chapter 4._

HAYTI: A. D. 1639-1700. The Buccaneers.

See AMERICA: A. D. 1639-1700.

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HAYTI: A. D. 1804-1880. Massacre of whites. The Empire of Dessalines. The kingdom of Christophe. The Republic of Pétion and Boyer. Separation of the independent Republic of San Domingo. The Empire of Soulouque. The restored Republic of Hayti.

"In the beginning of 1804 the independence of the negroes under Dessalines was sufficiently assured: but they were not satisfied until they had completed a general massacre of nearly the whole of the whites, including aged men, women and children, who remained in the island, numbering, according to the lowest estimate, 2,500 souls. Thus did Dessalines, in his own savage words, render war for war, crime for crime, and outrage for outrage, to the European cannibals who had so long preyed upon his unhappy race. The negroes declared Dessalines Emperor: and in October 1804 he was crowned at Port-au-Prince by the title of James I. Dessalines was at once a brave man and a cruel and avaricious tyrant. He acquired great influence over the negroes, who long remembered him with affectionate regret: but he was not warmly supported by the mulattoes, who were by far the most intelligent of the Haytians. He abolished the militia, and set up a standing army of 40,000 men, whom he found himself unable to pay, from the universal ruin which had overtaken the island. The plantation labourers refused to work. … Dessalines authorised the landowners to flog them. Dessalines was himself a large planter: he had 32 large plantations of his own at work, and he forced his labourers to work on them at the point of the bayonet. Both he and his successor, Christophe, like Mahomed Ali in Egypt, grew rich by being the chief merchants in their own dominions. … He failed in an expedition against St. Domingo, the Spanish part of the island, whence the French general Ferrand still threatened him: and at length some sanguinary acts of tyranny roused against him an insurrection headed by his old comrade Christophe. The insurgents marched on Port-au-Prince, and the first black Emperor was shot by an ambuscade at the Pont Rouge outside the town. The death of Dessalines delivered up Hayti once more to the horrors of civil war. 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: but his government, especially in his later years, was almost as despotic as that of Christophe. Boyer was the first Haytian who united the blacks and mulattoes under his rule. It was mainly through confidence in him that the government of Hayti won the recognition of the European powers. … In 1825 its independence was formally recognised by France, on a compensation of 150,000,000 of francs being guaranteed to the exiled planters and to