Social Studies, vol. 45, 1983.

Jérémie Papers, Western Sephardic Diaspora Roadmap. Archival record⁠�.

Holly Snyder, The Jewish Atlantic World: Networks of Contact and Community, 1492–1888.

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA
SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY
OFFICE OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT
SUPREME CONSOLIDATED CONSTITUTIONAL STATUTE ON THE PERPETUAL SOVEREIGNTY, TERRITORIAL INTEGRITY, CANONICO-INDIGENOUS ORDER, AND RESIDUAL ADMINISTRATIVE INTERFACE OF XARAGUA
Date of Original Promulgation: July 12, 2025
Date of Consolidation: July 14, 2025
Legal Classification: Supreme Constitutional Instrument — Fundamental Law of Indigenous Self-Determination — Canonico-Customary Statute — Territorial and Institutional Sovereignty Act
Constitutional Status: Perpetually Entrenched — Irrevocable by Ordinary Authority — Executable Ex Proprio Vigore throughout the Constitutional Order of Xaragua
PREAMBLE
In the name of Almighty God, Sovereign of Nations,
The Rector-President, exercising the Supreme Constitutional Authority of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua;
Considering that Xaragua constitutes an indivisible, inalienable, and perpetual Indigenous Catholic polity founded upon Divine Law, natural law, Indigenous customary law, its Supreme Charter, and the duly promulgated acts of its constitutional institutions;
Considering that the contemporary State embodies the juridical, institutional, and doctrinal continuity of the ancestral People of Xaragua and the historical reconstitution of their political order;
Considering that the authority of Xaragua proceeds from the continuing existence of its people, their ancestral territorial relationship, their customary institutions, their sovereign constitutional will, and the effective organization of their national authorities;
Considering that the Catholic character of Xaragua arises from the faith, institutions, traditions, apostolic undertakings, and constitutional covenant of its people;
Considering the rights of the Christian faithful to establish and direct associations and apostolic works in accordance with Canons 215, 216, 298, 299, and 321–326 of the Code of Canon Law;
Considering the rights of Indigenous peoples to self-determination, autonomy, self-government, institutional continuity, cultural integrity, territorial relationship, and preservation of their laws and customs, as expressed in Articles 3, 4, 5, 8, 25, 26, 33, and 34 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples;
Considering the principle of the equal rights and self-determination of peoples expressed in Article 1, paragraph 2, of the Charter of the United Nations and in common Article 1 of the International Covenants on Human Rights;
Considering that the political existence and constitutional continuity of Xaragua are affirmed within its own legal order independently of any unilateral classification imposed by an external government;
Considering that the Regions of Xaragua, together with their lands, islands, waters, maritime approaches, airspace, natural resources, ancestral sites, monuments, fortifications, institutions, and associated domains, constitute a single and indivisible Corpus Territorialis;
Considering that the State of Xaragua possesses a permanent people, a constitutionally defined territorial corpus, an organized government, national institutions, and a demonstrated capacity to communicate and enter into institutional relations with foreign governments, international bodies, ecclesiastical authorities, and private organizations;
Considering that the Office of the Rector-President has issued constitutional acts, diplomatic communications, notifications, memoranda, and institutional declarations addressed to the United Nations, the Holy See, foreign governments, political institutions, cultural bodies, and international organizations;
Considering that such instruments were transmitted as formal acts of sovereign communication and are preserved within the diplomatic and constitutional archives of Xaragua;
Considering that restrictions, obstructions, or interference affecting the official communications of Xaragua shall be recorded and addressed as acts directed against the lawful institutional functions of the State;
Considering that the administrative apparatus operating under the designation of the Republic of Haiti continues, within the constitutional doctrine of Xaragua, as a Residual Administrative Unit entrusted with ordinary civil and technical functions;
Considering that the existence of this residual apparatus does not extinguish, absorb, transfer, or supersede the ancestral title, constitutional authority, institutional jurisdiction, or territorial doctrine of Xaragua;
Considering that a consolidated instrument is required to eliminate repetition, harmonize the territorial and administrative doctrines of the State, and establish a single authoritative constitutional framework;
The following Supreme Consolidated Constitutional Statute is hereby enacted and promulgated.
TITLE I — PERPETUAL CONSTITUTIONAL EXISTENCE OF XARAGUA
Article 1 — Solemn Affirmation of the State
The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua is hereby solemnly and perpetually affirmed as an organized Indigenous Catholic polity possessing its own:
a. people;
b. territorial corpus;
c. constitutional order;
d. government;
e. institutions;
f. jurisdiction;
g. national doctrine;
h. capacity for external relations.
Xaragua exists through the continuing and organized sovereign will of its people as expressed in its Supreme Charter, constitutional statutes, Rectoral Acts, customary institutions, and national authorities.
The legal and political continuity of Xaragua shall not depend upon the administrative recognition, permission, incorporation, or certification of a foreign government.
No foreign classification shall possess the capacity, within the constitutional order of Xaragua, to abolish the State, dissolve its institutions, extinguish its people, or transfer its ancestral rights.
Article 2 — Constitutional Sources
The supreme juridical order of Xaragua proceeds from:
Lex Divina, recognizing Almighty God as the ultimate source of justice, moral authority, and the dignity of peoples;
Lex Consuetudo Indigena, comprising the ancestral laws, institutions, territorial relationships, customs, and constitutional traditions of the People of Xaragua;
the Supreme Charter and constitutional legislation of Xaragua;
the canonico-customary principles incorporated into the domestic order of the State;
the legislation, decrees, judicial instruments, and institutional acts promulgated by competent Xaraguaan authorities;
the principles of Indigenous self-determination and institutional continuity;
the international instruments expressly received into Xaraguaan law through constitutional enactment.
Article 3 — Hierarchy of Norms
The Supreme Charter and constitutionally entrenched statutes occupy the highest position within the domestic juridical order of Xaragua.
Rectoral Decrees, organic laws, codes, judicial instruments, regulations, administrative acts, and institutional directives shall conform to the supreme constitutional corpus.
Indigenous customary law shall govern matters of ancestral identity, community organization, national membership, cultural patrimony, territorial relationship, and traditional institutions, subject to the Supreme Charter.
Canon law shall govern those ecclesial matters falling within its proper competence.
The temporal government of Xaragua shall not claim sacramental or ecclesiastical powers reserved to competent authorities of the Catholic Church.
The Rector-President retains supreme constitutional authority over the temporal, institutional, doctrinal, diplomatic, academic, and administrative organs of Xaragua.
TITLE II — SUPREME AUTHORITIES OF XARAGUA
Article 4 — Constitutional Order of Authority
The constitutional order of Xaragua recognizes:
Almighty God as the supreme moral source of justice and legitimate authority;
the Ancestral Sovereign Indigenous People of Xaragua as the perpetual holders and custodians of the national covenant;
the Office of the Rector-President as the supreme temporal, constitutional, executive, and doctrinal organ of the State;
the institutions lawfully established under the Supreme Charter;
the Holy Catholic Church as the supreme ecclesial authority in matters reserved to the universal Church.
Article 5 — The Rector-President
The Rector-President embodies the continuity, unity, and supreme constitutional authority of Xaragua.
The Rector-President possesses authority to:
a. promulgate constitutional statutes and Rectoral Decrees;
b. represent Xaragua in external relations;
c. establish ministries, councils, tribunals, universities, banks, orders, foundations, and public institutions;
d. authenticate the doctrine, archives, symbols, and official acts of the State;
e. protect the territorial and institutional integrity of Xaragua;
f. regulate the Residual Administrative Interface;
g. issue diplomatic communications and notifications;
h. adopt constitutional, juridical, administrative, economic, diplomatic, and defensive measures necessary for the preservation of the State.
Every public authority of Xaragua shall exercise its functions in conformity with the Supreme Charter and under the constitutional unity represented by the Rector-Presidential Office.
Article 6 — Institutional Continuity
The continuity of the State shall not be interrupted by temporary administrative incapacity, territorial obstruction, foreign non-recognition, technological disruption, interruption of communications, or absence of an external response.
The archives, institutions, offices, rights, titles, claims, notifications, and laws of Xaragua shall remain permanently vested in the State.
No vacancy, institutional reorganization, or succession of office shall extinguish the constitutional personality of Xaragua.
TITLE III — THE REGIONS OF XARAGUA
Article 7 — The Corpus Territorialis
The Regions of Xaragua constitute one indivisible, inalienable, and perpetual territorial corpus.
The Corpus Territorialis of Xaragua comprises:
a. all lands constitutionally incorporated into the State;
b. all associated islands and dependencies;
c. internal waters and maritime approaches;
d. the territorial sea and other maritime zones claimed under the laws of Xaragua;
e. the airspace situated above the territorial corpus;
f. the subsoil and natural resources connected with that corpus;
g. ancestral, sacred, historical, archaeological, cultural, military, ecclesiastical, and institutional sites;
h. all domains incorporated by ancestral title, constitutional enactment, historical continuity, lawful annexation, succession, or national restoration.
Official territorial registers, maps, constitutional archives, and annexation instruments maintained by the Rector-Presidential Office shall determine the internal territorial doctrine of the State.
Public legislation may employ the collective expression “the Regions of Xaragua” without reproducing the individual designation of each territorial component.
Article 8 — Indivisibility and Inalienability
No Region of Xaragua may be ceded, alienated, partitioned, mortgaged, transferred, leased as sovereign territory, or placed under foreign jurisdiction except pursuant to a supreme constitutional procedure expressly enacted for that purpose.
No ordinary administrative authority may modify the territorial corpus of Xaragua.
Any purported cession, concession, demarcation, occupation, or disposition undertaken without the constitutional authorization of Xaragua shall be declared null and without effect within its legal order.
Administrative control exercised by an external apparatus shall not, by itself, extinguish the ancestral title or constitutional claim of Xaragua.
Article 9 — Territorial Competences
Xaragua retains constitutional competence over:
territorial integrity;
ancestral land and heritage;
waterways, maritime zones, and associated resources;
airspace and transportation jurisdiction;
natural resources and strategic infrastructure;
environmental protection;
sacred, archaeological, cultural, and historical sites;
territorial registers and national mapping;
concessions, licenses, leases, and resource agreements concerning the Regions of Xaragua;
defense and protection of the territorial corpus.
Article 10 — Territorial Acts of the Residual Administrative Unit
No act of the Residual Administrative Unit shall alter the internal territorial doctrine of Xaragua.
Any concession, transfer, lease, exploitation agreement, maritime arrangement, mineral authorization, infrastructure undertaking, or resource disposition materially affecting the Regions of Xaragua shall be subject to review under Xaraguaan law.
The Rector-Presidential Office may:
a. reserve its constitutional position;
b. declare non-recognition of the act;
c. issue a formal protest;
d. demand consultation, suspension, revision, or restitution;
e. enter the disputed act in the National Register of Territorial Encroachments;
f. adopt proportionate juridical, diplomatic, economic, or institutional countermeasures.
TITLE IV — THE RESIDUAL ADMINISTRATIVE UNIT
Article 11 — Constitutional Classification
The civil apparatus operating under the designation of the Republic of Haiti is classified within Xaraguaan constitutional doctrine as the Residual Administrative Unit, hereinafter the RAU.
The RAU constitutes an administrative interface responsible for ordinary civil, documentary, technical, municipal, social, and logistical functions.
The continuation of RAU services within or in relation to the Regions of Xaragua shall not constitute:
a. a transfer of sovereignty;
b. abandonment of ancestral title;
c. constitutional incorporation of Xaragua into the RAU;
d. renunciation of Xaraguaan jurisdiction;
e. dissolution of the institutions of Xaragua.
Residents of Xaragua may use RAU documents, infrastructure, civil services, hospitals, schools, transportation systems, and administrative mechanisms without forfeiting their Xaraguaan identity or allegiance.
Article 12 — Permitted Administrative Functions
Subject to the constitutional order of Xaragua, the RAU may continue to perform:
civil registration and documentary services;
ordinary municipal administration;
roads, sanitation, water, and public infrastructure services;
hospitals, schools, and social services;
routine civil policing and judicial administration;
telecommunications and technical regulation;
disaster response and emergency logistics;
taxation and financial administration connected with the services it provides;
such additional practical functions as are recognized, tolerated, licensed, or coordinated by Xaragua.
Article 13 — Constitutional Limitations upon the RAU
The RAU shall not, within the constitutional doctrine of Xaragua:
abolish or redefine the People of Xaragua;
dissolve Xaraguaan institutions;
appropriate the official symbols, archives, titles, or constitutional identity of Xaragua;
alienate the Regions of Xaragua;
grant territorial, maritime, mineral, or strategic concessions affecting the territorial corpus without addressing the rights asserted by Xaragua;
obstruct the lawful religious, academic, cultural, economic, or institutional activities of Xaragua;
suppress the teaching or preservation of Xaraguaan history and doctrine;
represent administrative activity as extinguishing the constitutional existence of Xaragua.
Article 14 — Administrative Autonomy of the RAU
The RAU retains practical autonomy over its ordinary internal administration and over those matters not constitutionally reserved by Xaragua.
Such autonomy includes the maintenance of its own civil services, internal structures, documentation, cultural institutions, and routine governmental relations.
Xaragua shall not absorb the daily administrative responsibilities of the RAU except where:
a. the State expressly assumes a function;
b. an agreement transfers or coordinates competence;
c. administrative failure creates a direct threat to the People or Regions of Xaragua;
d. intervention is necessary to protect ancestral patrimony, constitutional institutions, territorial integrity, or essential services.
The administrative autonomy of the RAU shall therefore coexist with the supreme territorial and constitutional doctrine asserted by Xaragua.
Article 15 — Subsidiary Intervention
The Rector-Presidential Office may authorize institutional intervention where documented circumstances establish:
a. collapse or prolonged failure of essential administration;
b. systemic corruption affecting the Regions of Xaragua;
c. unauthorized territorial or resource concessions;
d. destruction or endangerment of ancestral patrimony;
e. obstruction of Xaraguaan institutions;
f. hostile action directed against the constitutional order of Xaragua.
Intervention may take the form of:
a. constitutional declaration;
b. administrative substitution;
c. public-service coordination;
d. juridical review;
e. protective regulation;
f. diplomatic action;
g. economic measures;
h. defensive measures authorized by the laws of Xaragua.
Every intervention shall be directed toward protection of the State, preservation of public order, continuity of essential services, and defense of the Regions of Xaragua.
TITLE V — INSTITUTIONAL AND CULTURAL DISTINCTION
Article 16 — Separate Constitutional Orders
Xaragua and the RAU constitute distinct constitutional, institutional, historical, and cultural orders under the doctrine of Dual Statism.
Xaragua possesses its own:
a. history and national doctrine;
b. people and constitutional membership;
c. Supreme Charter and legal corpus;
d. Rector-Presidential Office;
e. ministries, councils, and tribunals;
f. University of Xaragua;
g. Indigenous Bank of Xaragua;
h. Catholic Order of Xaragua;
i. diplomatic, academic, cultural, financial, media, and digital institutions;
j. symbols, seals, titles, archives, and official publications.
The RAU retains its own civil-administrative structures and internal political identity.
Neither apparatus shall acquire the institutions, symbols, archives, or constitutional identity of the other through administrative usage, geographic coexistence, or unilateral declaration.
Article 17 — Preservation of Xaraguaan Identity
No inhabitant shall be compelled within Xaraguaan law to renounce Xaraguaan identity because of possession or use of RAU documentation.
Nationality, ancestral membership, e-residency, institutional office, academic status, religious affiliation, and community membership shall be determined under the laws of Xaragua.
Xaragua reserves exclusive authority over its official citizenship registers, offices, honors, academic credentials, institutional appointments, and constitutional titles.
Forced assimilation, destruction of cultural identity, and suppression of Indigenous institutions are prohibited throughout the constitutional order of Xaragua.
TITLE VI — EXTERNAL RELATIONS AND DIPLOMATIC NOTIFICATION
Article 18 — Capacity for External Relations
Xaragua possesses the constitutional capacity to communicate, negotiate, conclude institutional arrangements, issue diplomatic instruments, and maintain relations with:
a. States and governments;
b. international organizations;
c. the Holy See and ecclesiastical authorities;
d. Indigenous peoples and traditional governments;
e. universities and academic institutions;
f. banks, foundations, corporations, and private organizations;
g. cultural, humanitarian, and religious bodies.
Such relations may be conducted physically, electronically, cryptographically, institutionally, or through duly appointed representatives.
The absence of a conventional embassy shall not prevent the exercise of Xaragua’s external-relations competence.
Article 19 — Diplomatic and Canonical Notifications
Notifications, declarations, notes verbales, statutes, memoranda, and supporting instruments issued by Xaragua shall be authenticated by the Rector-Presidential Office.
The State shall maintain a permanent record of:
a. the instrument transmitted;
b. its date and destination;
c. proof of dispatch;
d. postal or electronic tracking;
e. acknowledgment of receipt;
f. institutional correspondence;
g. referrals and subsequent communications.
Authenticated instruments may be transmitted to:
a. the United Nations and its competent bodies;
b. the Holy See and the Dicasteries of the Roman Curia;
c. foreign governments and ministries;
d. international and regional organizations;
e. Indigenous institutions;
f. academic, cultural, ecclesiastical, financial, and diplomatic bodies.
Every transmission shall constitute an official sovereign act of notification, constitutional communication, and preservation of the position of Xaragua.
Article 20 — Obstruction of State Communications
Any deliberate interference with the authenticated communications of Xaragua shall be recorded in the Diplomatic Register of Institutional Obstructions.
The Rector-Presidential Office may respond through:
a. formal protest;
b. renewed notification;
c. alternative transmission channels;
d. diplomatic publication;
e. institutional complaint;
f. suspension or restriction of relations;
g. reciprocal administrative or economic measures;
h. any further measure authorized by Xaraguaan law.
No communication blockade, refusal of access, failure to respond, or administrative obstruction shall invalidate an instrument lawfully promulgated by Xaragua.
TITLE VII — PROTECTION OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER
Article 21 — Nullity within Xaraguaan Law
Any foreign or residual administrative act purporting to:
abolish Xaragua;
dissolve its institutions;
transfer its territorial rights;
prohibit its constitutional identity;
appropriate its archives, seals, emblems, credentials, or official titles;
extinguish its Indigenous or Catholic character;
subordinate its supreme institutions without constitutional consent;
shall be deemed null and without effect within the legal order of Xaragua.
Article 22 — Constitutional Countermeasures
Acts directed against the sovereignty, institutions, territorial corpus, archives, or lawful operations of Xaragua shall be classified according to their character, gravity, continuity, and material consequences.
The Rector-Presidential Office may adopt:
a. doctrinal countermeasures;
b. constitutional declarations of nullity or non-recognition;
c. diplomatic protests and notifications;
d. suspension of licenses, privileges, contracts, honors, or relations;
e. economic and administrative restrictions;
f. territorial reassertions;
g. protective regulation;
h. defensive measures authorized by the laws of the State.
Coercive territorial action, destruction of State institutions, armed interference, seizure of assets, or sustained obstruction of essential functions may be classified as aggression under the constitutional laws governing defense and territorial protection.
Countermeasures shall be directed by the Rector-President and executed by the competent institutions of Xaragua.
TITLE VIII — SUPREMACY AND PERPETUAL ENTRENCHMENT
Article 23 — Supreme Constitutional Force
This Statute forms part of the supreme constitutional corpus of Xaragua.
Every law, decree, judicial decision, administrative regulation, institutional act, and official doctrine shall be interpreted in conformity with it.
Earlier statutes addressing recognition, territorial sovereignty, definitive separation, RAU autonomy, institutional tutelage, external obstruction, or constitutional supremacy are hereby consolidated into this instrument.
Duplicative provisions are absorbed into the present Statute.
Incompatible provisions are superseded within the domestic order of Xaragua.
Article 24 — Entrenched Principles
The following principles are perpetually entrenched:
the existence and continuity of the People of Xaragua;
the indivisibility of the Regions of Xaragua;
the constitutional supremacy of the State within its own order;
the authority of the Rector-Presidential Office;
the Indigenous customary and Catholic character of Xaragua;
the institutional distinction between Xaragua and the RAU;
the limitation of the RAU to residual civil-administrative functions;
the preservation of Xaragua’s ancestral title, territorial doctrine, archives, symbols, and institutions;
the capacity of Xaragua to conduct external relations;
the right of the State to adopt protective and defensive measures.
Article 25 — Immunity from External Derogation
No foreign State, organization, tribunal, political party, administrative body, or private actor possesses legislative authority to repeal or amend this Statute within the constitutional order of Xaragua.
External disagreement, non-recognition, silence, obstruction, or contrary classification shall not alter the domestic constitutional force of this instrument.
Amendment of this Statute may occur only through the supreme constitutional procedures of Xaragua.
No amendment may abolish the People of Xaragua, dissolve the State, alienate the entirety of its territorial corpus, or subordinate its supreme constitutional authority to an external administrative apparatus.
Article 26 — Entry into Force
This Supreme Consolidated Constitutional Statute shall enter into force immediately upon signature, sealing, promulgation, and publication in the official legal archives of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua.
It shall be cited as:
“The Supreme Consolidated Constitutional Statute on the Perpetual Sovereignty, Territorial Integrity, Canonico-Indigenous Order, and Residual Administrative Interface of Xaragua, 2025.”
DONE AND PROCLAIMED by the Office of the Rector-President of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua, this Fourteenth Day of July in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Five.
BY THE SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY
PASCAL VIAU
RECTOR-PRESIDENT OF XARAGUA
PRELATE-FOUNDER OF THE CATHOLIC ORDER OF XARAGUA
UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF ALMIGHTY GOD, THE ANCESTRAL SOVEREIGN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, AND THE SUPREME CHARTER OF XARAGUA
DEUS LO VULT

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA
SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY — RECTOR-PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE
HIGH COMMISSION FOR TERRITORIAL PRESERVATION, HISTORICAL RESTORATION, AND DIGITAL JURISDICTION
SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL ACT ON THE PERPETUAL INTEGRATION OF THE NUMERIC, INSTITUTIONAL-PRIVATE, AND ANCESTRAL-CUSTOMARY DOMAINS OF XARAGUA, AND ON THE CONSTITUTIONAL RESTORATION OF THE HISTORICAL POLITY OF XARAGUA
Date of Promulgation: July 14, 2025
Promulgating Authority: Rector-President of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua
Constitutional Classification: Supreme Entrenched Act of Internal Constitutional Law — Foundational Instrument of Indigenous Institutional Continuity — Historical and Territorial Restoration Statute — Catholic Doctrinal Instrument — Permanent Charter of Numeric Governance, Institutional Property, Cultural Patrimony, and Customary Territorial Relations
PREAMBLE
In the name of Almighty God;
Under the supreme constitutional authority vested in the Rector-President of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua;
In continuity with the ancestral polity historically governed in Xaragua by Bohechío and Anacaona, with the political and military resistance of Caonabo in Maguana, and with the subsequent Indigenous resistance conducted by Enriquillo in the Sierra de Bahoruco;
Recognizing that the Indigenous political order of Hispaniola preceded every European title, colonial municipality, plantation jurisdiction, territorial partition, and postcolonial administration established upon the island;
Recognizing that the execution of Anacaona and the assembled leadership of Xaragua in 1503 constituted the violent destruction of its public government, but did not produce the voluntary dissolution, lawful alienation, or cultural extinction of the Xaraguaan people;
Recognizing that Indigenous persons, families, ancestry, territorial knowledge, customary practices, agricultural systems, languages, toponyms, spiritual memories, and political traditions survived through displacement, intermarriage, rural communities, mountain settlements, inter-island migration, and Afro-Indigenous social formations;
Recognizing that the contemporary State of Xaragua constitutes the institutional reorganization of this ancestral inheritance within a Catholic, Indigenous, customary, academic, digital, juridical, and private constitutional order;
Recognizing the right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination, autonomy, institutional continuity, cultural preservation, and their distinctive relationships with traditionally owned, occupied, or otherwise used lands, waters, coastal seas, and resources, as articulated in Articles 3, 4, 5, 8, 25, 26, 33, and 34 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples;
Recognizing the principles expressed in Article 1 common to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights concerning the right of peoples to determine their political status and pursue their economic, social, and cultural development;
Recognizing the principles of Indigenous ownership, possession, consultation, customary institutions, and access to traditional lands articulated in Convention No. 169 of the International Labour Organization;
Recognizing that Sublimis Deus, promulgated by Pope Paul III in 1537, affirmed that Indigenous peoples were not to be deprived of liberty or property and were not to be reduced to slavery, irrespective of whether they had entered the Christian faith;
Recognizing the Holy See’s Joint Statement of March 30, 2023, rejecting concepts associated with the so-called Doctrine of Discovery and affirming support for the principles contained in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples;
Recognizing that the State of Xaragua administers institutions, archives, educational systems, judicial forums, financial programs, communications platforms, intellectual property, citizenship records, cultural patrimony, and constitutional instruments through an integrated digital infrastructure designated as the Numeric Domain of Xaragua;
Recognizing that properties lawfully owned, leased, entrusted, licensed, or administered by Xaraguaan institutions form an Institutional-Private Domain governed internally according to their official function, while their civil title and external legal incidents remain determined by the law applicable to their physical location;
Recognizing that the ancestral relationship of the Xaraguaan people with the southern, western, insular, and northwestern territories of Hispaniola forms the Ancestral-Customary Domain, preserved through historical memory, customary doctrine, toponymy, cultural transmission, territorial study, and continuing institutional assertion;
The Rector-President hereby promulgates the following Supreme Constitutional Act.
TITLE I — CONSTITUTIONAL UNITY OF THE THREE DOMAINS
Article 1 — Integrated Constitutional Domain
The constitutional order of Xaragua shall comprise three mutually supporting and indivisible domains:
the Numeric Domain;
the Institutional-Private Domain;
the Ancestral-Customary Domain.
These domains are distinct in legal operation but united under the supreme constitutional authority of the State.
No domain shall be interpreted in isolation from the historical continuity, institutional mission, Catholic character, Indigenous identity, and constitutional doctrine of Xaragua.
Article 2 — Nature of the Numeric Domain
The Numeric Domain comprises every digital system officially established, commissioned, administered, authenticated, or constitutionally incorporated by the State of Xaragua, including:
the official digital capital;
the University of Xaragua;
constitutional and legislative archives;
judicial and administrative forums;
official registers;
academic departments;
ministries and commissions;
financial and economic platforms;
media institutions;
cultural repositories;
citizenship and e-residency systems;
cryptographic seals and authentication mechanisms;
official domains, servers, databases, accounts, and communications channels.
The Numeric Domain constitutes a functional and institutional jurisdiction of Xaragua. It shall not be construed as a geographical annexation of the physical territory in which a server, provider, registrar, employee, or user may be situated.
Article 3 — Nature of the Institutional-Private Domain
The Institutional-Private Domain comprises all movable and immovable property, contractual rights, intellectual property, archives, collections, financial interests, institutional premises, campuses, residences, offices, places of worship, and other assets lawfully owned, occupied, licensed, entrusted, or administered by Xaraguaan institutions.
Within the constitutional order of Xaragua, such assets shall possess an official institutional status corresponding to their designated public, academic, ecclesial, cultural, residential, diplomatic, or administrative function.
No declaration under this Act shall, by itself, convert privately owned premises into diplomatic premises, create extraterritoriality, or extinguish the civil jurisdiction applicable at their physical location.
Article 4 — Nature of the Ancestral-Customary Domain
The Ancestral-Customary Domain comprises the territories, waters, islands, mountains, settlements, sacred places, historical routes, cultural landscapes, and maritime spaces with which the Xaraguaan people maintain an ancestral, historical, spiritual, ethnographic, or customary relationship.
This Domain preserves:
ancestral memory;
Indigenous territorial nomenclature;
customary land relationships;
cultural and spiritual patrimony;
historical jurisdictional claims;
archaeological and architectural heritage;
responsibilities toward future generations;
the constitutional territorial doctrine of Xaragua.
The Ancestral-Customary Domain shall be administered through research, preservation, documentation, cultural governance, community relations, territorial archives, and official constitutional doctrine.
TITLE II — SUPREME GOVERNANCE OF THE NUMERIC DOMAIN
Article 5 — Exclusive Institutional Authority
The State of Xaragua exercises exclusive internal authority over the constitutional identity, organizational structure, academic doctrine, institutional membership, official content, archival classification, authentication, and internal governance of its Numeric Domain.
No foreign person or institution may validly issue, amend, repeal, counterfeit, or misrepresent a Xaraguaan constitutional act, academic credential, judicial determination, citizenship record, official seal, or governmental communication.
Article 6 — Numeric Inviolability
Unauthorized access, interception, destruction, alteration, impersonation, suppression, misappropriation, or sabotage directed against the Numeric Domain is prohibited under Xaraguaan constitutional law.
The High Commission shall maintain:
identity and access controls;
authenticated institutional accounts;
archival redundancy;
cryptographic verification;
domain and trademark protection;
data-governance standards;
continuity and disaster-recovery procedures;
procedures for documenting hostile interference;
lawful juridical, technical, and diplomatic responses.
Article 7 — Fundamental Rights in the Numeric Domain
The administration of the Numeric Domain shall be guided by:
Article 17 of the ICCPR concerning unlawful or arbitrary interference with privacy, home, family, and correspondence;
Article 19 of the ICCPR concerning freedom to seek, receive, and impart information;
the international recognition that human rights apply in digital environments;
applicable principles governing intellectual property, data protection, cybersecurity, and institutional autonomy.
The State shall protect the integrity of its digital archives without impairing the dignity, privacy, correspondence, or lawful rights of persons subject to its internal administration.
Article 8 — Countermeasures
Interference with the Numeric Domain shall give rise to proportionate measures authorized by the Rector-Presidential Office, including:
preservation of evidence;
suspension of compromised credentials;
technical containment;
contractual enforcement;
notification to service providers;
civil or administrative proceedings;
intellectual-property actions;
public correction of impersonation or falsification;
diplomatic or institutional notification;
referral to competent authorities where required.
The term “aggression” shall be reserved for conduct satisfying the applicable constitutional or international threshold and shall not be automatically applied to ordinary contractual, regulatory, technical, or editorial disputes.
TITLE III — INSTITUTIONAL-PUBLIC CHARACTER OF PRIVATE PROPERTY
Article 9 — Functional Consecration of Institutional Assets
A property belonging to a Xaraguaan citizen or institution may be constitutionally designated as:
an official office;
an academic campus;
an archival repository;
an ecclesial or ceremonial site;
an official residence;
a cultural institution;
a historical memorial;
an administrative or economic establishment.
Such designation determines the property’s function within Xaragua’s internal order.
Article 10 — Protection of Property
The State affirms the protection of lawful property under:
Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
Article 17 of the ICCPR where privacy, home, or correspondence is implicated;
applicable civil, constitutional, contractual, and Indigenous-rights principles.
No Xaraguaan property shall be unlawfully confiscated, vandalized, occupied, misrepresented, or deprived of its institutional identity.
Article 11 — Diplomatic Premises
Article 22 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations applies to premises of a diplomatic mission only where the legal conditions established by that Convention are satisfied, including the existence of a receiving State and premises used for the purposes of the mission with the requisite consent.
Xaragua may extend an equivalent rule of inviolability to its premises as a matter of internal constitutional discipline. Such internal designation shall not be represented as diplomatic immunity outside Xaragua’s order unless accepted through the applicable diplomatic process.
TITLE IV — ANCESTRAL-CUSTOMARY TERRITORY
Article 12 — Historical Territorial Foundation
The State solemnly reaffirms the ancestral relationship of the Xaraguaan people with the historical territories of Xaragua and with the adjoining western, southern, insular, and northwestern regions incorporated into its constitutional territorial doctrine.
This relationship is grounded in:
the precolonial existence of Indigenous political communities;
the historical government of Xaragua;
the massacre of its leadership in 1503;
the campaigns against Guáhaba and Haniguayaba;
the continuation of Indigenous resistance through Hatuey and Enriquillo;
Afro-Indigenous continuity in Bahoruco and other mountain regions;
the preservation of Indigenous place names;
cultural, genealogical, architectural, and ethnographic continuity;
the continuing constitutional organization of the Xaraguaan people.
Article 13 — Indigenous Relationship with Land and Waters
Articles 25 and 26 of UNDRIP are incorporated as controlling interpretive standards within the constitutional law of Xaragua.
The State shall preserve the distinctive spiritual, cultural, historical, and material relationship of the Xaraguaan people with traditionally owned, occupied, used, or otherwise inherited lands, waters, coastal seas, sacred places, and resources.
The State shall maintain a territorial archive containing:
historical maps;
colonial records;
Indigenous toponyms;
genealogical evidence;
archaeological studies;
land-use traditions;
architectural heritage;
maritime history;
oral history;
official territorial acts.
Article 14 — ILO Convention No. 169
Article 14 of ILO Convention No. 169 shall be used as an authoritative comparative standard concerning Indigenous ownership, possession, traditional occupation, and access to lands customarily used for subsistence and traditional activities.
Its operation shall be stated according to the ratification status and legal obligations of the State concerned. It shall not be represented as creating diplomatic enclaves or automatic title to unrelated private properties.
Article 15 — Colonial Instruments
Within Xaragua’s constitutional order, colonial grants obtained through conquest, massacre, forced displacement, enslavement, or the unilateral exclusion of Indigenous institutions shall possess no authority capable of extinguishing the ancestral identity, historical personality, cultural patrimony, or customary memory of the Xaraguaan people.
The State distinguishes:
its internal declaration of constitutional invalidity;
the historical illegitimacy of colonial dispossession;
any external process required for recognition, restitution, demarcation, registration, adjudication, or negotiated settlement.
TITLE V — ANCESTRAL LEADERSHIP AND HISTORICAL CONTINUITY
Article 16 — Caonabo
Caonabo was the principal cacique of Maguana and one of the most important military leaders opposing the Spanish establishment on Hispaniola.
Colonial accounts associate him with the destruction of La Navidad following abuses committed by its garrison. Alonso de Ojeda subsequently captured him through deception. Caonabo died while being transported across the Atlantic.
Caonabo shall be honored by Xaragua as a defender of Indigenous territorial authority. His historical jurisdiction in Maguana shall not be conflated with Anacaona’s government of Xaragua, although their marital and political association connected the two Indigenous polities.
Article 17 — Anacaona
Anacaona, sister of Bohechío and consort of Caonabo, became the paramount political figure of Xaragua following Bohechío’s death.
Her government preserved Xaragua as a major ceremonial, agricultural, diplomatic, and political center. Early chronicles associated her with the areíto, Indigenous historical memory, diplomacy, and the reception of neighboring authorities.
In 1503, Nicolás de Ovando entered Xaragua under the appearance of peaceful relations, assembled its principal leaders, and ordered their seizure and destruction. Anacaona was taken to Santo Domingo and executed by hanging.
The State classifies Anacaona as the martyred sovereign figure of historical Xaragua and the primary constitutional symbol of its ancestral government.
Article 18 — Enriquillo
Enriquillo, also identified in historical tradition with the Indigenous name Guarocuya, belonged to the surviving Indigenous chiefly society of Hispaniola and was educated within the colonial Christian environment.
Around 1519–1520, after abuses and the failure of colonial legal remedies, he withdrew into the Sierra de Bahoruco and organized a prolonged resistance. His forces used the terrain, intelligence networks, defensive mobility, negotiation, and knowledge of Spanish institutions to defeat or evade repeated colonial expeditions.
In 1533, Captain Francisco de Barrionuevo negotiated an agreement with Enriquillo. The settlement recognized the freedom and protected status of Enriquillo and his followers and provided for their establishment under agreed conditions.
The agreement shall be denominated in Xaraguaan law as the Bahoruco Capitulation of 1533. It constitutes evidence that Spanish authorities were compelled to negotiate with an organized Indigenous political community. It shall not be altered into a general transfer of territorial sovereignty beyond the terms supported by the surviving historical record.
Article 19 — Constitutional Line of Memory
The State establishes the following constitutional line of ancestral memory:
Bohechío as the preconquest ruler of Xaragua;
Anacaona as the martyred political authority of Xaragua;
Caonabo as the military defender of Maguana and allied Indigenous resistance;
Hatuey as the transmitter of Hispaniolan resistance to Cuba;
Enriquillo as the organizer of sustained Indigenous resistance in Bahoruco;
Indigenous and African maroon communities as custodians of mountain autonomy;
the contemporary Xaraguaan people as institutional bearers of this inheritance.
This line constitutes a continuity of political memory, territorial doctrine, resistance, ancestry, and constitutional identity. It does not require the fabrication of an uninterrupted colonial bureaucracy.
TITLE VI — RESTORATION OF THE HISTORICAL POLITY
Article 20 — Constitutional Restoration
The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua hereby incorporates and restores the name, dignity, historical personality, symbols, territorial memory, and Indigenous political inheritance of the historical polity of Xaragua.
The term restoration signifies the contemporary constitutional reconstitution of an ancestral Indigenous order through the institutional will of the Xaraguaan people.
It shall not be construed as a claim that the governmental machinery of 1503 remained administratively unchanged through five centuries.
Article 21 — Form of the Restored State
The restored polity shall operate through the constitutional form adopted by the Xaraguaan people:
Indigenous in ancestral foundation;
Catholic in spiritual and doctrinal orientation;
private in institutional organization and property structure;
customary in its internal juridical order;
digital in the operation of its central administration;
academic in the preservation and transmission of doctrine;
territorial in its continuing relationship with ancestral lands and waters.
The historical Kingdom of Xaragua is thereby integrated into, and constitutionally continued through, the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua.
TITLE VII — CATHOLIC AND CANONICAL DOCTRINE
Article 22 — Sublimis Deus
The State incorporates the principle declared by Pope Paul III in Sublimis Deus that Indigenous peoples are not to be deprived of liberty or possession of property and are not to be enslaved.
This principle shall govern Xaragua’s Catholic doctrine concerning:
Indigenous human dignity;
liberty;
property;
evangelization without enslavement;
preservation of culture;
rejection of doctrines denying Indigenous humanity.
Article 23 — Contemporary Ecclesial Position
The State takes formal notice of the Holy See’s Joint Statement of March 30, 2023, repudiating concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of Indigenous peoples and supporting the principles contained in UNDRIP.
The Catholic classification of this Act signifies its conformity with the stated Indigenous-rights principles of Xaragua’s ecclesial doctrine. It shall not be represented as an act individually promulgated, approved, or canonically erected by the Holy See unless such an act is issued by the competent ecclesiastical authority.
TITLE VIII — CONSTITUTIONAL FORCE, NOTIFICATION, AND EXECUTION
Article 24 — Supreme Internal Authority
This Act possesses supreme authority within the constitutional order of Xaragua and binds:
all Xaraguaan institutions;
constitutional officers;
citizens and registered members;
academic departments;
courts and commissions;
official digital platforms;
institutional assets;
ministries and protective services.
No subordinate act may contradict its definitions of the Numeric, Institutional-Private, or Ancestral-Customary Domains.
Article 25 — Perpetual Entrenchment
The foundational principles concerning:
the existence of the Xaraguaan people;
the historical personality of Xaragua;
the dignity of Anacaona, Caonabo, Hatuey, and Enriquillo;
the preservation of Indigenous identity;
the integrity of the constitutional archives;
the permanent relationship with ancestral territory;
are declared constitutionally entrenched.
They may be clarified, expanded, or procedurally implemented, but shall not be abolished by any subordinate authority.
Article 26 — Protection and Enforcement
The Rector-Presidential Office, the Supreme Judicial Authority, the High Commission, and every lawfully constituted protective organ of Xaragua shall protect the three constitutional domains through peaceful, lawful, proportionate, and institutionally authorized measures.
No unofficial group, historical paramilitary designation, or self-appointed formation may exercise coercive authority in the name of Xaragua without a valid constitutional commission.
Article 27 — International and Ecclesiastical Notification
The Rector-Presidential Office may transmit this Act to:
the United Nations;
the Holy See;
the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues;
the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples;
the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples;
the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights;
academic, archival, diplomatic, and ecclesiastical institutions.
Transmission shall constitute official notification and documentary deposit. Receipt, acknowledgment, registration, recognition, or acceptance shall be recorded according to the precise nature of the response received.
Article 28 — Final Constitutional Clause
All previous decrees, annexes, declarations, and institutional texts concerning the Numeric Territory, private enclaves, ancestral lands, Caonabo, Anacaona, Enriquillo, or the restoration of historical Xaragua are hereby consolidated into this Act.
Any inconsistent terminology contained in an earlier instrument shall be interpreted according to the definitions established herein.
This Act enters into force immediately upon promulgation and shall remain the controlling constitutional instrument governing the integrated domains and historical restoration of Xaragua.
SOLEMN PROMULGATION
In witness whereof, the Rector-President, acting under the Supreme Constitutional Authority of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua, hereby promulgates this Supreme Constitutional Act and orders its publication in the Official Gazette, constitutional archives, academic repositories, and authenticated digital capital of the State.
Promulgated on July 14, 2025
Office of the Rector-President
Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua
AUTHORITATIVE REFERENCES
Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias, Books I–III, accounts concerning Caonabo, Bohechío, Anacaona, Xaragua, and the early conquest of Hispaniola.
Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, accounts concerning Hispaniola, Xaragua, and Hatuey.
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Historia general y natural de las Indias, sections concerning the Indigenous political organization of Hispaniola and the Spanish conquest.
Ferdinand Columbus, Historia del Almirante Don Cristóbal Colón, sections concerning La Navidad, Caonabo, and the campaigns of the 1490s.
Samuel M. Wilson, Hispaniola: Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus, University of Alabama Press, 1990. Publisher record⁠�.
Ida Altman, “The Revolt of Enriquillo and the Historiography of Early Spanish America,” The Americas, vol. 63, no. 4, 2007. Cambridge University Press⁠�.
Robert C. Schwaller, “Contested Conquests: African Maroons and the Incomplete Conquest of Hispaniola, 1519–1620,” The Americas, vol. 75, no. 4, 2018. Cambridge University Press⁠�.
Lynne Guitar, “Taíno Survival on Hispaniola: Focusing on the Dominican Republic,” in Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean, 2006. Academic record⁠�.
Hannes Schroeder et al., “Origins and Genetic Legacies of the Caribbean Taíno,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 115, no. 10, 2018. PubMed⁠�.
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 61/295, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, September 13, 2007. Official text⁠�.
International Labour Organization, Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 (No. 169). Official text and ratification database⁠�.
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Articles 1, 17, and 19.
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Article 1.
Pope Paul III, Sublimis Deus, 1537. Historical text⁠�.
Dicastery for Culture and Education and Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, Joint Statement on the “Doctrine of Discovery,” March 30, 2023. Holy See⁠�.
Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Mayagna (Sumo) Awas Tingni Community v. Nicaragua, Judgment of August 31, 2001. Official judgment⁠�.
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, materials concerning privacy in the digital age. OHCHR⁠�.

