1767-10-06: (Henri Christophe, Born Most Likely in Grenada, Sold Into Slavery in Haiti, Who Fought as a Teenage Drummer Boy at the Siege of Savannah, Rose Th…

1767-10-06: (Henri Christophe, Born Most Likely in Grenada, Sold Into Slavery in Haiti, Who Fought as a Teenage Drummer Boy at the Siege of Savannah, Rose Through the Revolution to Become King Henri I of Northern Haiti, Builder of the Citadel and Sans-Souci, an Enlightened Despot Who Shot Himself When His Kingdom Collapsed): Henri Christophe was most likely born on October 6, 1767, on the island of Grenada and sold into slavery in Saint-Domingue during the 1770s. As a boy of twelve, he marched with the Chasseurs Volontaires de Saint-Domingue at the 1779 Siege of Savannah, serving as a drummer boy in one of the largest deployments of African-descended soldiers in the American War of Independence. Through labor and determination, he obtained his freedom before the Revolution erupted. During the revolutionary years, he became one of Louverture’s most effective military commanders in the north. After Dessalines’s assassination in 1806, Christophe proclaimed himself president of northern Haiti in February 1807, while his rival Pétion took the south. On March 28, 1811, he crowned himself King Henri I, established a full European-style nobility of princes, dukes, counts, and barons, and renamed Cap-Haïtien as Cap-Henri. His vision was imperial: he instituted a corvée labor system that generated enormous agricultural wealth, built the Citadel and Sans-Souci Palace as monuments to Black sovereignty, imposed the Code Henri modeled on the Code Napoléon, and cultivated profitable trade with Britain. Corruption was punished severely. Education was expanded. Yet the vast majority of his subjects experienced his reign as despotism, and when a stroke left him physically diminished, the loyalty that had been held in place by force evaporated. On October 8, 1820, in the palace he had built to rival Versailles, Henri Christophe shot himself. Within weeks, Boyer’s southern troops marched north and reunited the country. The Citadel endures. Sans-Souci endures. The question Christophe posed, whether a Black nation could build a civilization to rival Europe’s and at what human cost, endures longest of all.