When Jonah sat in the shade of his heaven--sent vine he
was no doubt unaware (as he was of some other important things) that a
time would come when the fruit of his shade-vine would play an
important, if transitory, role in the field of high finance.
The time, to be sure, was far down the centuries from
Jonah's day, and did not arrive till 1807. The place was a steamy but
beautiful little island of the Caribbean. By that time the original
Caribs had long since perished, and were replaced by Europeans,
especially by Spanish in the east and French in the west - and by black
slaves all over the place.
Slavery, of course, is always hateful and cruel; but
there are degrees to the degradation it imposes; and the planters who
had settled in the Artibonite Plaine of Saint Domingues had brought its
horrors to a new depth of savagery. At long last came the inevitable
explosion. Suddenly the whole countryside was in flaming revolt.
And the slaves had able leaders: Ogé Boukman,
Chavannes, and others of lesser fame - all of whom were soon killed. And
then came three compelling figures, former slaves all, whose names were
to be inscribed, quite literally, in blood: Toussaint, Dessalines,
Christophe. Toussaint was nicknamed L'Ouverture because as a general he
always seemed able to "open" things up for victory - or for escape. His
two great lieutenants were: Jean- Jacques Dessalines, unlettered and
ferocious, but a great battle tactician; and Henry Christophe, a
physical giant with the gift of leadership.
Christophe was born, it is believed, on the British
island of St. Kitts, which at that time was still called Saint
Christopher. This may account for his last name, and also for the fact
that though he was French in speech and name and sentiment, he always
spelled his first name with the terminal English "y" instead of the
French "i." Most likely he pronounced it Onree, but he spelled it Henry.
So much for the main actors. In a few swift and bloody
years the dark drama of the tragic little black nation moved to its
denouement. Toussaint was tricked, captured, and allowed to die
miserably in a frigid French prison. Dessalines, after a grotesque brief
masquerade as "Emperor," was murdered by his own people. That left the
towering Christophe, who became head of state, and who finally made
himself king. But the king business came later.
In 1807 this ex-slave stable boy and sometime waiter
was named President of the newly-created Republic of Haiti. It was a
moment of glory for the dignified man who, as a menial, had been slapped
and treated to other indignities. But it was also a moment of great
problems and sharp decisions.
For one thing, he headed a completely bankrupt
government. The land had been laid waste by the ravages of the revolt
against the landed proprietors, the revolution against France, the wars
with the Spaniards on the eastern end of the island, and by their own
internecine butcheries. There was no currency system, and Christophe had
no money and no reserves of any kind.
Needless to say, he could secure no credit abroad.
But Christophe was both a resourceful military leader
and an able administrator. He could not read, but he knew the absolute
necessity of a workable currency system. And he knew something else -
namely, that the people he governed relied greatly on the homely gourd
vine in their domestic economy, using its fruit, when dried and free of
seeds and pulp, to make all kinds of household utensils - bottles,
decanters, bowls, saucers, cups, even spoons and plates. The gourd,
indeed, was about the nearest thing to a constant and general necessity
in the simple life of the Haitian peasants. And the gourd utensils wore
out quickly, broke easily, and had to be replaced often.
As Christophe ascended to power a green crop of gourds
was ripening. So he issued an edict that all gourds were the property of
the state. He sent out collectors to seize them, and in a short time
they had brought in and "deposited" the year's crop at Cap Francois.
That became the "reserve" in Christophe's "treasury," and he put an
arbitrary value of 20 sous on each gourd, which established the ratio of
five gourds to the French Franc. Then he waited a while.1
Gourds to Coffee to Gold
Soon the important coffee crop ripened. Coffee, along
with cane for sugar, were the money crops of the island. But there was
little sugar as yet, because the sugar mills had all been burned down in
the wars. When the coffee beans were brought to market, Christophe
bought them - and paid for them with the gourds he had previously
expropriated, sometimes from the coffee growers themselves! Then he
resold the coffee to foreign traders - for gold; and before long he had
a substantial metal reserve and could put a gold-supported currency into
circulation. As one result of this remarkable adventure into
sophisticated governmental finance, after 170 years the unit of currency
in Haiti is still called the gourde. More significantly, the Christophe
technique had become a potent, if unrecognized and unacknowledged,
fixture in that form of fiscal legerdemain known today as deficit
financing.
Not many Americans raise gourds these days, and
converted cucurbitaceous shells have little importance in our national
economy. But the gourds of Christophe are symbolic of other possessions
of ours that are systematically diverted from their normal use by a
modern and deadly version of the Christophe process.
Those possessions are the dollars which we have earned
and tried to save and invest, but which are taken away from us by the
hidden and insidious seizures of debt--created inflation.
No analogy is here intended or implied between the
Haitian treasury dilemma of 1807 and the multitudinous, mountainous, and
world-wide profligacies of our own government. We are not here concerned
with those balance-of-payment problems occasioned by our many
international involvements, but with the simple arithmetic of a
perpetually unbalanced national budget, and the resultant gnawing away
of our substance by the steady and relentless debasement of our money in
relation to the things we would purchase with it.
Henry Christophe seized the people's gourds to
underwrite his money. That was the lawless procedure of a dictator, a
piece of hard-fisted brigandage. But it was a onetime expedient to meet
an emergency, and was never repeated. Even so, it was an illegal act of
ruthless seizure. And yet ...
And yet . . . as between two methods of expropriation,
the one lawless but visible and not continued, the other legal but
hidden and ruinously perpetuated - maybe there is something to be said,
after all, for Christophe and his gourds!
At the time of the original publication, Mr. Bradford,
of Ocala, Florida, was well known as a writer, poet, speaker, and
business organization consultant.
1. See pages 108-9 of John Vandercook's excellent book,
Black Majesty, Harpers, 1928.
Reprinted with permission from The
Freeman, a publication of the Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.,
August 1978, Vol. 28, No. 8.
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