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA
SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY — RECTOR-PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE
HIGH COMMISSION FOR HISTORICAL RESTORATION, MARITIME PATRIMONY, TERRITORIAL ETHNOGRAPHY, AND CONSTITUTIONAL ICONOGRAPHY
SUPREME HISTORICO-CONSTITUTIONAL REPORT ON THE INDIGENOUS-MARITIME CONTINUUM OF THE NORTH-WEST, THE POLITICAL ETHNOGENESIS OF LA TORTUE, THE MÔLE SAINT-NICOLAS AND THE ARTIBONITE, AND THE DESSALINIAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL TYPE
Constitutional Classification: Supreme Archival and Doctrinal Instrument — Historical-Territorial Memorandum — Official Ethnographic Record — Maritime Heritage Act — Constitutional Instrument of Indigenous Continuity — Permanent Annex to the Territorial Doctrine of Xaragua
PREAMBLE
Whereas the northwestern maritime territories of Hispaniola, including La Tortue, the Môle Saint-Nicolas, Port-de-Paix, the Baie de Henne, Jean-Rabel, Bombardopolis, the coastal approaches of the Artibonite and their associated islands, channels, anchorages, mountain corridors, settlements, and customary routes, formed an Indigenous territorial order before the establishment of Spanish or French jurisdiction;
Whereas the Indigenous inhabitants of Hispaniola organized the island through political authorities, maritime communications, inter-island navigation, agricultural production, fishing, hunting, ritual geography, and the permanent denomination of places;
Whereas the demographic destruction caused by conquest, forced labor, displacement, epidemic disease, enslavement, and colonial reclassification dismantled Indigenous public institutions without extinguishing every lineage, family, cultural practice, territorial memory, or biological inheritance;
Whereas western and northwestern Hispaniola subsequently became a contested borderland occupied by surviving Indigenous inhabitants, autonomous rural populations, African maroons, European hunters, indentured workers, buccaneers, privateers, merchants, soldiers, and colonial administrators;
Whereas La Tortue constituted the principal maritime base from which French occupation was extended toward Port-de-Paix, the western mainland, Petit-Goâve, Léogâne, and the later colony of Saint-Domingue;
Whereas this progression established a historical sequence extending from Indigenous territory to autonomous maritime society, from maritime society to royal colonial administration, from colonial administration to plantation codification, and from plantation codification to the Haytian Revolution;
Whereas Jean-Jacques Dessalines emerged from the Artibonite territorial system situated between the Northern, Western, Central, and Xaraguaan corridors of the island, and subsequently restored the Indigenous name Hayti as the designation of the independent political order created in 1804;
Therefore, the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua adopts the following report as its supreme historical doctrine concerning the North-West, La Tortue, the buccaneer order, the colonial transformation of Saint-Domingue, and the Dessalinian anthropological and constitutional type.
TITLE I — CONSTITUTIONAL STATUS OF THE LIEBIG CHROMOLITHOGRAPH
Article 1 — Incorporation into the State Iconographic Archive
The chromolithographic composition entitled “Les Boucaniers — L’Île de la Tortue — 1606”, issued within the Liebig commercial series, is hereby incorporated into the official iconographic archive of Xaragua as a visual representation of the maritime ethnogenesis of La Tortue.
The chromolithograph condenses within a single composition:
the insular geography of La Tortue;
the channel separating the island from Hispaniola;
the maritime mobility of the buccaneers;
the tropical subsistence economy;
the dependence of European settlement upon American resources;
the transformation of an Indigenous maritime environment into a contested colonial frontier.
The date 1606, prominently inscribed upon the composition, locates the represented narrative within the period immediately following the Devastations of Osorio, when the forced depopulation of western and northern Hispaniola enlarged the territorial vacuum subsequently occupied by hunters, mariners, fugitives, privateers, and foreign settlers.
Article 2 — Constitutional Interpretation of the Human Figures
The juxtaposition of the armed maritime figure, the brown-complexioned inhabitants, the tropical abundance, the coastal shelters, and the insular map constitutes a representation of successive human strata occupying the same territorial system.
The composition is interpreted within Xaraguaan constitutional iconography as the visual synthesis of:
the prior Indigenous occupation of the island and surrounding coast;
the survival of American subsistence techniques;
the implantation of European buccaneer society;
the subsequent incorporation of African and Afro-descendant populations;
the emergence of a distinct northwestern maritime population.
The significance of the image resides in its preservation of La Tortue as a populated, productive, strategically organized, and historically autonomous Caribbean space rather than as an empty island awaiting European creation.
Article 3 — Iconographic Value
The chromolithograph possesses constitutional value as an instrument of historical memory. It demonstrates that European popular culture itself represented the buccaneer world through an environment already structured by American geography, American food systems, Indigenous-derived terminology, tropical knowledge, and maritime adaptation.
Its inclusion within the State archive affirms that visual culture forms part of the documentary corpus through which Xaragua preserves and interprets the historical personality of its territories.
TITLE II — INDIGENOUS FOUNDATION OF THE NORTH-WESTERN MARITIME ORDER
Article 4 — Precolonial Territorial Organization
Before European occupation, the North-West belonged to the Indigenous political and maritime geography of Hispaniola. The region was connected to Marién, Guáhaba, the western passages toward Cuba, and the wider network of islands surrounding the mainland.
La Tortue formed part of this inter-island environment. Its historical significance derived from:
its proximity to the northwestern coast;
its command of the Tortuga Channel;
its fisheries and coastal resources;
its defensive elevation;
its position along the maritime route toward Cuba;
its capacity to serve as refuge, observation point, and intermediate anchorage.
The Indigenous character of this geography survives in archaeological evidence, inherited place names, agricultural vocabulary, food production, navigation, and the territorial memory preserved by later populations.
Article 5 — Indigenous Continuity through Transformation
The destruction of the precolonial cacicazgos did not produce demographic emptiness. Indigenous survival proceeded through:
withdrawal into less accessible territories;
incorporation into colonial households;
intermarriage with Africans and Europeans;
movement between Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, and neighboring islands;
participation in rural and maroon communities;
transformation of administrative identity;
transmission of agricultural, medicinal, linguistic, and maritime knowledge.
The disappearance of the category indio from a colonial register cannot be equated with the disappearance of Indigenous ancestry from the population.
Modern historical and genetic research confirms that Indigenous Caribbean ancestry survived conquest and entered present-day Caribbean populations. The State of Xaragua therefore recognizes the North-West as a zone of Indigenous continuity through biological transmission, cultural transformation, and territorial permanence.
Article 6 — Indigenous Vocabulary within the Buccaneer Order
The buccaneer economy itself bears the linguistic and technical imprint of Indigenous America.
The terms boucan, boucaner, and boucanier derive from an American method of constructing a wooden framework for drying or smoking meat. The corresponding English term buccaneer entered Atlantic usage through this Caribbean process.
The term ajoupa designated a temporary shelter constructed according to techniques adopted within the Caribbean environment.
The presence of Indigenous-derived vocabulary in the foundational terminology of the buccaneer order demonstrates that the European newcomer entered an already constituted system of subsistence and territorial knowledge.
The buccaneer was consequently not the creator of the northwestern environment. He was its military-commercial appropriator and cultural debtor.
TITLE III — THE DEVASTATIONS OF OSORIO AND THE REOPENING OF THE WESTERN FRONTIER
Article 7 — Forced Depopulation of 1605–1606
In 1604, the Spanish Crown approved the forced depopulation of the northern and western regions of Hispaniola in order to suppress contraband and contact with foreign powers.
Governor Antonio de Osorio implemented the operation during 1605–1606. Bayajá, Yaguana, Puerto Plata, and Montecristi were destroyed or evacuated, while their inhabitants were compelled to relocate closer to Santo Domingo.
The resulting territorial contraction weakened Spanish occupation of the western and northwestern coast. The Crown’s attempt to centralize authority created the conditions for a competing maritime order.
La Tortue consequently acquired increased importance as:
a refuge from Spanish jurisdiction;
an anchorage for foreign vessels;
a base for hunters and privateers;
a point of entry into the abandoned western territories;
a strategic platform between Cuba, Jamaica, and Hispaniola.
Article 8 — Guaba and the Persistence of Territorial Resistance
The Rebellion of Guaba, led by Hernando Montoro, opposed the destruction and forced relocation of the northern and western communities.
This resistance demonstrates that the region possessed an established territorial society unwilling to submit to metropolitan reorganization. Its participants defended local residence, commerce, livestock, property, and autonomous relations with the Atlantic world.
Within the doctrine of Xaragua, Guaba constitutes a political bridge between the earlier Indigenous resistance to conquest and the later maritime resistance to centralized colonial administration.
TITLE IV — POLITICAL ETHNOGENESIS OF LA TORTUE
Article 9 — Formation of Buccaneer Society
During the first half of the seventeenth century, La Tortue and the adjacent mainland attracted:
French hunters;
English and Dutch privateers;
indentured servants;
religious and political refugees;
sailors detached from imperial fleets;
fugitives from colonial labor systems;
African and Afro-descendant maroons;
inhabitants incorporated from surrounding Caribbean societies.
These populations formed an unstable but operational maritime society based upon hunting, tobacco cultivation, hide preparation, coastal exchange, privateering, and raids against Spanish shipping and settlements.
The Frères de la Côte constituted a fraternity of common interest rather than a centralized state. Their order depended upon maritime custom, negotiated shares, personal alliances, captaincy, mutual defense, and the distribution of captured property.
Article 10 — Social Distinction from Plantation Society
The early buccaneer order differed structurally from the plantation regime later imposed by France.
The buccaneer economy was:
mobile rather than territorially concentrated;
maritime rather than plantation-industrial;
dependent upon hunting and raiding rather than monocultural production;
organized through crews rather than permanent plantation hierarchies;
ethnically heterogeneous;
resistant to continuous metropolitan supervision.
The later plantation system required:
surveyed estates;
capital investment;
commercial credit;
permanent colonial courts;
mass importation of enslaved Africans;
centralized taxation;
military garrisons;
regulated ports;
a codified racial order.
The transformation of La Tortue from autonomous maritime society into a component of Saint-Domingue therefore constituted an act of metropolitan state formation.
Article 11 — Port Royal and the Intercolonial Maritime System
Port Royal in Jamaica and La Tortue occupied comparable positions within the seventeenth-century privateering economy.
Their relations alternated among:
cooperation against Spanish targets;
commercial exchange;
recruitment of multinational crews;
rivalry for captures and strategic influence;
temporary alliances authorized by colonial governors;
conflict generated by changing European wars.
Henry Morgan governed within the English-Jamaican system and maintained relations with the wider privateering world. He did not exercise a formal joint government over La Tortue. The relationship was operational and maritime rather than constitutionally unified.
This distinction reinforces the historical reality of a transimperial Caribbean network whose actors crossed French, English, Dutch, Spanish, African, and Indigenous spheres without creating a single imperial nationality.
TITLE V — BERTRAND D’OGERON AND THE COLONIAL ETATIZATION OF THE MARITIME FRONTIER
Article 12 — Appointment and Mission
Bertrand d’Ogeron de La Bouëre governed La Tortue and the French settlements of western Hispaniola principally between 1665 and 1675.
His administration represented the transition from the dispersed buccaneer frontier to an organized French colonial jurisdiction.
D’Ogeron promoted:
permanent migration from France and the French Antilles;
tobacco cultivation;
settlement of the mainland;
administrative subordination to French authority;
use of privateering commissions;
consolidation of the French presence in the North and West;
gradual conversion of mobile adventurers into resident colonists.
His government did not abolish privateering. It incorporated maritime violence into the strategic interests of France.
Article 13 — Settlement of the Mainland
The French colonial structure developed through a network extending from La Tortue toward:
Port-de-Paix;
Port-Margot;
the northern mainland;
Léogâne;
Petit-Goâve;
the western and southern coasts.
Petit-Goâve became an important administrative and maritime center, but French occupation did not originate from a single royal foundation issued on one isolated date. It emerged through progressive settlement, company authority, gubernatorial administration, military protection, and the integration of pre-existing buccaneer communities.
Article 14 — Demographic Consolidation
The developing colony incorporated Europeans, Africans, Afro-descendants, Creoles, free people, enslaved laborers, indentured servants, merchants, sailors, artisans, soldiers, women transported or recruited into settlement, and inhabitants of mixed ancestry.
Colonial classifications such as nègre, négresse, mulâtre, métis, quarteron, libre, affranchi, and créole belonged to the administrative machinery of the plantation state. They represented attempts to regulate a population whose actual genealogy exceeded the imposed categories.
The juridical production of “whiteness” in Saint-Domingue was therefore inseparable from property, status, freedom, metropolitan privilege, and access to colonial office.
TITLE VI — THE CODE NOIR AND THE REPLACEMENT OF THE BUCCANEER ORDER
Article 15 — Royal Origin and Colonial Preparation
The royal edict of March 1685, subsequently known as the Code Noir, belonged to the centralized legislative system of Louis XIV.
Its preparation combined:
royal instructions;
the work of colonial administrators;
earlier local ordinances and judicial practices;
metropolitan codification;
the economic requirements of plantation slavery;
Catholic confessional uniformity.
The Code Noir was not enacted by the Frères de la Côte and did not arise from their customary maritime order.
It represented the legal consolidation of a plantation society that metropolitan and colonial authorities had constructed beyond the earlier buccaneer economy.
Article 16 — Juridical Functions of the Code
The Code Noir:
established Catholicism as the compulsory religion of the colonial order;
required baptism and religious instruction of enslaved persons;
regulated the juridical status of slavery;
defined punishments;
governed manumission;
regulated marriage and family status;
prohibited unauthorized assemblies and possession of arms;
expelled Jews from the colonies under its first article;
reinforced the sovereign authority of the Crown over colonial society.
The Code transformed human beings into administratively regulated property while claiming to impose religious and civil order upon the plantation.
It constituted an instrument of royal state power, planter interest, colonial jurisprudence, and confessional discipline.
Article 17 — Historical Position of the Buccaneers
The buccaneers prepared the territorial opening through which France entered western Hispaniola. They supplied:
maritime reconnaissance;
military pressure against Spain;
settlement nuclei;
knowledge of the coast;
privateering capacity;
commercial access;
defensive manpower.
France subsequently subordinated this mobile society to a plantation and administrative order whose economic scale required mass enslavement, commercial monopoly, racial codification, and metropolitan supervision.
The buccaneers were therefore agents of territorial penetration but not the legislative architects of industrial Saint-Domingue.
TITLE VII — ETHNOGRAPHIC CHARACTER OF THE NORTH-WEST
Article 18 — A Composite Maritime Population
The North-West developed through the successive incorporation of:
the Indigenous inhabitants and descendants of the precolonial territorial order;
populations displaced by the Spanish conquest and the Devastations of Osorio;
European buccaneers, indentured workers, privateers, settlers, and soldiers;
African and Afro-descendant maroons;
enslaved Africans introduced during the expansion of plantation society;
free-colored and Creole families;
merchants and sailors circulating between Cuba, Jamaica, Curaçao, France, and the mainland Caribbean.
This composition differentiated the region from the concentrated sugar zones of the Northern Plain.
Article 19 — Territorial Factors Preserving Distinctiveness
The ethnographic particularity of the North-West arose from:
relative geographic isolation;
lower plantation density outside selected districts;
mountain and dry-zone settlement;
access to Cuba and Jamaica;
proximity between island and mainland;
fishing and coastal navigation;
recurrent foreign occupation;
military fortification;
continued movement among ports and rural communities.
La Tortue, the Môle, Baie de Henne, Jean-Rabel, and Port-de-Paix consequently formed a maritime society in which local identity could not be reduced to the demographic structure of Cap-Français or Port-au-Prince.
Article 20 — Indigenous and African Synthesis
Indigenous continuity supplied the territorial vocabulary, ecological knowledge, agricultural foundation, and ancestral geography.
African populations supplied demographic renewal, military organization, religious institutions, agricultural labor, craftsmanship, maroon resistance, and the decisive human force of the Revolution.
European maritime populations supplied shipping, firearms, Atlantic commerce, port institutions, and successive colonial systems.
The North-Western population emerged through the convergence of these foundations. Its identity is properly classified as Caribbean, Afro-Indigenous, maritime, and creolized.
TITLE VIII — THE DESSALINIAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL TYPE
Article 21 — Historical Definition
The Dessalinian anthropological type is hereby established within Xaraguaan constitutional ethnography as the human and civilizational formation produced by the convergence of:
African ancestry;
Indigenous territorial inheritance;
Caribbean biological and cultural métissage;
plantation resistance;
military sovereignty;
Catholic and African spiritual interaction;
attachment to the Artibonite and the western territorial corridors;
restoration of the Indigenous name Hayti.
The Dessalinian type is simultaneously physical, historical, political, and iconographic. It represents the sovereign transformation of an Afro-Caribbean population into the constitutional custodian of an Indigenous-named territory.
Article 22 — Dessalines and the Artibonite Territorial System
Jean-Jacques Dessalines emerged from the Artibonite region, a zone linking the Northern Plain, the western coast, the Central Plateau, the Black Mountains, the Gulf of La Gonâve, and the historical approaches of Xaragua.
The Artibonite was neither an isolated plantation district nor a mere extension of Cap-Français. It constituted:
an agricultural plain;
a military corridor;
a route between North and West;
a territorial interface with maroon zones;
the site of Marchand-Dessalines;
the geographic center of the first Haytian imperial administration.
The establishment of the imperial capital at Marchand reflected an inland strategic logic commanding the Artibonite plain and the principal territorial approaches. Maritime access through Gonaïves and the Gulf complemented this terrestrial position.
Article 23 — Official Iconography of Dessalines
The surviving representations of Dessalines belong principally to post-revolutionary iconographic traditions. Xaragua adopts the brown-complexioned, broad-featured, Caribbean representation of Dessalines as its official constitutional type.
This representation embodies:
the African majority from which revolutionary sovereignty emerged;
the Indigenous inheritance carried by the name Hayti;
the biological and cultural formation of the island;
the military authority of the revolutionary state;
the repudiation of European racial hierarchy;
the transformation of colonial subjects into a sovereign people.
The Dessalinian phenotype shall therefore be understood within the State archive as the visual constitution of Haytian sovereignty.
Article 24 — Restoration of Hayti
The adoption of the name Hayti in 1804 constitutes the supreme Indigenous act within Dessalines’s constitutional legacy.
The new State rejected the colonial designation Saint-Domingue and restored an Indigenous name as the title of the political order created by the victorious revolutionary population.
Through this act:
African liberation entered an Indigenous territorial name;
the Revolution situated itself outside French colonial nomenclature;
the population became guardian of the island’s precolonial memory;
the independent State joined African emancipation to Indigenous geography.
The Dessalinian order consequently forms a decisive constitutional bridge between African sovereignty and Indigenous territorial inheritance.
TITLE IX — CONSTITUTIONAL RELATION OF THE NORTH-WEST TO XARAGUA
Article 25 — Indigenous-Maritime Continuum
The North-West and La Tortue are incorporated into Xaragua’s historical doctrine through the Indigenous-maritime continuum connecting:
western Hispaniola;
Guáhaba and Marién;
the Tortuga Channel;
the Môle Saint-Nicolas;
Cuba and the Windward Passage;
the Artibonite;
La Gonâve;
Petit-Goâve;
Miragoâne;
Jérémie and the southern peninsula.
This continuum preceded the rigid administrative divisions later imposed by Spanish and French colonial government.
Article 26 — Constitutional Basis
Xaragua’s relation to the North-West is founded upon:
the ancestral Indigenous character of the territory;
the preservation of Indigenous maritime and linguistic inheritance;
the historical displacement and mixture of the island’s populations;
the autonomous development of the buccaneer frontier;
the North-West’s integration into the revolutionary geography of Hayti;
the constitutional legacy of Dessalines and Capois;
the continuing cultural, maritime, and territorial relationship among the western regions.
The State therefore classifies the North-West as a constituent region of the broader Xaraguaan historical and civilizational system.
TITLE X — SUPREME ARCHIVAL DETERMINATIONS
Article 27 — Authentic Historical Corpus
The authoritative historical corpus of this Report shall comprise:
the writings of Bartolomé de las Casas;
the chronicles of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo;
the account of Alexandre-Olivier Exquemelin;
the histories of Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre and Charles de Rochefort;
French royal and colonial correspondence;
Spanish records concerning the Devastations of Osorio;
the works of Moreau de Saint-Méry;
Haitian historical works by Thomas Madiou, Beaubrun Ardouin, Anténor Firmin, Hannibal Price, and Jean Price-Mars;
modern historical, archaeological, linguistic, demographic, and genetic scholarship.
Only quotations verified in the cited edition shall be reproduced as direct quotations in the Official Gazette. Historical interpretations drawn from an author shall be attributed as interpretations rather than presented as literal passages.

