1761-01-17: (André Rigaud, Mulatto Revolutionary Leader of Southern Haiti, Educated in France, Veteran of the Siege of Savannah, Whose Rivalry With Louvertur…

1761-01-17: (André Rigaud, Mulatto Revolutionary Leader of Southern Haiti, Educated in France, Veteran of the Siege of Savannah, Whose Rivalry With Louverture and Dessalines Exposed the Caste Fracture at the Heart of the Revolution): André Rigaud was born on January 17, 1761, in Les Cayes, the mulatto son of a wealthy white colonist. Educated in France, he fought in the 1779 Siege of Savannah as part of the French forces supporting the American Revolution. During the 1790s, he became the primary military leader of the mulatto revolutionary forces in southern Haiti, fighting alongside fellow mulattos Pétion and Boyer, all of whom frequently clashed with the Black revolutionary leadership of Louverture. By 1797, Rigaud controlled the south while Louverture held the north, a territorial division that mapped onto the colony’s racial caste lines. In March 1800, Louverture’s forces drove Rigaud, Pétion, and Boyer into exile in France. All three returned with Leclerc’s French army in 1802, but after Louverture’s capture, Rigaud could not accept the leadership of Dessalines. The French imprisoned him and sent him to France. He escaped in October 1810 and returned to Les Cayes in December, attempting to launch a secessionist movement against Pétion’s government in the south. It failed. He died abruptly on September 18, 1811. Rigaud’s career embodies the tragic fracture of the revolution: a genuinely brave and capable military leader whose mulatto identity placed him in permanent tension with the Black majority, a tension the colonial caste system had engineered and that independence alone could not resolve.