The negroes and mulattoes, who had joined cordially enough to exterminate their common enemies, would no longer hold together; and ever since the death of Dessalines their jealousies and differences have been a source of weakness in the black republic. In the old times, Hayti, as the French part of the island of Española was henceforth called, had been divided into three provinces: South, East, and North. After the death of Dessalines each of these provinces became for a time a separate state. Christophe wished to maintain the unlimited imperialism which Dessalines had set up: but the Constituent Assembly, which he summoned at Port-au-Prince in 1806, had other views. They resolved upon a Republican constitution." Christophe, not contented with the offered presidency, "collected an army with the view of dispersing the Constituent Assembly: but they collected one of their own, under Pétion, and forced him to retire from the capital. Christophe maintained himself in Cap François, or, as it is now called, Cap Haytien; and here he ruled for 14 years. In 1811, despising the imperial title which Dessalines had desecrated, he took the royal style by the name of Henry I. Christophe, as a man, was nearly as great a monster as Dessalines. … Yet Christophe at his best was a man capable of great aims, and a sagacious and energetic ruler." In 1820, finding himself deserted in the face of a mulatto insurrection, he committed suicide. "In a month or two after Christophe's suicide the whole island was united under the rule of President Boyer." Boyer was the successor of Pétion, who had been elected in the North, under the republican constitution which Christophe refused submission to. Pétion, "a mulatto of the best type," educated at the military academy of Paris, and full of European ideas, had ruled the province which he controlled ably and well for eleven years. In discouragement he then took his own life, and was succeeded, in 1818, by his lieutenant, Jean Pierre Boyer, a mulatto. "On the suicide of Christophe, the army of the Northern Province, weary of the tyranny of one of their own race, declared for Boyer. The French part of the island was now once more under a single government: and Boyer turned his attention to the much larger Spanish territory, with the old capital of St. Domingo, where a Spaniard named Muñez de Caceres, with the aid of the negroes, had now followed the example in the West, and proclaimed an independent government. The Dominicans, however, were still afraid of Spain, and were glad to put themselves under the wing of Hayti: Boyer was not unwilling to take possession of the Spanish colony, and thus it happened that in 1822 he united the whole island under his Presidency. In the same year he was elected President for life under the constitution of Pétion, whose general policy he maintained: