Liberty, Fraternity, Exile by Matthew J. Smith

Author:Matthew J. Smith [Smith, Matthew J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Caribbean & West Indies, General
ISBN: 9781469617985
Google: YOdjBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2014-10-20T00:23:15+00:00

Return to Conflict

Those who wrote derisively about Haiti in the 1870s and 1880s did so in a context of continuous rounds of upheaval. What St. John and Froude used as evidence of Haiti’s political deterioration was the failure of its leaders to establish a stable government. Saget’s retirement may have been seen as a step forward, but the events that followed Domingue’s rise erased impressions of political progress in Haiti.

Domingue lived up to the fears of his liberal adversaries. His ruthlessness awoke opposition from all directions. From outside, in St. Thomas and Jamaica, liberals worked against him with the assistance of local businessmen like Jamaican Altamont DeCordova who helped them organize an expeditionary force. From the north, opposition to Domingue was immediate and sustained. From Jacmel, a revolutionary movement was organized. From the center, in the Cul-de-Sac plain where Boisrond Canal owned many large estates, the insurgency routed the government forces.

His institution of martial law in the west and north and blockade in the south achieved nothing for Domingue. Canal, the leader of the movement, traveled from St. Thomas to Kingston, where he awaited Domingue’s collapse. It arrived with expected drama in April 1876. The fever of insurrection, having spread across the entire northern district, bore down on Port-au-Prince. Domingue and his trusted nephew, Septimus Rameau, ordered the head of the jail to murder all the political prisoners. Among them was Nord Alexis, then in his midforties and two years into a six-year prison sentence. The plan faltered when the guard sought and received asylum from one of the legations. He took refuge after releasing all the prisoners into the streets, where they joined with the insurgents. Domingue abdicated and narrowly made it from the palace to a French ship that took him to St. Thomas. He would end up in Kingston, where he lived out his remaining years. Rameau was not so fortunate; he was murdered by a mob on the way to the legation.

After Domingue’s fall, the Liberals supported Canal’s election. It would not be the triumph they expected. Factionalism and color divisions remained unsettled. A few months after Domingue’s fall, Nord Alexis, recently freed from prison, attempted a fresh rising in the north. When it foundered, he ended up in Kingston once again, settling with his wife in a house at 39 Orange Street.60 “The question of race,” Robert Stuart noted in reference to Alexis and other “vulgar agitators,” “is the favorite text of political agitators in this country and the recitation of it has hitherto been one of the chief obstacles to the national progress.”61 Alexis’s attempted coup demonstrated that a government dominated by light-skinned members of the Liberal Party would be susceptible to opposition from others willing to capitalize on the country’s color and class differences.

Divisions of color were undoubtedly pronounced in the political conflicts during Canal’s administration. The most serious of these occurred three years later. The catalyst was a split among the Liberals themselves and an acrimonious rivalry between Canal and Boyer Bazelais. The split in the Liberal Party proved to be the government’s undoing.

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