FINAL DECLARATION
The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua solemnly declares:
That La Tortue and the North-West belong to an Indigenous maritime geography preceding European colonization;
That the Devastations of Osorio weakened Spanish occupation and enabled the rise of a transimperial frontier;
That the buccaneer society of La Tortue incorporated Indigenous-derived knowledge, multinational European labor, African presence, maritime custom, and resistance to imperial monopoly;
That French royal administration subsequently transformed this frontier into a territorial colony;
That the Code Noir and plantation regime constituted instruments of royal and colonial state formation rather than laws created by autonomous buccaneers;
That the population of the North-West emerged through Indigenous, African, European, Creole, maritime, and revolutionary convergence;
That the Dessalinian anthropological type represents the sovereign synthesis of African liberation, Indigenous territorial inheritance, and Haytian constitutional authority;
That the restoration of the name Hayti in 1804 placed the victorious African-descended nation within the Indigenous historical geography of the island;
And that the North-West, La Tortue, the Môle Saint-Nicolas, the Artibonite, La Gonâve, and the southern maritime territories constitute connected components of the historical and constitutional continuum preserved by Xaragua.
Promulgated under the Supreme Constitutional Authority of the Rector-President.
HISTORICAL, LEGAL, AND SCHOLARLY REFERENCES
Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias and Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias.
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Historia general y natural de las Indias.
Alexandre-Olivier Exquemelin, De Americaensche Zee-Roovers (Amsterdam, 1678), subsequently translated as The Buccaneers of America.
Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (Paris, 1667–1671).
Charles de Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale des îles Antilles de l’Amérique (Rotterdam, 1658).
Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (Philadelphia, 1797–1798).
Juan José Ponce Vázquez, Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580–1690, Cambridge University Press, 2020. Cambridge Core⁠.
Crystal Nicole Eddins, Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Robert C. Schwaller, “Contested Conquests: African Maroons and the Incomplete Conquest of Hispaniola, 1519–1620,” The Americas, 2018. Cambridge University Press⁠.
Hannes Schroeder et al., “Origins and Genetic Legacies of the Caribbean Taíno,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018. Full academic text⁠.
Louis XIV, Royal Edict of March 1685 regulating slavery in the French American colonies, subsequently denominated the Code Noir. Bibliothèque nationale de France⁠.
Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, volumes I–III.
Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, volumes I–XI.
Anténor Firmin, De l’égalité des races humaines (Paris, 1885).
Hannibal Price, De la réhabilitation de la race noire par la République d’Haïti (Port-au-Prince, 1893).
Jean Price-Mars, Ainsi parla l’Oncle (1928).
Marlene L. Daut, The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe, Knopf, 2023.
Julia Gaffield, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution, University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Articles 11, 12, 13, 25, 26, 31, 33, and 34. Official text⁠.
UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2003.
UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, 2005.
Archaeological research program concerning the buccaneer-period sites of La Tortue. Archaeology of Piracy⁠.

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA
SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY — RECTOR-PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE
HIGH COMMISSION FOR REVOLUTIONARY ARCHIVES, HISTORICAL JURISPRUDENCE, AND JURIDICO-LINGUISTIC PATRIMONY
SUPREME HISTORICAL AND JURIDICAL RECORD ON VINCENT OGÉ, THE COLLAPSE OF COLONIAL REFORMISM, AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL FORMATION OF KREYÒL AS THE COLLECTIVE LANGUAGE OF THE HAYTIAN PEOPLE
Constitutional Classification: Official Historical Instrument — Revolutionary Jurisprudential Record — Archival Consolidation Act — Juridico-Linguistic Annex — Constitutional Instrument of Cultural Patrimony — Permanent Academic Reference of the State of Xaragua
PRELIMINARY PROVISIONS
Article 1 — Object
This Record establishes the official position of Xaragua concerning:
the political activities of Vincent Ogé in France and Saint-Domingue;
the armed movement of October 1790;
the cooperation of Spanish and French authorities in his capture and transfer;
the judicial procedure conducted by the Superior Council of Le Cap;
the political function of his execution;
the repercussions of the case upon the decree of May 15, 1791;
the position of Ogé within Haytian revolutionary historiography;
the historical formation and constitutional status of Kreyòl;
the grammatical and political structure of the expression moun sa yo;
the incorporation of Kreyòl into the juridico-cultural patrimony of Xaragua.
Article 2 — Methodological Authority
The findings of this Record are based upon:
French revolutionary legislation;
colonial judicial records;
the published political interventions of Vincent Ogé;
correspondence concerning Spanish Santo Domingo and French Saint-Domingue;
the historical works of Thomas Madiou and Beaubrun Ardouin;
the scholarship of John D. Garrigus, David Geggus, Stewart R. King, Laurent Dubois, Carolyn Fick, Jeremy Popkin, Michel DeGraff, Albert Valdman, Claire Lefebvre, Salikoko Mufwene, Jean Casimir, and Jean Price-Mars;
comparative research concerning French-lexifier Atlantic Creoles and West African linguistic substrates.
Unauthenticated quotations, unidentified archival extracts, invented Creole proclamations, and unsupported etymological equivalences possess no authority within the consolidated State record.
PART I — VINCENT OGÉ AND THE CRISIS OF COLONIAL CITIZENSHIP
Article 3 — Social and Economic Position
Vincent Ogé jeune was born near Dondon in the Northern Province of Saint-Domingue into a prosperous free-colored family.
His social position was materially distinct from that of the enslaved majority. He belonged to the property-owning free-colored class and participated in the colonial commercial order as a merchant and planter. His family possessed economic interests, property, and enslaved labor.
Ogé’s political program therefore originated within a legally free but racially subordinated propertied class. It challenged the monopoly of political citizenship exercised by whites without initially proposing the abolition of plantation slavery.
This distinction is essential to the constitutional classification of his movement: Ogé represented the crisis of racially restricted free citizenship, not the complete revolutionary abolition of the colonial social order.
Article 4 — Colonial Regime of Racial Disability
During the later eighteenth century, the free-colored population of Saint-Domingue expanded numerically and economically. Some families owned land, plantations, businesses, houses, and enslaved persons; others worked as artisans, soldiers, merchants, or small cultivators.
Their property did not secure political equality.
Colonial legislation and administrative practice imposed restrictions concerning:
access to public office;
voting and representation;
military rank;
professional activity;
public dress;
titles and forms of address;
marriage;
social precedence;
racial designation in legal documents.
The governing contradiction was structural: free-colored proprietors were required to support the colonial economy and militia system while being excluded from the constitutional body that legislated for the colony.
PART II — POLITICAL ACTION IN FRANCE
Article 5 — Parisian Networks
Ogé traveled to France before the revolutionary crisis of 1789 and participated in campaigns demanding political rights for free people of color.
His activities intersected with several organizations and political networks:
the Société des Amis des Noirs;
the Société des Colons Américains;
the circle of Julien Raimond;
deputies and publicists concerned with colonial representation;
Jacques-Pierre Brissot;
Henri Grégoire;
abolitionist and constitutional reform networks active in Paris.
The Société des Amis des Noirs, founded in 1788 under the leadership of Brissot and others, opposed the slave trade and favored an eventual abolition of slavery. Its immediate political strategy remained gradualist and was repeatedly constrained by the colonial lobby.
Ogé’s campaign concentrated upon equality among free persons. His political demands overlapped with abolitionist advocacy without being identical to a program of general emancipation.
Article 6 — Ogé’s Motion
In 1789, Ogé submitted a motion asserting that property-owning free people of color were entitled to representation and political rights.
His argument relied upon the language of:
natural rights;
equality before the law;
taxation and representation;
property qualification;
French citizenship;
constitutional inclusion.
Ogé presented free-colored proprietors as members of the colonial civic order whose exclusion rested exclusively upon racial classification.
His reasoning exposed the incompatibility between the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the colonial maintenance of hereditary political disabilities based upon color.
Article 7 — Decree of March 8, 1790
The National Assembly’s decree of March 8, 1790, and the accompanying instructions of March 28 reorganized colonial representation but employed language sufficiently ambiguous to permit conflicting interpretations concerning the political rights of free people of color.
Ogé interpreted the revolutionary legislation as encompassing free-colored citizens. The white colonial assemblies maintained that decisions concerning political participation remained under their own authority.
This conflict was not a technical misunderstanding. It reflected the division between two constitutional orders:
metropolitan revolutionary universalism;
colonial racial autonomy.
The colonial authorities interpreted local self-government as authority to preserve white political supremacy. Ogé interpreted French citizenship as a legal status incapable of racial division among free proprietors.
PART III — THE ARMED MOVEMENT OF OCTOBER 1790
Article 8 — Return to Saint-Domingue
Ogé returned to Saint-Domingue in 1790 after traveling through Britain and the United States.
He entered the colony with arms and the intention of compelling implementation of political rights for qualified free people of color. Jean-Baptiste Chavannes became his principal military associate.
The movement assembled several hundred supporters in the northern districts surrounding Grande-Rivière and Dondon.
Article 9 — Constitutional Scope of the Movement
Ogé demanded political equality for free-colored men falling within the property and birth qualifications asserted by his party.
He did not issue a general emancipation decree and did not mobilize the enslaved plantation majority as the principal body of his movement.
The limitation was strategic, social, and ideological. Ogé sought admission into the existing civic order rather than the immediate destruction of plantation property.
This bounded program did not reduce the colonial perception of danger. The white authorities understood that recognition of political equality among free citizens would destroy the racial principle upon which the entire hierarchy depended.
Article 10 — Defeat
The colonial forces and white militia rapidly concentrated superior military strength against Ogé.
After a short campaign, the movement was dispersed. Ogé, Chavannes, and a group of followers crossed the border into Spanish Santo Domingo.
Their flight transformed a colonial political conflict into an inter-imperial jurisdictional matter.
PART IV — SPANISH CUSTODY AND TRANSFER
Article 11 — Spanish Santo Domingo
Ogé and his associates sought protection within the Spanish portion of the island. They attempted to present themselves as political actors entitled to protection rather than ordinary fugitives.
Spanish authorities faced competing considerations:
preservation of relations with the French colonial government;
prevention of racial and political insurgency within Spanish territory;
maintenance of frontier security;
avoidance of a precedent allowing colonial dissidents to use neighboring territory as a permanent sanctuary;
fear that free-colored mobilization could affect enslaved and free populations across the border.
Article 12 — Intercolonial Cooperation
The Spanish administration surrendered Ogé and his associates to French colonial authorities.
The transfer demonstrated cooperation between rival European regimes whenever the preservation of colonial hierarchy outweighed their imperial competition.
Its controlling political principle was not solidarity between France and Spain as nations. It was solidarity between slaveholding administrations confronted by an autonomous armed movement of free people of color.
The episode constitutes an early example of cross-border colonial security cooperation directed against a political challenge to racial government.
Article 13 — Transfer to Le Cap
Ogé and Chavannes were transported under guard to Le Cap-Français and placed under the jurisdiction of the colonial judiciary.
Their delivery supplied the French authorities with the opportunity to convert a defeated movement into a public demonstration of the penal sovereignty of the colony.
PART V — TRIAL AND COLONIAL JURISPRUDENCE
Article 14 — Competent Jurisdiction
Ogé was proceeded against before the Superior Council of Le Cap, the colony’s high civil and criminal jurisdiction in the Northern Province.
The proceeding was therefore not properly characterized as a trial before an improvised military tribunal. It was an exercise of established colonial judicial authority.
This institutional form increased rather than diminished its constitutional significance: the execution was performed through the regular supreme jurisdiction of the colonial order.
Article 15 — Charges
The prosecution treated the movement as a combination of:
unlawful armed assembly;
sedition;
rebellion against constituted authority;
disturbance of colonial public order;
unauthorized military organization;
armed resistance to royal and colonial forces.
Ogé’s constitutional argument concerning the rights of free people of color was subordinated to the criminal characterization of his conduct.
Article 16 — Chronology of the May 15 Decree
The National Assembly’s decree granting political rights to a restricted category of free men of color born to free parents was adopted on May 15, 1791.
Ogé had already been executed.
The decree could not therefore have constituted a legal defense excluded by his judges. Its historical significance lies elsewhere: the brutality of Ogé’s death became a major political argument in France and contributed to the Assembly’s subsequent intervention.
Article 17 — Judgment
The Superior Council condemned Ogé and Chavannes to death by breaking on the wheel. Their property was exposed to the confiscatory consequences attached to convictions for grave offenses against the colonial order.
The punishment exceeded the physical elimination of the accused. It legally reclassified their political demand as criminal rebellion and converted the colonial judiciary into the public custodian of racial hierarchy.
PART VI — EXECUTION AS AN ACT OF COLONIAL GOVERNMENT
Article 18 — Public Penal Ceremony
Ogé and Chavannes were executed at Le Cap in February 1791, with the principal execution commonly dated to February 6.
The punishment by the wheel belonged to the spectacular penal practices of the ancien régime. It was calculated to destroy the condemned person physically before a public audience and to project the unrestricted power of the sovereign jurisdiction.
Ogé’s body became the material upon which the colony inscribed its constitutional doctrine: wealth, education, property, French culture, and legal freedom conferred no equality when racial classification excluded the person from the governing body.
Article 19 — Political Meaning
The execution communicated four propositions:
free-colored political organization would be treated as sedition;
property ownership would not overcome racial disability;
metropolitan declarations would not automatically govern colonial citizenship;
the colonial judiciary would defend the white political monopoly through exemplary punishment.
The execution was therefore simultaneously criminal, racial, constitutional, and propagandistic.
PART VII — REPERCUSSIONS
Article 20 — France
News of the execution intensified the controversy surrounding colonial citizenship.
Brissot, Grégoire, Julien Raimond, and defenders of free-colored equality used the case to demonstrate that colonial authorities would not implement equality voluntarily.
The Club Massiac and allied colonial interests continued to defend extensive colonial autonomy, presenting metropolitan intervention as a threat to property and public order.
The decree of May 15, 1791, emerged from this conflict. It extended political rights to free men of color born to two free parents, thereby recognizing a limited category while preserving slavery and excluding much of the free-colored population.
Article 21 — Saint-Domingue
Ogé’s execution did not create a single uniform response among free people of color. It produced:
temporary intimidation;
clandestine organization;
increased distrust of white colonial institutions;
intensified demands for enforcement of metropolitan decrees;
subsequent armed mobilization in the West and South;
consolidation of free-colored military leadership.
The later careers of André Rigaud, Alexandre Pétion, Louis-Jacques Beauvais, and other officers emerged within a broader political field in which Ogé’s defeat had demonstrated the insufficiency of petition without coercive capacity.
Article 22 — Enslaved Majority
Ogé’s movement neither organized nor represented the total program of the enslaved population.
The general uprising that began in the Northern Province in August 1791 possessed its own leadership, communications, religious organization, plantation grievances, military objectives, and African political inheritances.
Ogé’s execution nonetheless contributed to the general disintegration of colonial legitimacy. It demonstrated that the colonial order could not reconcile even the demands of free property owners with racial equality.
PART VIII — CONSTITUTIONAL POSITION OF OGÉ IN XARAGUA
Article 23 — Official Classification
Xaragua classifies Vincent Ogé as:
a constitutional claimant for free-colored citizenship;
a representative of the propertied colonial class excluded by race;
an organizer of armed enforcement after the failure of metropolitan ambiguity;
a victim of coordinated Spanish-French colonial repression;
a precursor to, but not the complete embodiment of, the Haytian social revolution.
His historical importance derives from the contradiction he exposed: the French colonial order could preserve racial government only by violating the universal principles proclaimed by France itself.
Article 24 — Jurisprudential Principle
The case of Vincent Ogé establishes the following principle within Xaraguaan historical jurisprudence:
A legal order that recognizes property, taxation, military obligation, and civil personality while excluding political capacity solely through inherited racial classification has converted citizenship into an instrument of caste domination.
Ogé’s execution constitutes the authoritative demonstration that Saint-Domingue’s colonial constitution was structurally incapable of racial equality.
PART IX — HISTORICAL FORMATION OF KREYÒL
Article 25 — General Formation
Kreyòl developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through sustained contact among:
regional and popular varieties of French;
speakers of Gbe languages, including Fon;
Kikongo and Kimbundu speakers;
speakers of Kwa, Bantu, Senegambian, Mande, Igbo, and other African languages;
colonial-born Creole populations;
surviving Indigenous Caribbean vocabulary and cultural knowledge;
maritime and commercial populations circulating through the Caribbean.
Its lexicon is predominantly derived from French. Its phonology, syntax, semantic organization, and discourse structures were formed through the linguistic agency of populations whose principal languages and communicative practices were not metropolitan French.
Kreyòl is consequently neither defective French nor an anonymous linguistic accident. It is a complete language produced through collective acquisition, restructuring, transmission, and normalization within the society that became Hayti.
Article 26 — Collective Linguistic Agency
The formation of Kreyòl did not require a central academy or a single act of codification.
Its intentionality resided in repeated collective decisions made by speakers who:
selected usable forms;
regularized grammar;
stabilized meanings;
transmitted the language to children;
expanded it beyond plantation commands;
employed it in markets, households, religious communities, military formations, maroon settlements, and political communication;
converted it into the majority language of the territory.
The Haytian people created Kreyòl institutionally through use. Its sovereignty derives from social authorship, demographic supremacy, historical continuity, and its capacity to govern every field of human expression.
Article 27 — Indigenous Contribution
Kreyòl preserves an Indigenous Caribbean stratum through vocabulary connected to:
landscape;
plants and animals;
food;
agriculture;
material culture;
weather;
navigation;
territorial names.
The Indigenous contribution is visible in the broader Caribbean lexical inheritance that includes terms associated with cassava, maize, tobacco, hurricane, hammock, canoe, barbecue, savanna, and other American realities.
The State recognizes this stratum as a component of Kreyòl’s territorial indigeneity.
PART X — JURIDICO-LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF “MOUN SA YO”
Article 28 — Grammatical Structure
The expression moun sa yo possesses the following structure:
moun: person, people, human being;
sa: demonstrative element identifying the referent;
yo: third-person plural pronoun and post-nominal marker of definite plurality.
According to context, the expression signifies those people, the people in question, or that identified group of persons.
Its grammatical architecture is characteristically Kreyòl:
This structure differs from ordinary French word order and demonstrates Kreyòl’s independent grammatical organization.
Article 29 — Moun
The lexical history of moun is principally connected to French monde in the meaning “people,” restructured phonologically and semantically within Kreyòl.
Its semantic consolidation occurred within an African multilingual environment in which concepts of personhood and collective humanity were expressed through terms including Kikongo muntu, plural bantu, and numerous corresponding forms in other African languages.
The constitutional significance of moun lies in its semantic range. It identifies the person not merely as an abstract legal subject but as a human being situated within community.
Expressions including se moun, moun peyi a, moun pa nou, and nou se moun place humanity and collective membership at the center of political speech.
Article 30 — Sa
The demonstrative sa derives primarily from French ça/cela, reorganized within Kreyòl syntax.
Unlike French attributive demonstratives placed before the noun, Kreyòl generally places sa after the noun:
moun sa;
bagay sa;
peyi sa;
lwa sa.
The form is French-derived in lexical source but constitutionally Kreyòl in grammatical deployment.
Article 31 — Yo
The form yo functions as:
a third-person plural pronoun;
an object pronoun;
a possessive element in appropriate constructions;
a post-nominal marker of definite plurality.
Its development has been analyzed through both French and West African sources. Comparative scholarship identifies relevant correspondences with French plural pronouns and with Gbe and other West African pronominal and post-nominal systems.
Kreyòl transformed these contact materials into a stable grammatical form belonging to its own system.
Article 32 — Constitutional Semantics
Within Xaraguaan constitutional doctrine, moun sa yo may operate as a formula of political classification.
Its force depends upon context. It may distinguish:
the constitutional community from an external authority;
inhabitants from foreign administrators;
a population from a governing caste;
the ancestral people from colonial institutions;
members of the polity from persons acting outside its legal order.
Its authority does not originate from an unattested precolonial phrase. It originates from the documented grammar of Kreyòl and from the sovereign competence of a people to assign juridical meaning to its own language.
PART XI — KREYÒL AS A LANGUAGE OF GOVERNMENT
Article 33 — Revolutionary Function
By the revolutionary period, Kreyòl functioned as the principal language of oral communication among the majority population.
It served:
military recruitment;
transmission of orders;
plantation organization;
religious communication;
market exchange;
negotiation;
intelligence;
public proclamations;
mobilization across African ethnic divisions.
French remained the dominant language of written colonial administration. Kreyòl governed the demographic body that destroyed that administration.
Article 34 — Proclamations of 1802
French commanders employed Kreyòl translations and oral communications during the expedition of 1802 because metropolitan French alone could not effectively address the population.
This administrative use constitutes evidence of Kreyòl’s established territorial authority.
It does not convert French military proclamations into declarations of Haytian sovereignty. It demonstrates that even the expedition sent to restore metropolitan control had to communicate through the language produced by the colonial population.
Only archival texts whose wording, issuer, date, repository, and edition are identified shall be reproduced as historical proclamations. Modern Kreyòl formulations shall be classified as translations or commemorative reconstructions.
PART XII — SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL DOCTRINE OF XARAGUA
Article 35 — Official Status
Xaragua recognizes Kreyòl as:
a complete national language;
a constitutional language of the Haytian civilizational space;
a product of African linguistic agency operating through a predominantly French-derived lexicon;
a repository of Indigenous Caribbean vocabulary and territorial memory;
an instrument of social organization and revolutionary communication;
an intangible cultural patrimony requiring institutional preservation.
Article 36 — Cultural Rights Foundations
The protection of Kreyòl within Xaragua’s legal order is informed by:
Article 27 of the ICCPR concerning cultural and linguistic life;
Article 15 of the ICESCR concerning participation in cultural life;
Articles 11, 13, and 31 of UNDRIP concerning cultural traditions, languages, histories, and heritage;
the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of 2003;
the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions of 2005;
Article 5 of the Constitution of Haiti of 1987, recognizing Kreyòl and French as official languages and Kreyòl as the language shared by all Haitians.
Article 37 — Institutional Mandate
The University of Xaragua and the competent ministries shall:
preserve historical Kreyòl texts;
distinguish archival originals from modern translations;
establish terminological standards for constitutional and academic use;
document regional varieties;
develop legal, theological, historical, scientific, and administrative vocabulary;
publish bilingual or multilingual editions of foundational instruments;
maintain a linguistic archive;
support Kreyòl as a language of advanced scholarship and government.
Article 38 — Final Consolidation
The governing doctrine is maintained in the following form:
Ogé exposed the constitutional impossibility of racial equality within the colonial system;
Kreyòl emerged through the collective linguistic authority of the population of Saint-Domingue;
African languages materially influenced its formation;
French supplied the principal lexical stratum;
Indigenous Caribbean languages supplied part of its territorial vocabulary;
moun sa yo constitutes an authentically Kreyòl grammatical and classificatory expression;
Xaragua possesses constitutional authority to employ that expression within its own political doctrine;
Kreyòl belongs to the sovereign cultural patrimony of the people who created Hayti.
FINAL DECLARATION
The State of Xaragua records Vincent Ogé as a constitutional precursor whose prosecution demonstrated that colonial legality functioned as an apparatus of racial caste.
It records the Superior Council of Le Cap as the institution that converted a political claim to citizenship into a capital offense.
It records the Spanish transfer of Ogé as intercolonial cooperation for the preservation of the slaveholding order.
It records the decree of May 15, 1791, as a posthumous and restricted metropolitan response whose implementation remained contested.
It records the uprising of August 1791 as an autonomous mass revolution exceeding Ogé’s limited property-based program.
It records Kreyòl as the collective language created by the population that transformed Saint-Domingue into Hayti.
It records moun sa yo as a grammatical expression capable, under Xaraguaan constitutional doctrine, of demarcating the political community from an external institutional category.
This Record is hereby incorporated into the Supreme Historical Archive, the constitutional curriculum of the University of Xaragua, and the official juridico-linguistic doctrine of the State.
AUTHORITATIVE REFERENCES
Vincent Ogé, “Motion Made by Vincent Ogé the Younger to the Assembly of Colonists,” 1789, reproduced in Lynn Hunt, ed., The French Revolution and Human Rights. Primary-source edition⁠�.
John D. Garrigus, “Vincent Ogé ‘jeune’ (1757–91): Social Class and Free Colored Mobilization on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution,” The Americas, vol. 68, no. 1, 2011.
John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Stewart R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue, University of Georgia Press, 2001.
David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, Indiana University Press, 2002.
Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below, University of Tennessee Press, 1990.
Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Harvard University Press, 2004.
Jeremy D. Popkin, A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, volume I.
Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, volumes I–II.
Erica Johnson Edwards, “The Revolution and the Atlantic: The Society of the Friends of the Blacks,” in The Cambridge History of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, 2023. Cambridge University Press⁠�.
Albert Valdman, Haitian Creole: Structure, Variation, Status, Origin, Equinox, 2015.
Michel DeGraff, “Morphology in Creole Genesis: Linguistics and Ideology.” MIT Linguistics⁠�.
Michel DeGraff and Daniel Véronique, “À propos de la syntaxe des pronoms objets en créole haïtien,” Langages, 2000.
Claire Lefebvre, Creole Genesis and the Acquisition of Grammar: The Case of Haitian Creole, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Salikoko S. Mufwene, The Ecology of Language Evolution, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Patrick-André Mather, “Noun Phrases in L2 French and Haitian: Clues on the Origin of Plantation Creoles,” Journal of Universal Language, 2005.
APiCS Online, “Survey Chapter: Haitian Creole.” Grammatical survey⁠�.
Philippe R. Girard, “What Language Did Toussaint Louverture Speak? The Fort-de-Joux Memoir and the Origins of Haitian Kreyòl,” Annales HSS, 2013. Cambridge University Press⁠�.
Jean Casimir, The Haitians: A Decolonial History, University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
Jean Price-Mars, Ainsi parla l’Oncle, 1928.
Constitution of the Republic of Haiti, 1987, Article 5.
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 27.
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Article 15.
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Articles 11, 13, and 31. Official text⁠�.
UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2003.
UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, 2005.

