Jean Pierre Boyer (1776-1850) was a president of Haiti whose most noteworthy activities were the promulgation of the Rural Code of 1826 and the negotiation of final French recognition of Haitian independence in the same year.

Jean Pierre Boyer was born in Port-au-Prince on Feb. 28, 1776, of a well-to-do mulatto family. Educated in Paris, he returned to the colony of Saint-Domingue to participate in the military campaigns of the 1790s. Exiled by the Haitian leader Pierre Dominique Toussaint L'Ouverture, Boyer returned with the French troops of Gen. Charles Leclerc, whose mission was to break the power of Toussaint and his associates and to reintroduce slavery to the colony. When Boyer discovered this motive he switched to the Haitian side, serving with distinction in the final struggles for independence.

After Jean Jacques Dessalines, the first ruler of independent Haiti, was assassinated in 1806, Gen. Alexandre Sabès Pétion emerged...