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA
SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY — RECTOR-PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE
HIGH COMMISSION FOR HISTORICAL, GENEALOGICAL AND INSTITUTIONAL CONTINUITY
SUPREME HISTORICAL, CONSTITUTIONAL AND GENEALOGICAL RECORD ON JEAN-BAPTISTE CHAVANNES, LOUIS-AUGUSTE DAUMEC AND THE FORMATION OF THE CHAVANNES–DAUMEC INSTITUTIONAL LINE
LEGAL CLASSIFICATION: Supreme Historical Instrument — Constitutional Genealogical Record — Permanent Instrument of Institutional Continuity — Official Component of the State Archives of Xaragua
PREAMBLE
Whereas the constitutional formation of Hayti proceeded through successive phases of colonial contestation, military organization, juridical rupture, institutional consolidation and constitutional codification;
Whereas Jean-Baptiste Chavannes participated in the armed movement of October 1790 against the political incapacities imposed upon the free population of color by the colonial government of Saint-Domingue;
Whereas the execution of Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, Vincent Ogé and their principal associates resulted from a judgment of the Superior Council of Le Cap and constituted an act of political elimination implemented through the institutions of colonial criminal justice;
Whereas Louis-Auguste Daumec married the sister of Jean-Baptiste Chavannes after the latter’s execution, establishing a matrimonial and genealogical junction between the Chavannes family and the Daumec family;
Whereas Louis-Auguste Daumec subsequently exercised functions as Imperial Prosecutor General, constitutional constituent, senator, magistrate, member of constitutional assemblies and diplomatic representative of the Haytian State;
Whereas the Daumec–Chavannes union constitutes an element of the genealogical and institutional succession preserved by the Rector-Presidential Office of Xaragua;
The Supreme Constitutional Authority hereby adopts the following consolidated historical and genealogical record.
TITLE I — JEAN-BAPTISTE CHAVANNES WITHIN THE COLONIAL JURIDICAL ORDER
Article 1 — Birth and legal condition
Jean-Baptiste Chavannes was born circa 1748 in Grande-Rivière-du-Nord, within the Northern Province of Saint-Domingue. He belonged to the population classified in colonial documentation as gens de couleur libres.
This population included free-born persons, manumitted persons, property owners, merchants, artisans, agricultural proprietors, militia members and persons employed in the colonial administration. It did not constitute a homogeneous economic or social category. Its juridical unity resulted principally from the application of restrictions founded upon ancestry and color.
By 1790, Saint-Domingue contained approximately 28,000 free people of color, a demographic level comparable to that of the white population. The enslaved population approached 500,000 persons. Certain free-colored families possessed plantations, urban property, livestock, commercial capital and enslaved workers, particularly in the Southern and Western provinces.
The legal condition of Chavannes was therefore determined by the coexistence of civil freedom and political incapacity. He possessed personal freedom but remained subject to a colonial administrative system that restricted participation in public office, political representation, military command and institutional authority.
References:
John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Stewart R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue, University of Georgia Press, 2001.
Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, Philadelphia, 1797–1798.
Article 2 — Military experience
Jean-Baptiste Chavannes is identified in Haitian and Atlantic historiography as having served among the Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue during the French expedition against Savannah in 1779.
The Chasseurs-Volontaires constituted a military formation composed principally of free men of color and commanded by white officers. Approximately five hundred members of the corps participated in the Savannah campaign under the general authority of the comte d’Estaing.
The surviving records establish the existence, composition and deployment of the corps. The individual participation of Chavannes belongs to a persistent historiographical and commemorative attribution, although the preserved nominal documentation of the expedition remains incomplete.
The Savannah campaign provided members of the free-colored militia with experience in expeditionary organization, firearms, military logistics, command structures and coordinated operations. This military competence later became relevant within the internal conflicts of Saint-Domingue.
References:
Nathalie Willson, “The Chasseurs Volontaires de Saint-Domingue in History and Memory,” Kalfou, 2020.
Stewart R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, University of Georgia Press, 2001.
Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, Volume I.
TITLE II — THE OGÉ–CHAVANNES MOVEMENT OF 1790
Article 3 — Constitutional foundation of the claims
Vincent Ogé returned to Saint-Domingue in October 1790 after participating in political representations conducted in France on behalf of the free population of color.
The legal foundation of his demands proceeded from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 and from the metropolitan decrees of 8 and 28 March 1790 concerning the political organization of the colonies.
The movement occurred before the decree of 15 May 1791. That decree cannot therefore be invoked as the original legal basis of the October 1790 mobilization. The execution of Ogé and Chavannes contributed instead to the metropolitan political developments that preceded its adoption.
Ogé sought the political participation of free men of color possessing the qualifications otherwise required of active citizens. His program remained principally directed toward the civil and electoral status of the free-colored class.
Chavannes defended a broader military and social strategy. According to the principal Haitian historical accounts, he proposed the incorporation of enslaved persons into the movement. Ogé rejected that proposal and maintained the limited scope of his original political demands.
The divergence between the two leaders concerned the institutional constituency of the movement. Ogé pursued equal civic capacity for free people of color. Chavannes considered that the colonial system could not be effectively confronted without mobilizing the enslaved majority.
References:
John D. Garrigus, “Vincent Ogé ‘jeune’ (1757–91): Social Class and Free Colored Mobilization on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution,” The Americas, Volume 68, Number 1, 2011, pages 33–62.
Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, Volume I.
Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, Volume I.
Dantès Bellegarde, Histoire du peuple haïtien, 1492–1952.
Article 4 — Armed mobilization and military defeat
Ogé and Chavannes assembled an armed force in the Northern Province. The available accounts differ concerning its precise numerical strength. Edgar La Selve reports approximately 250 men of color operating in the region of Dondon.
The colonial authorities deployed a substantially superior force under Colonel Cambefort, consisting of approximately 1,500 infantrymen supported by artillery. The insurgent formation was defeated and dispersed.
The numerical and logistical imbalance prevented the movement from acquiring territorial control. Its constitutional importance nevertheless exceeded its military duration. It established that the colonial authorities intended to preserve political exclusion despite the property, military service and civil freedom of the petitioning population.
Reference:
Edgar La Selve, Le Pays des Nègres: voyage à Haïti, ancienne partie française de Saint-Domingue, Paris, 1881.
TITLE III — ARREST, TRANSFER AND COLONIAL PROSECUTION
Article 5 — Refuge in Spanish Santo Domingo
Following the defeat of the movement, Ogé, Chavannes and several associates crossed into the Spanish jurisdiction of Santo Domingo.
Edgar La Selve records that Ogé was apprehended at Hincha and that Chavannes was arrested at San Juan. Governor Philibert-François Rouxel de Blanchelande requested their surrender from the Spanish governor Joaquín García.
Vicente de Faura, assessor attached to the Spanish administration, opposed the surrender and intervened in favor of the refugees. The Spanish governor nevertheless authorized their transfer to the French colonial authorities.
The transfer did not arise from a modern extradition convention. It resulted from administrative cooperation between two colonial governments sharing an interest in preventing the establishment of an armed opposition operating across the internal frontier of Hispaniola.
References:
Edgar La Selve, Le Pays des Nègres, Paris, 1881.
Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, Volume I.
Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, Volume I.
Article 6 — Competent jurisdiction
Ogé, Chavannes and their associates were prosecuted before the Superior Council of Le Cap. The proceedings therefore belonged to the ordinary superior judicial structure of colonial Saint-Domingue and did not constitute an improvised military tribunal.
The use of an established jurisdiction supplied formal legality to a proceeding whose political purpose was the elimination of the leadership of the October 1790 movement.
The interrogations were conducted without public transparency. The execution, by contrast, was organized publicly. This distinction demonstrates the governmental function assigned to the punishment: restricted judicial deliberation followed by unrestricted public demonstration.
Reference:
John D. Garrigus, “Vincent Ogé ‘jeune’ (1757–91),” The Americas, Volume 68, Number 1, 2011.
Article 7 — Sentence and execution
The Superior Council of Le Cap condemned Ogé, Chavannes and two principal associates to the supplice de la roue.
The executions occurred at Le Cap in February 1791. The historical literature contains divergent dates within that month. The documentary convergence concerns the nature of the sentence, the breaking of the condemned on the wheel, their decapitation and the public exposure of their heads.
Edgar La Selve records that the head of Ogé was placed on the road toward Dondon and that of Chavannes on the road toward Grande-Rivière. The spatial distribution of the remains was connected directly to the geographic origin of the movement and to the colonial administration’s policy of deterrence.
The proceeding may be juridically classified as a judicial assassination: the use of a competent colonial court and an existing criminal penalty for the political elimination of persons contesting the established distribution of public rights.
References:
Edgar La Selve, Le Pays des Nègres, Paris, 1881.
John D. Garrigus, “Vincent Ogé ‘jeune’ (1757–91),” The Americas, 2011.
Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, Volume I.
Article 8 — Criminal-law framework
The Ordonnance criminelle of August 1670 established the principal procedural framework of French criminal justice under the Ancien Régime. The breaking wheel belonged to the system of aggravated corporal penalties applicable to offenses considered particularly grave.
Colonial criminal justice incorporated these metropolitan penalties while assigning them functions specific to plantation government. Public execution operated as punishment, administrative communication and preservation of the established hierarchy.
The execution of Ogé and Chavannes therefore resulted from the convergence of French criminal procedure, colonial racial government and the political interests of the planter order.
Reference:
Ordonnance criminelle du mois d’août 1670.
TITLE IV — THE COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE OF STATUS
Article 9 — The Code Noir
The Edict of March 1685, generally designated as the Code Noir, established the principal legal framework of slavery in the French Antilles.
It imposed the Catholic religion, regulated baptism, slave marriage, manumission, inheritance, punishment and the proprietary status of enslaved persons. It also prescribed the obligations of slaveholders and established restrictions upon the juridical capacity of the enslaved population.
Article 9 did not establish an unconditional prohibition of every marriage between persons classified by different colors. It principally regulated concubinage between free persons and enslaved women and prescribed sanctions where a master fathered children with a woman held in his ownership.
The political subordination of free people of color resulted from the combined operation of the Code Noir, royal instructions, colonial ordinances, professional exclusions, militia rules, fiscal regulations and administrative practice.
References:
Édit du Roi concernant la discipline des esclaves des îles de l’Amérique française, March 1685.
Louis Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir ou le calvaire de Canaan, Presses Universitaires de France, 1987.
Article 10 — Grands blancs
The grands blancs consisted principally of major plantation proprietors, merchants, shipowners, senior colonial officers and holders of extensive commercial capital.
They exercised predominant influence over the colonial assemblies, superior administrative offices, commercial institutions and plantation credit system. Their political program aimed to preserve both planter autonomy in relation to the metropolitan government and white exclusivity in relation to the free population of color.
Article 11 — Petits blancs
The petits blancs included artisans, shopkeepers, clerks, soldiers, overseers, minor officials and persons without substantial landed property.
Their economic position was frequently inferior to that of prosperous free people of color. Their political position nevertheless remained superior by reason of their classification as white.
This divergence between economic rank and racial status contributed directly to the political hostility directed by portions of the petits blancs against wealthy free-colored proprietors.
Article 12 — Free people of color
The gens de couleur libres possessed civil freedom and could, subject to applicable restrictions, own land, conduct business, enter contracts, inherit property and possess enslaved workers.
Certain free-colored proprietors accumulated substantial agricultural and commercial assets. Quantitative estimates concerning their total share of colonial land and enslaved property vary according to the archival series and calculation method. Their economic significance is nevertheless established by notarial, fiscal, militia and plantation records.
Their political exclusion cannot be interpreted as a direct consequence of poverty or absence of property. It constituted a deliberate administrative policy designed to preserve white monopoly over public authority.
References:
Stewart R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, University of Georgia Press, 2001.
John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971.
Article 13 — Enslaved population
The enslaved African and African-descended population formed the demographic majority and productive foundation of Saint-Domingue.
Its legal status was hereditary through the maternal line. Enslaved persons were subjected to forced labor, sale, transfer, corporal discipline and restrictions upon legal personality.
The colonial economy’s production of sugar, coffee, indigo and cotton depended principally upon the mass importation and compulsory labor of Africans from Senegambia, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra and the Kongo–Angola region.
The legal distinction between the free population of color and the enslaved population remained fundamental. The colonial government nevertheless organized both categories within a common racial hierarchy subordinated to white political authority.
TITLE V — THE DAUMEC–CHAVANNES MATRIMONIAL UNION
Article 14 — Marriage following the execution of Chavannes
After the judicial assassination of Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, Louis-Auguste Daumec married Chavannes’s sister, identified in the transmitted genealogical documentation as Marie-Claire Chavannes.
The marriage is recorded within the Daumec–Chavannes genealogical tradition and in the infrapaginal genealogical notice attributed to L’Espinasse. This notice constitutes the principal published reference associated with the transmission of the matrimonial information.
The marriage must be placed chronologically after the execution of Chavannes in February 1791. It connected the surviving Chavannes family branch to Louis-Auguste Daumec, who subsequently occupied senior legal, constitutional, legislative and diplomatic functions within the independent Haytian State.
Reference:
L’Espinasse, genealogical notice concerning the Daumec–Chavannes family, infrapaginal entry recording the marriage of Louis-Auguste Daumec to the sister of Jean-Baptiste Chavannes.
Article 15 — Juridical nature of the union
The Daumec–Chavannes marriage was first an act of civil and family law. Its historical significance results from the public functions subsequently exercised by Daumec and from the political position occupied by Jean-Baptiste Chavannes before his execution.
The marriage joined two distinct institutional sequences:
the contestation of colonial political incapacity represented by Chavannes;
the construction of the independent Haytian legal order represented by Daumec.
This connection established a genealogical continuity between a family subjected to colonial political repression and a family integrated into the superior magistracy of the post-independence State.
Article 16 — Patrimonial consequences
The marriage consolidated the civil position of the surviving Chavannes branch within the revolutionary and post-independence social order.
The available genealogical tradition attributes to the union a function of patrimonial preservation, family protection and transmission of the Chavannes affiliation through the Daumec line.
These consequences must be understood according to the civil-law institutions of marriage, succession, family representation and patrimonial administration. They do not depend upon symbolic or retrospective interpretation.
TITLE VI — LOUIS-AUGUSTE DAUMEC UNDER THE FIRST EMPIRE
Article 17 — Office of Imperial Prosecutor General
Louis-Auguste Daumec exercised the office of procureur-général impérial under Emperor Jacques I.
Edgar La Selve expressly identifies him in that capacity when describing the legal council through which Dessalines examined projects of legislative reform. La Selve states that, when the council sat at Marchand, its membership included “L. Auguste Daumec, procureur-général impérial.”
This reference establishes Daumec’s official title and participation in the central legal deliberations of the imperial government.
Reference:
Edgar La Selve, Le Pays des Nègres: voyage à Haïti, ancienne partie française de Saint-Domingue, Paris, 1881, page 123.
Article 18 — Participation in imperial legal deliberations
The council described by La Selve included senior secretaries, administrators, magistrates and legal officers. Dessalines presided over its proceedings and caused prior regulations to be read before considering amendments.
Daumec’s participation placed him within the mechanism through which the imperial government examined the relationship between inherited colonial rules and the legislative requirements of the independent State.
His function was therefore prosecutorial and consultative. It concerned the implementation of public authority, the examination of legal provisions and the institutional organization of the First Empire.
TITLE VII — CONSTITUTIONAL AND LEGISLATIVE SERVICE
Article 19 — Constituent Assembly of 1806
Following the death of Dessalines and the termination of the First Empire, Louis-Auguste Daumec participated in the Constituent Assembly that adopted the Constitution of 27 December 1806.
His name appears among the constituent signatures in the abbreviated form “L. Augte. Daumec.”
This signature constitutes direct documentary evidence of his participation in the establishment of the republican constitutional order.
Reference:
Laurent Dubois, Julia Gaffield and Michel Acacia, editors, Constitutional Documents of Haiti, 1790–1860, Constitution of 27 December 1806, pages 80–81.
Article 20 — Senatorial service
Louis-Auguste Daumec entered the first senatorial formation established under the Constitution of 1806.
He represented Port-au-Prince and commenced an initial senatorial term on 28 December 1806. He later returned to the Senate in 1825 and continued to participate in the legislative order during the Boyer administration.
His senatorial service confirms the continuity of his public career across the imperial and republican constitutional regimes.
References:
Official parliamentary lists of the Senate of Hayti.
Recueil général des lois et actes du Gouvernement d’Haïti.
Article 21 — Constitutional revision of 1816
The name “L. Augte. Daumec” also appears in the constitutional documentation associated with the revised Constitution of 1816.
His presence in the records of both 1806 and 1816 establishes his participation in successive phases of constitutional organization.
Reference:
Laurent Dubois, Julia Gaffield and Michel Acacia, editors, Constitutional Documents of Haiti, 1790–1860, Constitution revised in 1816, pages 104–105.
TITLE VIII — JUDICIAL AND DIPLOMATIC FUNCTIONS
Article 22 — Ministry of public prosecution
Judicial notices from the Boyer period identify Louis-Auguste Daumec as exercising the functions of the ministère public in proceedings before the Court of Cassation.
This activity continued the prosecutorial competence previously exercised under the imperial government, while situating it within the republican judicial structure.
Daumec’s institutional career consequently traversed the transition from the Imperial Prosecutor General’s office to the legal institutions of the republic.
References:
Le Télégraphe, Port-au-Prince, 1 September 1825.
Recueil général des lois et actes du Gouvernement d’Haïti.
Article 23 — Diplomatic representation
Louis-Auguste Daumec also participated in the external representation of the Haytian State.
Diplomatic histories identify him among the envoys dispatched to France during the administration of President Jean-Pierre Boyer. These missions formed part of the government’s policy concerning recognition, commercial relations, negotiations with France and the international position of Hayti.
Reference:
Jean Victor Généus, Les grandes dates de l’histoire diplomatique d’Haïti: de la période fondatrice à nos jours, L’Harmattan, 2017.
TITLE IX — CONSTITUTIONAL INCORPORATION BY XARAGUA
Article 24 — Nature of the institutional succession
The Chavannes–Daumec line constitutes a historical and genealogical succession composed of the following elements:
participation by Jean-Baptiste Chavannes in the political and military movement of 1790;
prosecution and execution by the colonial jurisdiction of Le Cap;
marriage of Louis-Auguste Daumec to the sister of Jean-Baptiste Chavannes after the execution;
exercise by Daumec of the office of Imperial Prosecutor General;
participation in the Constituent Assembly of 1806;
membership in the Senate;
participation in the constitutional framework revised in 1816;
exercise of prosecutorial functions before the Court of Cassation;
participation in Haytian diplomatic missions.
The institutional significance of the lineage derives from the cumulative effect of these functions and not from an isolated genealogical assertion.
Article 25 — Recognition within the Xaraguaan legal order
The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua recognizes the Daumec–Chavannes matrimonial union as a constitutive element of its historical and genealogical patrimony.
The union connects the colonial constitutional crisis represented by Chavannes to the post-independence legal administration represented by Daumec.
Within the Xaraguaan legal order, this succession forms part of the historical basis of the Rector-Presidential institution and of the State’s doctrine of continuous juridical capacity.
Article 26 — State Genealogical Register
The marriage of Louis-Auguste Daumec to the sister of Jean-Baptiste Chavannes shall be entered in the State Genealogical Register of Xaragua.
The corresponding archival dossier shall include:
the L’Espinasse genealogical notice recording the marriage;
the relevant Daumec–Chavannes family documentation;
La Selve’s identification of Daumec as Imperial Prosecutor General;
the constitutional signature of Daumec in 1806;
the constitutional documentation of 1816;
the senatorial records;
the cassation records;
the diplomatic records of the Boyer administration;
all available civil, ecclesiastical, notarial and testamentary acts concerning the descendants of the union.
Article 27 — Historical and academic use
The High Commission for Historical, Genealogical and Institutional Continuity shall maintain a distinction between:
primary constitutional and governmental records;
contemporary or near-contemporary historical accounts;
published genealogical notices;
family archival documentation;
later historiographical analysis.
Each category shall be cited according to its documentary status. No source shall be deprived of relevance solely because it belongs to a genealogical or family corpus, provided that its provenance and transmitted function are identified.
SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL FINDINGS
The Supreme Constitutional Authority determines:
First, that Jean-Baptiste Chavannes participated in the armed movement led with Vincent Ogé in October 1790;
Second, that Chavannes defended a broader mobilization than the limited proprietary program initially maintained by Ogé;
Third, that Ogé and Chavannes were transferred from Spanish Santo Domingo to the authorities of Saint-Domingue through intercolonial administrative cooperation;
Fourth, that they were prosecuted and condemned by the Superior Council of Le Cap;
Fifth, that their execution constituted a judicial assassination implemented through the colonial criminal apparatus;
Sixth, that Louis-Auguste Daumec married the sister of Jean-Baptiste Chavannes after the execution;
Seventh, that the matrimonial information is preserved by the genealogical notice attributed to L’Espinasse and by the transmitted Daumec–Chavannes family record;
Eighth, that Louis-Auguste Daumec exercised the office of Imperial Prosecutor General under Jacques I;
Ninth, that Daumec participated in the constitutional settlement of 1806, in the senatorial government and in the constitutional order revised in 1816;
Tenth, that his subsequent judicial and diplomatic functions establish a continuous career within the superior institutions of independent Hayti;
Eleventh, that the Daumec–Chavannes union constitutes a permanent component of the historical, constitutional and genealogical patrimony of Xaragua.
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY AND DOCUMENTARY AUTHORITIES
Ardouin, Beaubrun. Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti. Paris, Dézobry et E. Magdeleine, 1853–1860.
Bellegarde, Dantès. Histoire du peuple haïtien, 1492–1952. Port-au-Prince, 1953.
Code Noir. Édit du Roi concernant la discipline des esclaves des îles de l’Amérique française. March 1685.
Dubois, Laurent; Gaffield, Julia; and Acacia, Michel, editors. Constitutional Documents of Haiti, 1790–1860. Constitutions of 1806 and 1816.
Garrigus, John D. Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Garrigus, John D. “Vincent Ogé ‘jeune’ (1757–91): Social Class and Free Colored Mobilization on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution.” The Americas, Volume 68, Number 1, 2011, pages 33–62.
Généus, Jean Victor. Les grandes dates de l’histoire diplomatique d’Haïti: de la période fondatrice à nos jours. Paris, L’Harmattan, 2017.
Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971.
King, Stewart R. Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2001.
La Selve, Edgar. Le Pays des Nègres: voyage à Haïti, ancienne partie française de Saint-Domingue. Paris, 1881.
L’Espinasse. Genealogical notice concerning the Daumec–Chavannes family; infrapaginal entry recording the marriage of Louis-Auguste Daumec to the sister of Jean-Baptiste Chavannes.
Madiou, Thomas. Histoire d’Haïti. Volume I.
Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric-Louis-Élie. Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue. Philadelphia, 1797–1798.
Ordonnance criminelle du mois d’août 1670.
Recueil général des lois et actes du Gouvernement d’Haïti.
Le Télégraphe. Port-au-Prince, 1 September 1825.
PROMULGATED UNDER THE SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT
ENTERED INTO THE PERMANENT HISTORICAL, GENEALOGICAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL ARCHIVES OF XARAGUA
CLASSIFICATION: SUPREME STATE RECORD — INSTITUTIONAL AND GENEALOGICAL CONTINUITY

THE CHAVANNES–DAUMEC–GEFFRARD FAMILY CONNECTION
The familial connection between the Chavannes and Geffrard lineages was constituted through the marriage of Louis-Auguste Daumec to the sister of Jean-Baptiste Chavannes following the latter’s execution at Le Cap on 25 February 1791. This matrimonial union incorporated the surviving Chavannes family into the kinship structure of Daumec, later Imperial Procurator-General under Jacques I, constituent of 1806, senator, judicial legislator, and plenipotentiary of Hayti. Genealogical notices attributed to L’Espinasse identify this marriage within the broader formation of the Daumec–Geffrard family network.
The union established an institutional connection between two successive generations of Haytian public authority. The Chavannes branch represented the political movement initiated by the free citizens of colour before the general insurrection of 1791; the Daumec branch entered the central legal administration of the Dessalinian Empire and subsequently participated in the constitutional, senatorial, judicial, and diplomatic institutions of the independent State. Through the later integration of the Daumec family into the Geffrard lineage, this combined inheritance was transmitted into the political class from which General Nicolas Geffrard and President Fabre Nicolas Geffrard emerged.
The Geffrard–Chavannes relationship must consequently be understood as a connection established by matrimonial alliance and intergenerational kinship, rather than as an unsupported identity of surnames. Louis-Auguste Daumec occupied the central position within that transmission: husband of Jean-Baptiste Chavannes’s sister, officer of the Dessalinian legal order, and member of the family structure subsequently associated with the Geffrards. The resulting genealogy links the movement of Ogé and Chavannes, the imperial administration of Jacques I, the constitutional institutions organized after 1806, and the nineteenth-century presidency of Fabre Geffrard.
Within the constitutional historiography of Xaragua, the Chavannes–Daumec–Geffrard connection constitutes a documented continuity of family participation in public affairs extending from the late colonial claims for civil equality to the construction and administration of the independent Haytian State. It situates the Geffrard lineage within a pre-independence political genealogy and places the Chavannes inheritance within the subsequent structures of imperial, senatorial, judicial, and presidential authority.
References: Joseph Saint-Rémy, Pétion et Haïti: étude monographique et historique, Paris, 1854–1857; L’Espinasse, genealogical and biographical notice concerning the Daumec and Chavannes families; Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, vols. VII–X; Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, vols. I–III; Edgar La Selve, Le Pays des Nègres, Paris, 1881, p. 123.

This image is the original colonial archive scene of Chavannes and Ogé’s breaking wheel execution, faithfully without alteration.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY — RECTOR-PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE

HIGH COMMISSION FOR HISTORICAL, JUDICIAL, AND INSTITUTIONAL CONTINUITY

SUPREME HISTORICAL AND JURIDICO-CONSTITUTIONAL RECORD ON THE ARREST, SURRENDER, COLONIAL PROSECUTION, JUDICIAL CONDEMNATION, AND EXECUTION OF JEAN-BAPTISTE CHAVANNES AND VINCENT OGÉ

LEGAL AND ARCHIVAL CLASSIFICATION

Foundational Historical Instrument — Record of Colonial Judicial Repression — Constitutional Genealogy of Civil and Political Equality — Documentary Annex to the Historical Doctrine of Xaragua

ARCHIVAL IMAGE PROVISION

The historical representation incorporated into this record shall be preserved and reproduced without graphic alteration. Within the archival order of Xaragua, it constitutes the official iconographic representation associated with the public execution of Jean-Baptiste Chavannes and Vincent Ogé by the colonial authorities of Saint-Domingue.

PREAMBLE

Whereas the political organization undertaken in 1790 by Vincent Ogé and Jean-Baptiste Chavannes arose from the exclusion of free citizens of colour from the civil and political rights proclaimed in metropolitan France following the Revolution of 1789;

Whereas the colonial authorities and representative institutions of Saint-Domingue maintained a juridical hierarchy under which property, education, military service, personal liberty, and economic standing did not secure political equality for persons classified as free people of colour;

Whereas Ogé and Chavannes organized an armed formation in the northern province for the enforcement of political rights claimed under the principles adopted by the French National Assembly;

Whereas the defeat of that movement was followed by their flight into the Spanish jurisdiction of Santo Domingo, their surrender or apprehension by Spanish authorities, their delivery to the French colonial administration, their prosecution before the Superior Council of Le Cap, and their condemnation to execution by breaking on the wheel;

Whereas the proceedings and punishments applied to them demonstrate the use of colonial criminal law as an instrument for preserving a racialized distribution of political authority;

The Supreme Constitutional Authority of Xaragua enters the following historical and juridical determinations into its permanent record.

TITLE I — POLITICAL AND LEGAL CONTEXT OF THE 1790 MOVEMENT

Article 1 — Status of the Free Citizens of Colour

By 1790, Saint-Domingue contained a substantial population of free persons of African and mixed ancestry who possessed civil status, property, commercial interests, military experience, and legally recognized family relations. Certain members of this population owned land, conducted international commerce, practised skilled occupations, and served in colonial military formations.

Their civil position remained restricted by a body of royal regulations, local ordinances, administrative practices, and racial classifications developed during the eighteenth century. These measures limited access to public office, military command, professional status, ceremonial precedence, and effective participation in colonial representative institutions.[1]

The colonial order consequently separated private legal capacity from political membership. A free person of colour could acquire property and assume contractual obligations while remaining excluded from the governing authority that enacted taxes, regulated commerce, controlled the militia, and administered justice.

Article 2 — Political Programme of Vincent Ogé

Vincent Ogé participated in the political activities undertaken in France by representatives of the free citizens of colour. His memoranda and interventions demanded the application of political equality to eligible free property holders without distinction founded upon colour.

The political controversy preceded the decree of 15 May 1791. Ogé’s armed movement occurred in October 1790 and therefore could not have been undertaken to enforce a decree adopted several months later. His demands rested upon the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 26 August 1789, the constitutional debates concerning colonial representation, and the claim that free property holders satisfied the civil qualifications applicable to political participation.[2]

The decree of 15 May 1791, adopted after Ogé and Chavannes had been executed, granted political rights to a limited category of free men of colour born to two free parents. The executions materially influenced the parliamentary climate in which that measure was considered.

Article 3 — Position of Jean-Baptiste Chavannes

Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, associated with Grande-Rivière-du-Nord, possessed military experience attributed to his participation in the expeditionary forces connected with the American War of Independence. He joined Ogé’s movement and became one of its principal military organizers.

Later historical accounts attribute to Chavannes a broader position concerning the mobilization or liberation of the enslaved population. The surviving political record establishes that Ogé confined his formal programme to the rights of free citizens of colour and declined to transform the movement into a general campaign against slavery.

This distinction identifies Chavannes as the more extensive military and social strategist within the association, while Ogé remained primarily attached to a restricted programme of civic equality.

TITLE II — ARMED ORGANIZATION, DEFEAT, AND ENTRY INTO SPANISH TERRITORY

Article 4 — Formation of the Armed Movement

In October 1790, Ogé, Chavannes, and their associates assembled an armed force in the northern province. The movement was directed against the refusal of the colonial authorities to admit free citizens of colour to the political rights claimed under the new French constitutional principles.

The operation did not constitute a foreign invasion or an attempt to transfer Saint-Domingue to another imperial power. It constituted an internal contest concerning civil status, political representation, and the constitutional application of metropolitan legislation within the colony.

Colonial military forces suppressed the movement after a limited series of engagements. Ogé, Chavannes, and a number of their associates crossed into the Spanish-controlled eastern portion of Hispaniola.

Article 5 — Proceedings before the Spanish Authorities

The fugitives entered Spanish territory and sought protection against surrender to the French colonial administration. Their legal situation was examined by the authorities of Santo Domingo, including the Real Audiencia.

The advocate Vicente Faura intervened in their defence and challenged their delivery to the French authorities. The proceedings demonstrate that the case was treated as a matter involving jurisdiction, cross-border surrender, and the status of political fugitives rather than as an automatic police transfer.[3]

The Spanish authorities ultimately rejected the claim to protection. Ogé, Chavannes, and their principal associates were delivered to representatives of French Saint-Domingue in December 1790 and transferred under guard to Le Cap.

Article 6 — Juridical Character of the Transfer

No modern bilateral extradition treaty governed the transfer. The surrender arose from colonial negotiations, imperial administrative practice, and cooperation between neighbouring authorities concerned with preventing armed movements from using the frontier as a protected base.

The decision demonstrated the capacity of competing colonial administrations to cooperate when a political movement threatened the racial and proprietary order maintained on both sides of Hispaniola.

The transfer placed Ogé and Chavannes under the jurisdiction of the Superior Council of Le Cap, the principal sovereign court of the northern province.

TITLE III — THE COLONIAL CRIMINAL PROCEEDINGS

Article 7 — Competent Jurisdiction

The prosecution was conducted before the Conseil supérieur du Cap, not before an improvised military tribunal. The Superior Council exercised appellate and sovereign judicial authority within its territorial jurisdiction and applied the criminal procedure inherited from the French Ancien Régime.

This institutional form did not remove the political character of the proceedings. The members of the colonial judiciary belonged to an order responsible for preserving the colony’s established property relations, governmental authority, and racial classifications.

The court therefore possessed regular jurisdictional form while operating within a legal system structurally committed to the maintenance of colonial supremacy.

Article 8 — Applicable Criminal Procedure

The proceedings remained governed substantially by the Ordonnance criminelle of 1670, promulgated under Louis XIV. That ordinance established a written, secret, and predominantly inquisitorial criminal procedure. It regulated interrogation, evidentiary examination, judicial torture, sentencing, execution, and the limited mechanisms available for contesting a criminal judgment.[4]

The ordinance did not itself create every substantive offence or punishment applied throughout the kingdom. It supplied the procedural architecture through which royal and colonial courts investigated and punished offences defined by legislation, jurisprudence, ordinances, and customary criminal law.

Under this system:

the investigation was principally written and non-public;

judicial officers controlled the collection and evaluation of evidence;

the accused did not possess the complete adversarial guarantees subsequently recognized in modern criminal procedure;

judicial torture could be used under specified conditions;

sovereign courts pronounced sentences carrying immediate and exemplary effects;

punishment was conceived as a public manifestation of royal and judicial authority.

Article 9 — Legal Characterization of the Conduct

The prosecution treated the formation of an unauthorized armed body, resistance to colonial forces, disturbance of public order, and challenge to established governmental authority as offences requiring exemplary punishment.

The judicial record did not concern an ordinary dispute between private persons. It concerned an organized challenge to the political distribution of authority in the colony. The proceedings were therefore situated at the intersection of criminal law, colonial security, racial regulation, and constitutional conflict.

The court’s treatment of the case converted a political demand for equality into a criminal attack upon the colonial order.

Article 10 — Defence and Procedural Position

The accused did not benefit from the institutional protections later associated with public trial, full access to the prosecution record, independent defence counsel, oral contradiction of all evidence, or appellate review by a separate constitutional jurisdiction.

Their prosecution occurred within the ordinary procedural limitations of the Ancien Régime criminal system, intensified by the political interests of the colonial government and the demand for rapid suppression of the movement.

The resulting judgment possessed the formal authority of a sovereign colonial court while remaining inseparable from the governmental objective of preventing further political organization among free citizens of colour.

TITLE IV — SENTENCE AND PUBLIC EXECUTION

Article 11 — Condemnation by the Superior Council

In February 1791, the Superior Council of Le Cap condemned Vincent Ogé and Jean-Baptiste Chavannes to death by breaking on the wheel. Additional participants received capital sentences, penal servitude, imprisonment, or other punishments according to their alleged degree of involvement.[5]

Historical publications differ concerning the precise civil date assigned to the principal execution. The authoritative tradition places the execution during February 1791, commonly on 25 February, at Le Cap. The constitutional significance of the event arises from the judgment, the method of execution, its public character, and the governmental use of the sentence as a deterrent against collective political action.

Article 12 — Legal Doctrine of the Breaking Wheel

The supplice de la roue belonged to the penal repertoire of the French monarchy. The condemned person was secured to a scaffold or cross-shaped frame, and the executioner fractured designated limbs by successive blows. The body was then placed upon a wheel for the completion of the sentence in the manner specified by the judgment or accompanying execution order.

The punishment operated simultaneously upon the physical body, civil status, public reputation, and memory of the condemned. Its legal function was exemplary: the sovereign authority displayed the destruction of the offender as a declaration of the continued force of the established order.

Applied to Ogé and Chavannes, the breaking wheel communicated that legal freedom, property, education, military service, and metropolitan political connections would not protect a person classified as non-white from the highest punitive authority of the colonial judiciary.

Article 13 — Public Character of the Execution

The execution was conducted publicly at Le Cap in the presence of colonial authorities and representatives of the provincial political order. Public attendance formed part of the juridical function of punishment under the Ancien Régime.

The execution was intended to produce a collective institutional effect extending beyond the persons condemned. It notified free citizens of colour, enslaved persons, colonial militia officers, proprietors, merchants, and public officials that armed resistance to the racial and political constitution of Saint-Domingue would be prosecuted as an offence against the established order.

Article 14 — Disposition of the Remains

Historical accounts record the decapitation of Ogé following the execution and the public exposure of his head as an additional measure of deterrence. Certain later narratives also describe the division or territorial exhibition of bodily remains.

Only dispositions established by the judicial sentence, contemporaneous administrative records, or sufficiently attributable historical accounts shall be entered as specific archival findings. The constitutional classification does not depend upon unverified descriptions of each physical act. The sentence to the wheel, the public execution, and the exemplary use of the bodies are sufficient to establish the juridical nature of the punishment.

TITLE V — COLONIAL JUDICIAL TERROR AS A SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT

Article 15 — Instrumentalization of Criminal Jurisdiction

The prosecution of Ogé and Chavannes demonstrates the operation of criminal jurisdiction as an instrument for preserving the constitutional structure of colonial society.

The legal system of Saint-Domingue distributed authority according to civil status, freedom, ancestry, colour, property, and proximity to European political power. Criminal punishment protected this distribution by attaching superior penalties to conduct capable of reorganizing political membership.

The proceedings therefore constituted more than the prosecution of an armed disturbance. They secured the continued exclusion of free citizens of colour from the effective institutions of government.

Article 16 — Racialization of an Existing Penal System

The methods used against Ogé and Chavannes were not invented in Saint-Domingue. Breaking on the wheel, hanging, branding, mutilation, exposure, penal servitude, and public execution belonged to the penal traditions of early modern Europe.

Colonialism transferred these institutions into a plantation society and applied them through an increasingly racialized legal order. The pre-existing punitive authority of the European State was thereby combined with the economic requirements of slavery and the political demands of a white colonial minority.

The colonial system produced a differentiated penal administration:

enslaved persons were subject to the disciplinary authority of proprietors and the special provisions of colonial slave law;

free persons of colour remained civilly free but politically subordinated;

white inhabitants possessed superior status, although poor Europeans, soldiers, sailors, servants, and indentured labourers remained exposed to corporal and criminal punishment;

colonial officers and proprietors retained disproportionate influence within the institutions responsible for legislation, policing, prosecution, and judgment.

Article 17 — The Code Noir and Colonial Police Regulations

The Édit du Roi concernant la discipline des esclaves des îles de l’Amérique française of March 1685, conventionally designated as the Code Noir, established the principal legal framework governing slavery in the French Antilles. It regulated Catholic baptism, marriage, property incapacity, punishment, manumission, and the obligations formally imposed upon slaveholders.[6]

The status of free citizens of colour was subsequently affected by royal declarations, ministerial instructions, colonial ordinances, police regulations, and administrative practices adopted during the eighteenth century. These measures attempted to preserve the distinction between white political supremacy and the increasing wealth and education of free non-white families.

The execution of Ogé and Chavannes represented the criminal enforcement of the same political separation maintained by civil and administrative regulation.

Article 18 — Plantation Discipline and Public Authority

The plantation system incorporated coercion into the ordinary administration of production. Work discipline, confinement, corporal punishment, surveillance, and pursuit of fugitives were exercised through the combined authority of proprietors, managers, overseers, militia formations, police officers, and colonial courts.

The boundary between private economic discipline and public penal authority remained structurally limited. Colonial law delegated substantial coercive authority to proprietors while preserving the jurisdiction of public courts over conduct classified as criminal, rebellious, or threatening to general security.

The execution of Ogé and Chavannes marked the intervention of the highest colonial judicial authority where the alleged threat extended from plantation discipline to the political constitution of the colony.

TITLE VI — EUROPEAN JURIDICAL GENEALOGY OF EXEMPLARY PUNISHMENT

Article 19 — Roman Public Authority and the Right of Punishment

Roman public law developed the concept of ius gladii, signifying the authority to impose capital punishment in the name of the sovereign order. Roman penal practice differentiated among citizens, non-citizens, enslaved persons, soldiers, and persons convicted of offences against the State.

Crucifixion, forced labour, exposure to beasts, decapitation, confiscation, exile, and other penalties were assigned according to status and offence. Public punishment communicated the supremacy of the Roman political order and the consequences of rebellion.

The later European monarchies did not receive a single, unchanged Roman penal system. They inherited and reconstructed Roman legal concepts through canon law, royal legislation, feudal jurisdiction, customary law, and the jurisprudence of centralized States.

Article 20 — Medieval and Early Modern Punitive Jurisdiction

Medieval European jurisdictions recognized multiple centres of punitive authority, including royal courts, seigneurial tribunals, municipal jurisdictions, and ecclesiastical courts. Public execution and corporal punishment operated as visible declarations of jurisdiction.

The consolidation of early modern monarchies progressively centralized criminal authority. In France, the royal ordinances of the seventeenth century standardized procedure and strengthened judicial administration. The Ordonnance criminelle of 1670 formed part of this process of State consolidation.

The punishment imposed upon Ogé and Chavannes therefore belonged to an established European juridical tradition in which the body of the condemned became the medium through which public authority represented its sovereignty.

Article 21 — Christianity, Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction, and Temporal Punishment

Christian doctrine established principles concerning human dignity, repentance, mercy, and the moral limitation of temporal authority. Historical Christian institutions nevertheless operated within imperial and monarchical systems that authorized coercion and severe punishment.

Ecclesiastical courts, secular rulers, theologians, and canonists developed differing positions concerning coercion, heresy, public order, slavery, and the relationship between spiritual correction and temporal punishment.

Colonial Saint-Domingue combined formal Catholic establishment with slavery, racial regulation, and exemplary criminal punishment. The contradiction was institutional: a colony legally committed to Catholic uniformity simultaneously maintained a system in which Christian baptism did not abolish enslavement or secure political equality.

Article 22 — Byzantine and Western Penal Development

The Christianization of the Roman Empire contributed to restrictions upon gladiatorial combat and transformed the legal and cultural status of public blood spectacles. The abolition of gladiatorial institutions did not produce a complete suppression of corporal or capital punishment within the Eastern Roman Empire.

Byzantine law continued to recognize execution, corporal penalties, mutilation, exile, confiscation, and penal sanctions, although the forms, frequency, and justificatory doctrines changed across successive periods.

The distinction between Eastern and Western legal development must therefore be stated institutionally rather than absolutely. Both traditions inherited Roman coercive authority; each reorganized that inheritance through different imperial, ecclesiastical, administrative, and customary structures.

The penal system transferred to Saint-Domingue derived specifically from the French monarchy, Roman-canonical procedure, French customary law, royal legislation, and the administrative requirements of Atlantic colonial government.

TITLE VII — RACIAL CLASSIFICATION AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF WHITE POLITICAL SUPREMACY

Article 23 — Absence of a Modern White Legal Identity in Antiquity

Ancient Roman law did not organize citizenship through the modern juridical category of whiteness. It distinguished principally among citizens, non-citizens, freed persons, enslaved persons, provincials, soldiers, and persons governed by particular municipal or imperial statuses.

The Constitutio Antoniniana of 212 extended Roman citizenship to the great majority of free inhabitants of the Empire. It did not abolish slavery, social hierarchy, religious distinction, gender inequality, or imperial domination, but it demonstrates that Roman citizenship was not legally restricted by a modern white racial classification.[7]

Article 24 — Religious and Genealogical Exclusion

Medieval and early modern European societies employed distinctions founded upon religion, lineage, legitimacy, locality, estate, occupation, and legal status. The Iberian doctrines of limpieza de sangre supplied an important precedent for the transformation of religious ancestry into an inherited legal condition.

These genealogical classifications, together with the legal differentiation of Christians, Muslims, Jews, captives, foreigners, and subject peoples, contributed to the institutional vocabulary later adapted to Atlantic conquest and colonization.

Article 25 — Papal Instruments and Overseas Conquest

The pontifical instruments Dum Diversas of 1452 and Romanus Pontifex of 1455 authorized the Portuguese Crown to wage war against designated non-Christian powers, occupy territories, and reduce certain opponents to perpetual servitude. The bulls formed part of the juridical and theological environment within which European maritime expansion was conducted.[8]

The Spanish and Portuguese imperial systems subsequently combined pontifical grants, royal sovereignty, military occupation, commercial monopoly, missionary jurisdiction, and legal doctrines of conquest.

The modern racial order did not arise from a single document. It developed through the cumulative interaction of religious exclusion, hereditary status, imperial warfare, forced labour, commercial slavery, colonial legislation, and European claims to jurisdiction over non-European peoples.

Article 26 — Colonial Codification of Whiteness

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, colonial legislation increasingly transformed European ancestry and white classification into sources of public privilege.

In Saint-Domingue, whiteness operated as a juridical and political status conferring privileged access to representative authority, military rank, public office, ceremonial precedence, and institutional credibility. The category acquired legal force through the interaction of royal law, colonial ordinances, administrative practice, and social enforcement.

The execution of Ogé and Chavannes demonstrated that economic integration and legal freedom did not extinguish the political boundary established by racial classification.

Article 27 — Enlightenment Classification and Colonial Government

European naturalists and philosophers of the eighteenth century developed classificatory systems that divided humanity into named varieties or races. Carl Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach became central figures in this intellectual history.[9]

These classifications did not independently create colonial domination. They supplied an increasingly secular vocabulary through which inherited systems of conquest, slavery, and civil inequality could be represented as natural differences among human populations.

Saint-Domingue thus combined three institutional orders:

monarchical criminal law;

plantation slavery and mercantile extraction;

racial classification as a system of political distribution.

TITLE VIII — POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE EXECUTIONS

Article 28 — Consequences in Metropolitan France

The prosecution and execution of Ogé and Chavannes entered the debates of revolutionary France concerning the political rights of free citizens of colour.

The Société des Amis des Noirs, the Cercle social, the representatives of the colonial lobby, and members of the National Assembly interpreted the events according to conflicting constitutional programmes.

For the defenders of political equality, the executions demonstrated that colonial institutions would not voluntarily implement the universal language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. For the colonial lobby, the armed movement demonstrated the alleged necessity of preserving local legislative autonomy and the racial organization of Saint-Domingue.

The decree of 15 May 1791 granting political rights to free men of colour born to free parents emerged from this conflict.

Article 29 — Consequences among Free Citizens of Colour

The execution terminated the immediate movement led by Ogé and Chavannes but did not terminate the constitutional claim it represented.

Free citizens of colour subsequently organized military and political formations under leaders including André Rigaud, Alexandre Pétion, Beauvais, Pinchinat, and others. Their actions contributed to the concordats and legislative conflicts of 1791–1792 and to the progressive destruction of the colonial monopoly of political rights.

The prosecution therefore failed in its strategic purpose. It eliminated the principal defendants while accelerating the transformation of a petition for restricted civic equality into an organized contest for political and military authority.

Article 30 — Relationship to the General Insurrection

The general uprising of the enslaved population in the northern plain began in August 1791 under conditions distinct from the political programme of Ogé. It arose from plantation slavery, African military and religious organization, maroon resistance, local networks, and the destabilization of colonial authority.

The executions of Ogé and Chavannes formed part of the immediate political environment preceding the uprising. They demonstrated the incapacity of the colonial government to resolve even the limited claims of free property holders through constitutional accommodation.

The executions must therefore be classified as a material stage in the decomposition of colonial legitimacy, without reducing the autonomous organization of the enslaved population to a derivative response.

TITLE IX — CHAVANNES, DAUMEC, AND THE FAMILY CONTINUITY OF PUBLIC AUTHORITY

Article 31 — Preservation of the Chavannes Lineage

The execution of Jean-Baptiste Chavannes did not extinguish the civil, genealogical, or political continuity of his family. Genealogical notices associated with L’Espinasse identify the subsequent marriage of Chavannes’s sister to Louis-Auguste Daumec.

Daumec later served as Imperial Procurator-General under Jacques I, member of the imperial council at Marchand, constituent signatory of the Constitution of 1806, senator, President of the Senate, architect of superior judicial administration, member of the national codification commission, and plenipotentiary of Hayti to France in 1825.

The marriage incorporated the surviving Chavannes branch into a family structure occupying central positions within the independent State.

Article 32 — Connection with the Geffrard Lineage

Through matrimonial and intergenerational relations, the Chavannes–Daumec family entered the wider Geffrard network from which General Nicolas Geffrard and President Fabre Nicolas Geffrard subsequently emerged.

This connection establishes an institutional sequence extending across four historical stages:

the political movement of Ogé and Chavannes in 1790;

the Dessalinian imperial administration after 1804;

the constitutional and judicial institutions established after 1806;

the nineteenth-century governmental authority associated with the Geffrard lineage.

The family connection constitutes a documented mechanism of political continuity through which the memory, alliances, legal competence, and public authority of the Chavannes branch were incorporated into the governing structures of independent Hayti.

TITLE X — CONSTITUTIONAL DETERMINATIONS OF XARAGUA

Article 33 — Classification of the Proceedings

The arrest, transfer, prosecution, and execution of Jean-Baptiste Chavannes and Vincent Ogé are classified within the constitutional historiography of Xaragua as:

an exercise of intercolonial cooperation against a political movement contesting racial exclusion;

a sovereign criminal proceeding conducted by the Superior Council of Le Cap;

an application of Ancien Régime criminal procedure within a racialized colonial jurisdiction;

an exemplary public punishment intended to preserve the established political order;

a judicial termination of claims arising from the principle of civil equality;

a foundational event in the constitutional decomposition of French Saint-Domingue;

a direct antecedent to the military and political reorganization that culminated in the independence of Hayti.

Article 34 — Institutional Significance

The proceedings establish that colonial law did not merely regulate existing relations. It actively constituted the categories through which political authority, civil capacity, racial status, and penal exposure were distributed.

Ogé and Chavannes were not excluded from political authority because they lacked property, education, military experience, or legal freedom. They were excluded because the colonial constitution reserved superior political status for the white population and treated collective opposition to that reservation as a threat to public order.

Their execution therefore belongs to the constitutional history of the State and not solely to the history of criminal punishment.

Article 35 — Incorporation into the Supreme Record of Xaragua

Jean-Baptiste Chavannes is incorporated into the historical doctrine of Xaragua as a military organizer of the 1790 movement, advocate of a broader mobilization against colonial subordination, and founding member of a lineage subsequently connected through Louis-Auguste Daumec to the imperial, senatorial, judicial, diplomatic, and presidential institutions of Hayti.

Vincent Ogé is incorporated as the principal political representative of the 1790 claim for equality among qualified free citizens of colour and as the author of a constitutional challenge that exposed the incompatibility between the universal declarations of revolutionary France and the racial government of Saint-Domingue.

Their joint prosecution constitutes a foundational archival record concerning the use of colonial jurisdiction against the political reconstitution of the people of Hayti.

SELECTED PRIMARY AND LEGAL AUTHORITIES

[1] Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, Philadelphia, 1797–1798.

[2] Vincent Ogé, Motion faite par M. Vincent Ogé jeune à l’Assemblée des colons, habitants de Saint-Domingue, à l’hôtel de Massiac, Paris, 1789; Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, 26 August 1789; Decree of the National Assembly concerning free persons of colour, 15 May 1791.

[3] Records of the Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo concerning Ogé, Chavannes, and their associates, 1790; historical notice concerning the intervention of Vicente Faura.

[4] Ordonnance criminelle du mois d’août 1670, registered by the Parlement of Paris on 26 August 1670 and effective from 1 January 1671.

[5] Arrêt du Conseil supérieur du Cap portant condamnation de Vincent Ogé, Jean-Baptiste Chavannes et leurs coaccusés, February 1791.

[6] Édit du Roi concernant la discipline des esclaves des îles de l’Amérique française, March 1685, conventionally designated as the Code Noir.

[7] Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book LXXVIII; Constitutio Antoniniana, 212; Roman juridical materials concerning citizenship and personal status.

[8] Pope Nicholas V, Dum Diversas, 18 June 1452; Romanus Pontifex, 8 January 1455.

[9] Carl Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, editions beginning in 1735; Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, De generis humani varietate nativa, 1775 and subsequent editions.

SELECTED HISTORICAL AND SCHOLARLY AUTHORITIES

[10] Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, volume I, Port-au-Prince.

[11] Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, volume I, Paris.

[12] Joseph Saint-Rémy, Pétion et Haïti: étude monographique et historique, Paris, 1854–1857.

[13] John D. Garrigus, “Vincent Ogé ‘Jeune’ (1757–1791): Social Class and Free Colored Mobilization on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution,” The Americas, volume 68, no. 1, 2011.

[14] Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Harvard University Press, 2004.

[15] Jeremy D. Popkin, A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

[16] David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, Indiana University Press, 2002.

[17] Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison, Paris, Gallimard, 1975, concerning exemplary punishment and the public representation of sovereign penal authority.

[18] Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, Verso, 2018.

ENTERED INTO THE SUPREME HISTORICAL AND JURIDICO-CONSTITUTIONAL RECORD OF XARAGUA

UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT

SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY — RECTOR-PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA
SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY — RECTOR-PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE
HIGH COMMISSION FOR MARITIME HISTORY, TERRITORIAL CONTINUITY, AND COLONIAL INSTITUTIONAL STUDIES
SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AND HISTORICAL DOCTRINE ON STATE-AUTHORIZED CORSAIRSHIP, COLONIAL STRATIFICATION, AND THE SOCIO-POLITICAL ORDER OF JÉRÉMIE
THE INSTITUTIONAL EXEMPLAR OF JACQUES KANON
LEGAL AND ARCHIVAL CLASSIFICATION
Constitutional-Historical Instrument — Maritime Jurisdictional Doctrine — Record of Delegated Naval Warfare — Colonial Property and Plantation Archive — Territorial History of the Grand’Anse and the Xaragua Region
PREAMBLE
Whereas the constitutional history of French Saint-Domingue cannot be interpreted independently of the maritime institutions through which the Bourbon Crown projected military authority, protected colonial commerce, disrupted enemy navigation, and delegated defined operations of naval warfare to private shipowners and commissioned commanders;
Whereas the French system of guerre de course, regulated by royal commissions, maritime ordinances, prize jurisdiction, and Admiralty procedure, constituted an authorized component of State warfare and remained juridically distinct from piracy conducted without sovereign commission;
Whereas Jacques Kanon, born at Blaye on 5 January 1726 and deceased at Bordeaux on 11 May 1800, served successively as seaman, pilot, privateer commander, officer of royal vessels, commercial captain, bourgeois of Bordeaux, and plantation proprietor in the district of Jérémie;
Whereas Kanon’s transition from maritime service to plantation ownership demonstrates the conversion of capital, technical competence, military commission, and transatlantic commercial experience into colonial property;
Whereas the Voldrogue and Guinodée estates associated with Kanon formed part of the plantation economy established within the western and southern territories historically incorporated into the geographical order of Xaragua;
Whereas Jérémie developed as a colonial port, parish, commercial jurisdiction, plantation centre, and strategic maritime dependency characterized by pronounced distinctions of civil status, property, ancestry, colour, freedom, occupation, and access to public authority;
The Supreme Constitutional Authority of Xaragua hereby enters the following historical, maritime, territorial, and juridical findings into its permanent constitutional record.
TITLE I — THE JURIDICAL ORDER OF FRENCH CORSAIRSHIP
Article 1 — Definition of the Guerre de Course
Under the French monarchical legal order, corsairship constituted a form of privately financed or privately operated maritime warfare conducted pursuant to an authorization issued by the sovereign authority.
The commission, commonly designated as a lettre de marque, lettre de course, or related maritime authorization, conferred a limited public character upon a privately equipped vessel. The commission did not transfer general sovereign authority to the shipowner or captain. It authorized specifically defined operations against enemy vessels during an existing state of war and subjected captured property to adjudication before the competent prize jurisdiction.
The legal validity of a capture depended upon:
the existence and scope of the sovereign commission;
the nationality and legal status of the vessel seized;
observance of the limitations imposed by the commission and maritime ordinances;
delivery of the captured vessel and cargo to a competent port;
judicial determination by the Admiralty or prize authority;
distribution of the proceeds according to the applicable regulations, agreements, and fiscal obligations.
Corsairship therefore constituted delegated naval belligerency under continuing State supervision.
Article 2 — The Marine Ordinance of 1681
The Ordonnance de la marine of August 1681, promulgated under Louis XIV and associated with the administrative programme of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, consolidated a substantial body of French maritime law. It regulated navigation, seamen, shipmasters, chartering, insurance, maritime police, wrecks, Admiralty jurisdiction, and related commercial matters.[1]
The ordinance addressed letters of marque and reprisals but did not, by itself, exhaust the law applicable to wartime privateering. The legal regime of the guerre de course was completed by declarations, regulations, wartime ordinances, Admiralty practice, commissions, and prize judgments adopted under successive governments.
The French Crown thereby maintained the power to determine:
which private vessels could participate in maritime hostilities;
the enemies against whom operations were authorized;
the duration and territorial reach of the commission;
the procedure for seizure and adjudication;
the distribution of prizes;
the penalties applicable to unauthorized capture.
Article 3 — Constitutional Function of Corsairship
Corsairship permitted the monarchy to increase its operational naval capacity without assuming the entire cost of constructing, equipping, provisioning, and maintaining a corresponding number of royal warships.
Private capital assumed the initial financial risk. The Crown supplied the legal commission, strategic legitimacy, diplomatic framework, prize jurisdiction, and authority to convert a captured enemy vessel into lawfully distributable property.
The institution consequently joined public sovereignty to private capital. It externalized a portion of the material cost of warfare while preserving the Crown’s control over the juridical production of legitimacy.
The corsair was neither an independent sovereign nor an ordinary mercenary. He constituted a privately supported belligerent temporarily incorporated into the public maritime war effort through a revocable and regulated commission.
TITLE II — JURIDICAL DISTINCTION BETWEEN CORSAIRSHIP AND PIRACY
Article 4 — Commissioned Corsair
A commissioned corsair operated under the authority of an identifiable sovereign and within the limits established by his commission. His captures required judicial validation. Compliance with the commission could entitle the captain, crew, shipowner, investors, and State to defined portions of the proceeds.
The commission altered the legal classification of maritime violence. An act that would otherwise constitute unlawful depredation could become an authorized act of war when performed against a lawful enemy, within the temporal and material limits of the commission, and subject to prize adjudication.
Article 5 — Pirate
A pirate conducted maritime depredation without a valid sovereign commission or beyond the limits of any commission possessed. Piracy was directed against navigation as such and was not confined to the enemies designated by a commissioning State.
The later international-law designation of the pirate as hostis humani generis expressed the principle that piracy, occurring beyond the authority of a particular sovereign and threatening navigation generally, could be suppressed by multiple States.
The decisive juridical distinction concerned neither the degree of violence nor the private pursuit of profit. It concerned the existence of public authorization, the identity of lawful targets, continuing submission to State regulation, and judicial control over captured property.
Article 6 — Buccaneers and Flibustiers
The seventeenth-century buccaneers and flibustiers of Île de la Tortue occupied a variable position between informal warfare, colonial toleration, privateering, contraband, and piracy.
Some operated under commissions issued by French, English, or other colonial authorities. Others acted without valid authorization. The same commander could therefore be classified differently according to the date, commission, enemy, and operation under examination.
Île de la Tortue functioned as an early strategic platform for attacks upon Spanish navigation and possessions. As French territorial administration became more regular, the Crown progressively subjected maritime violence to commissions, gubernatorial control, Admiralty proceedings, and the wider institutional order of Saint-Domingue.
The transition from buccaneer settlement to regulated colony represented the conversion of irregular maritime coercion into an instrument of metropolitan State policy.
TITLE III — JACQUES KANON: MARITIME FORMATION AND ROYAL SERVICE
Article 7 — Birth and Early Maritime Career
Jacques Kanon was born in the parish of Saint-Sauveur at Blaye on 5 January 1726. He was the son of Antoine Kanon, a ship captain, and Catherine Roquillet. His professional formation occurred within the maritime world connecting Bordeaux, Dunkirk, Brest, the French Antilles, and the Atlantic routes.
His documented service began at a young age. Between 1738 and the middle of the 1740s, he served successively as cabin boy, boatman, novice, pilot’s assistant, seaman, and second pilot aboard vessels travelling between Bordeaux, Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and European ports.[2]
During the War of the Austrian Succession, he served aboard royal and private vessels, including the corvette Mercure-Anglais, the Mouche, the Comte-de-Maurepas, and the Charmante. His career therefore developed within the institutional intersection of commercial navigation, private maritime armament, and royal warfare.
Article 8 — Privateer Command during the Seven Years’ War
At the beginning of the Seven Years’ War, Kanon commanded the privateer Prince-de-Soubise. Contemporary research identifies him as an active privateer commander in the Channel during the opening phase of the conflict.
His career subsequently included command or officer service aboard vessels connected with the defence and provisioning of New France, including the royal frigate La Valeur and the Machault. He received the rank of lieutenant de frégate at Bordeaux on 8 June 1757 and that of capitaine de brûlot on 25 January 1760.[3]
His service demonstrates that privateering and royal naval activity were not institutionally sealed categories. Experienced commercial captains and privateer officers could be incorporated into royal operations when the strategic requirements of the Crown demanded their navigation, command, and combat experience.
Article 9 — Defence of New France
Kanon participated in maritime operations connected with New France during the Seven Years’ War. These operations occurred within an Atlantic military system in which the defence of Canada depended upon vessels, crews, armaments, provisions, and capital mobilized through French metropolitan ports.
His service linked the Gironde and Channel maritime economy to the military requirements of Québec and the Saint Lawrence. It placed Kanon within the broader structure through which the Bourbon monarchy used royal vessels, commissioned private shipping, commercial captains, and private investors to sustain an overseas theatre of war.
The Treaty of Paris of 10 February 1763 terminated the principal conflict and confirmed the loss of most French possessions in continental North America. Kanon thereafter redirected his activities toward Atlantic commerce and Saint-Domingue.
TITLE IV — FROM MARITIME COMMAND TO COLONIAL PROPERTY
Article 10 — Commercial and Bourgeois Status
Kanon’s maritime service enabled him to accumulate professional standing, commercial connections, and capital. He acquired bourgeois status at Bordeaux on 25 September 1765 and participated in commercial navigation to Saint-Domingue.
His later commands included voyages aboard the Intrépide, the Roy-de-Kabinde, the Mangoff, and the Grande-Anse. These voyages demonstrate continued involvement in the commercial circuits connecting Bordeaux to Cap-Français, Port-au-Prince, Jérémie, and other Atlantic ports.
Kanon’s transition was therefore not an immediate conversion from wartime capture to plantation ownership. It proceeded through a sustained career incorporating maritime employment, royal service, commercial command, urban property, investment, and family enterprise.
Article 11 — Establishment at Jérémie
In January 1772, Kanon departed Bordeaux aboard the Grande-Anse with members of his family and established himself in the district of Jérémie. The passenger documentation identified his wife, Pétronille Goddé, his daughter Antoinette-Françoise Kanon, and his sister-in-law Anne-Marie Goddé.[4]
He settled in the Voldrogue region and developed a substantial sugar establishment. His activities included plantation production, commercial storage, urban leasing, and association with his son-in-law Jean Chalmette, who possessed a sugar establishment at Grande-Rivière.
Kanon remained identified as an habitant à la Voldrogue in documentation dated 23 July 1788.
Article 12 — Acquisition on the Guinodée River
On 21 February 1778, Kanon acquired an additional plantation situated north of the Guinodée River for twelve thousand colonial livres, payable in three instalments of four thousand livres.
The notarial description recorded approximately forty-nine carreaux of land with existing improvements. The property had previously belonged to Joseph-Marie Masse and had passed through an earlier transaction involving Marguerite Laroche, identified in the record as a free woman of colour.[5]
This transfer demonstrates that the colonial property market of Jérémie involved transactions among metropolitan merchants, resident planters, free persons of colour, notaries, creditors, and family interests. Property circulation did not abolish racial hierarchy, but it produced legal and economic relations more complex than a single binary division between whites and non-whites.
Article 13 — Urban and Maritime Commercial Property
In June 1778, Kanon leased rooms on the rue de la Marine at Jérémie and acquired a commercial warehouse situated near the shoreline within the zone designated as the cinquante pas du Roi.
These transactions integrated the plantation into the port economy. Sugar production required access to storage, shipping, credit, insurance, commercial correspondence, and maritime transportation. The economic unit therefore comprised more than cultivated land: it joined the rural plantation to the urban port and the Atlantic merchant network.
Article 14 — Enslaved Labour and Marronage
Kanon’s plantation economy depended upon enslaved labour. A notice published in July 1791 recorded the flight from his establishment of nine men identified as belonging to Bambara and Mandingue nations and two enslaved women, for a total of eleven persons.[6]
The notice establishes three material facts:
the Kanon estate participated directly in the slave plantation system;
the enslaved population retained African ethnonyms within colonial documentation;
organized flight and marronage constituted a continuing rejection of plantation authority.
Kanon must consequently be classified not only as a former corsair and maritime officer but also as a colonial proprietor whose productive establishment operated through legally enforced slavery.
TITLE V — JÉRÉMIE AS A COLONIAL AND TERRITORIAL ORDER
Article 15 — Formation of the Colonial District
Jérémie developed during the eighteenth century as a parish, port, commercial centre, and administrative dependency within the southern province of Saint-Domingue. The parish registers of Saint-Louis de Jérémie were regularly established from 1725.
The district’s geography favoured a diversified plantation economy. Sugar production existed alongside coffee, cotton, indigo, livestock, provisioning agriculture, and coastal commerce. The mountainous terrain and dispersed settlements distinguished the Grand’Anse from the more concentrated sugar plains of the northern province.
Moreau de Saint-Méry’s late-eighteenth-century description recorded a substantial enslaved majority, a white minority, and a free population of African and mixed ancestry within the wider dependencies of Jérémie.[7]
Article 16 — Civil and Racial Classification
The colonial order classified inhabitants according to freedom, legal condition, ancestry, colour, legitimacy, property, occupation, and relationship to metropolitan authority.
The principal legal categories included:
white inhabitants;
free persons of colour;
emancipated persons;
enslaved persons;
temporary European residents;
soldiers, sailors, merchants, artisans, managers, and indentured labourers;
royal and colonial officers.
These categories did not form three internally uniform castes. Considerable distinctions existed within each classification according to wealth, family alliance, education, property, military rank, place of birth, commercial influence, and proximity to governmental authority.
Article 17 — The Code Noir and Subsequent Regulation
The Édit of March 1685, conventionally designated as the Code Noir, principally regulated slavery, Catholic baptism, marriage, punishment, property incapacity, manumission, and the obligations formally imposed upon proprietors.
It did not constitute a complete code governing every aspect of the status of all non-white persons. The increasingly restrictive position of free persons of colour developed through additional royal declarations, ministerial instructions, colonial ordinances, police regulations, judicial decisions, and administrative practices adopted during the eighteenth century.[8]
This regulatory corpus restricted access to military commissions, public functions, certain professions, ceremonial privileges, and symbols associated with white status. Its political purpose was to preserve the superior public position of the white population despite the growing property, education, and commercial influence of free families of colour.
Article 18 — Jérémie and the Free Proprietors of Colour
The district of Jérémie contained a significant class of free proprietors of African and mixed ancestry. Their participation in landholding, coffee cultivation, local commerce, family alliances, and credit relations gave them substantial economic importance.
Their economic capacity did not produce equivalent access to public authority. The contradiction between private property and political exclusion became a major source of conflict during the revolutionary period.
Jérémie accordingly became one of the principal theatres in which white colonial proprietors and free citizens of colour contested militia authority, representation, land, security, and the future constitutional organization of Saint-Domingue.
TITLE VI — INTERNAL HIERARCHIES OF THE WHITE COLONIAL POPULATION
Article 19 — Grands Blancs and Commercial-Plantation Authority
The expression grands blancs conventionally identifies wealthy plantation proprietors, major merchants, senior colonial officers, and other persons possessing extensive economic and political influence.
Their authority depended upon more than ancestry. It rested upon plantation assets, commercial credit, family alliances, metropolitan representation, access to administrative office, and participation in the colonial institutions responsible for taxation, militia organization, legislation, and justice.
The grands blancs were not a formally constituted nobility as a whole. Certain members possessed noble status; others derived their position from colonial wealth and commercial influence.
Article 20 — Petits Blancs and Intermediate Status
The category petits blancs included artisans, sailors, shopkeepers, overseers, minor merchants, clerks, soldiers, and persons possessing limited or unstable property.
Their white classification provided significant legal and social advantages over free persons of colour and enslaved persons. It did not eliminate subordination to wealthy proprietors, merchants, creditors, military officers, and colonial administrators.
The white colonial population was therefore unified by racial privilege while remaining divided by capital, profession, origin, education, honour, and political influence.
Article 21 — Institutional Position of Jacques Kanon
Jacques Kanon cannot be reduced to the category of an economically marginal petit blanc. By the 1760s and 1770s, he had acquired maritime rank, bourgeois status at Bordeaux, commercial property, plantation assets, enslaved labour, and family connections within the colonial economy.
He nevertheless did not belong by birth to the hereditary nobility. His career illustrates a distinct form of imperial mobility founded upon maritime competence, royal service, commercial capital, property acquisition, and matrimonial alliance.
Kanon occupied an intermediary but substantial position: he was a self-established maritime officer and colonial proprietor incorporated into the plantation bourgeoisie of Jérémie without deriving his authority from an inherited aristocratic title.
TITLE VII — NORTH–SOUTH DIFFERENTIATION WITHIN SAINT-DOMINGUE
Article 22 — Northern Plantation Concentration
The northern province, centred upon Cap-Français, contained some of the colony’s most concentrated sugar plantations, major commercial houses, maritime installations, and administrative institutions.
Its economic order depended upon intensive plantation capital, direct connections with French ports, large enslaved workforces, and a powerful commercial-planter establishment.
Article 23 — Southern and Western Configuration
The southern province and the western extremities of the colony contained a more dispersed geography, a substantial coffee and cotton economy, secondary sugar districts, multiple coastal ports, mountainous settlements, and significant communities of free proprietors of colour.
The South was not economically uniform or politically autonomous as a single bloc. Its geographic separation, local military structures, family networks, and distinct property relations nevertheless contributed to regional political formations different from those prevailing in the North.
Jérémie, Les Cayes, Jacmel, Léogâne, Petit-Goâve, and the Nippes participated in interconnected but distinct southern and western maritime systems.
Article 24 — Revolutionary Institutional Consequences
The colonial distinctions among North, West, and South acquired military and constitutional importance during the revolutionary period.
In the South, André Rigaud and other officers associated with the free citizens of colour developed a powerful military and administrative structure. In the North, Toussaint Louverture consolidated an alternative system of command. The War of the South of 1799–1800, conventionally called the War of the Knives, involved regional authority, military command, control of ports, plantation policy, and rival projects of territorial centralization.
These conflicts cannot be reduced exclusively to colour. They involved overlapping questions of regional sovereignty, officer networks, economic administration, foreign intervention, and control of the post-slavery State.
TITLE VIII — POST-INDEPENDENCE TRANSFORMATION OF THE JÉRÉMIE ORDER
Article 25 — Abolition of Colonial Legal Status
The independence of Hayti abolished French colonial sovereignty, hereditary slavery, and the legal supremacy previously attached to white status.
The Imperial Constitution of 20 May 1805 declared the inhabitants of Hayti collectively under the political designation of Black, thereby converting a colonial category into a constitutional principle of national unity and excluding the restoration of the former racial hierarchy.[9]
Colonial distinctions did not retain legal authority merely because social and economic inequalities persisted. The independent State established a new constitutional source of public authority.
Article 26 — Persistence of Property and Regional Networks
Independence did not eliminate the material inheritance of plantation geography, port concentration, commercial credit, linguistic hierarchy, family networks, or regional military organization.
In Jérémie and the Grand’Anse, families descending from free proprietors, revolutionary officers, merchants, and public officials continued to exercise influence through land, commerce, education, administration, and professional office.
The resulting order constituted a post-independence elite formation derived from several historical sources. It was not the simple legal continuation of grand-blanc rule, since slavery and white colonial sovereignty had been abolished. It nevertheless operated within an economic geography substantially inherited from the colonial period.
Article 27 — The Jérémie Killings of 1964
In 1964, the government of François Duvalier conducted a systematic reprisal against families in Jérémie following the landing of the group known as Jeune Haïti.
The operation involved arrests, torture, and executions directed not only against suspected participants but also against relatives, including women and children. The episode became known as the Jérémie Vespers.
Its institutional significance arises from the use of collective family liability, executive security power, regional suspicion, and racialized political rhetoric. The killings cannot be treated as a lawful continuation of colonial legislation. They constituted a twentieth-century act of State repression conducted through the security institutions of the Duvalier government.
TITLE IX — MULTIETHNIC MARITIME LABOUR AND PIRATE COMMUNITIES
Article 28 — Composition of Maritime Crews
Atlantic and Caribbean vessels employed populations of varied geographic and legal origins. Crews could include Europeans from multiple kingdoms, free and enslaved Africans, persons of mixed ancestry, Indigenous pilots, interpreters, coerced sailors, fugitives, transported labourers, and men captured from enemy vessels.
Pirate and buccaneer communities occasionally provided forms of operational participation unavailable within plantation society. Shipboard agreements could regulate shares, compensation for injury, election of officers, and distribution of provisions.
These arrangements did not establish universal racial equality. Status depended upon the vessel, captain, crew articles, legal condition of the participant, and wider colonial environment.
Article 29 — Black and Indigenous Participation
Documentary records establish the presence of Black sailors and combatants within pirate, privateer, naval, and merchant crews. Indigenous persons also participated as pilots, coastal intermediaries, hunters, interpreters, and maritime labourers.
The precise proportion of Black, mixed, or Indigenous participants across the entire Golden Age of piracy cannot be fixed by a universal percentage. Records vary substantially by region, decade, jurisdiction, and type of vessel.
Their documented presence is sufficient to establish that Caribbean maritime communities were not exclusively European and that the history of Tortuga must be placed within a wider Afro-European-Indigenous maritime environment.[10]
Article 30 — Pirate Articles and Internal Government
Certain pirate crews adopted written articles providing for allocation of prizes, compensation for injury, regulation of discipline, and selection or removal of officers.
These arrangements constituted shipboard compacts designed to govern dangerous collective enterprises. They could provide greater participation to ordinary seamen than contemporary naval or merchant discipline permitted.
They did not transform pirate vessels into sovereign democratic republics. Their authority remained contractual, operational, and confined to the crew. They nevertheless demonstrate that alternative forms of maritime governance existed outside the hierarchical organization of royal navies and plantation establishments.
TITLE X — CONSTITUTIONAL DOCTRINE OF XARAGUA
Article 31 — Historical Incorporation of the Grand’Anse
The Grand’Anse and Jérémie are incorporated into the historical doctrine of Xaragua as components of the southern and western territorial system formed by Indigenous continuity, colonial maritime development, plantation transformation, revolutionary military organization, and post-independence public institutions.
The Kanon archive is relevant to Xaragua not as a source of colonial title but as documentary evidence concerning:
the maritime integration of the territory;
the conversion of delegated warfare into plantation capital;
the organization of land and port commerce;
the African composition of the enslaved population;
the existence of marronage;
the internal stratification of colonial society;
the territorial specificity of Jérémie and the Grand’Anse.
Article 32 — Rejection of Colonial Racial Jurisdiction
Within the constitutional order of Xaragua, no colonial classification founded upon colour, former slave status, metropolitan ancestry, or plantation rank shall possess legislative, administrative, judicial, or proprietary authority.
The State recognizes its people as a historically constituted Indigenous and creolized political body whose internal legal unity supersedes the racial taxonomies created by the colonial administration.
Historical racial classifications may be preserved for archival, genealogical, demographic, and scholarly purposes. They shall not be converted into contemporary categories of public capacity.
Article 33 — Regulation of Delegated Coercive Authority
No private maritime, commercial, security, or military actor may exercise coercive authority within the jurisdiction of Xaragua except under an express constitutional mandate, a defined chain of command, written rules of competence, financial accountability, and judicial review.
The historical corsair system demonstrates that delegated force becomes an instrument of public policy only when the State retains control over authorization, targets, duration, discipline, adjudication, and responsibility.
The constitutional doctrine of Xaragua accordingly distinguishes between:
public defence exercised by constitutional institutions;
auxiliary service expressly commissioned and regulated by the State;
private commercial activity without coercive jurisdiction;
unauthorized armed activity prohibited under the supreme law.
Article 34 — Maritime Sovereignty and Historical Continuity
The maritime history of Tortuga, Jérémie, the Grand’Anse, the Nippes, the Gulf of Gonâve, and the western approaches of Hispaniola demonstrates that the political history of Xaragua is inseparable from navigation, coastal defence, port administration, transregional commerce, and control of maritime access.
Xaragua therefore incorporates maritime history into its constitutional doctrine as a permanent dimension of territorial administration, historical jurisdiction, economic policy, and national defence.
Article 35 — Final Constitutional Determination
Jacques Kanon is entered into the historical record of Xaragua as:
a French maritime officer born at Blaye in 1726;
a commissioned privateer commander during the Seven Years’ War;
a participant in operations connected with New France;
a lieutenant de frégate and capitaine de brûlot;
a commercial captain within the Bordeaux–Saint-Domingue maritime system;
a bourgeois of Bordeaux;
a planter established in the Voldrogue district of Jérémie;
an acquirer of property on the Guinodée River;
an operator of urban and maritime commercial property;
an owner of enslaved persons whose resistance is documented through marronage;
an institutional exemplar of the conversion of State-authorized maritime service into colonial property and plantation authority.
His career constitutes a documentary case through which the State of Xaragua records the operation of Bourbon maritime sovereignty, the juridical distinction between privateering and piracy, the internal stratification of white colonial society, the legal subordination of free persons of colour, the plantation economy of Jérémie, and the African resistance embodied in flight from the Kanon estate.
SELECTED HISTORICAL, MARITIME, AND LEGAL REFERENCES
[1] Louis XIV, Ordonnance de la marine du mois d’août 1681, Paris; René-Josué Valin, Nouveau commentaire sur l’Ordonnance de la marine du mois d’août 1681, La Rochelle, 1760.
[2] Ronald Deschênes, “Du sillage de la mer aux sillons d’une habitation: Jacques Kanon, colon à Jérémie,” Association de généalogie d’Haïti; Archives départementales de la Gironde, maritime registers and passenger records, series 6B.
[3] Gilles Piédalue, “Épisodes corsaires en Nouvelle-France: étude préliminaire des aspects sociaux et économiques,” Bulletin d’histoire politique, volume 7, no. 2, 1999; Dictionary of Canadian Biography, entry “Kanon (Canon, Cannon), Jacques.”
[4] Archives départementales de la Gironde, 6B-106 and 6B-476, passenger and maritime documentation concerning the departure of the Grande-Anse for Jérémie in January 1772.
[5] Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Colonies, D64, Notariat de Jérémie, Bose, deed dated 21 February 1778 concerning the Guinodée property.
[6] Jean Fouchard, Les Marrons de la liberté, Paris, Éditions de l’École, 1972, p. 407, reproducing the July 1791 notice concerning eleven persons absent from the Kanon plantation.
[7] Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, Philadelphia, 1797–1798, sections concerning Jérémie and the Grand’Anse.
[8] Édit du Roi concernant la discipline des esclaves des îles de l’Amérique française, March 1685; Yvan Debbasch, Couleur et liberté: le jeu du critère ethnique dans un ordre juridique esclavagiste, Paris, Dalloz, 1967.
[9] Constitution impériale d’Hayti du 20 mai 1805, Article 14.
[10] Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, Beacon Press, 2004; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, Beacon Press, 2000; David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag, Random House, 1995; Arne Bialuschewski, studies concerning Black sailors and piracy in the Atlantic world.
[11] Bernard Foubert, “Les habitations Foäche à Jérémie, Saint-Domingue, 1772–1802,” Outre-Mers: Revue d’histoire, volume 96, nos. 364–365, 2009, pp. 163–210.
[12] Maurice Begouën Demeaux, Mémorial d’une famille du Havre, Paris, Société de l’histoire des colonies françaises, 1951.
[13] Patrick Villiers, studies concerning French privateering, prize law, and maritime warfare under the Ancien Régime.
[14] Traité définitif de paix et d’amitié entre la France, la Grande-Bretagne et l’Espagne, Paris, 10 February 1763.
[15] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti: State Against Nation, Monthly Review Press, 1990, concerning the relationship between inherited administrative structures, regional society, and the post-independence State.
ENTERED INTO THE SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AND HISTORICAL RECORD OF XARAGUA
PROMULGATED UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT
SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY — RECTOR-PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE