1780-00-00: (Jean Baptiste Riché, Born in Northern Haiti, the Son of a Free Black Militiaman, a Revolutionary Veteran and Christophe Loyalist Who Became Pres…

1780-00-00: (Jean Baptiste Riché, Born in Northern Haiti, the Son of a Free Black Militiaman, a Revolutionary Veteran and Christophe Loyalist Who Became President in 1846 as a Puppet of the Mulatto Elite, the Third in a Line of Controllable Black Figurehead Presidents Before Soulouque Broke the Pattern): Jean Baptiste Riché was born in 1780 in northern Haiti, the son of a free Black man who served in the colonial militia. He served under Henri Christophe during the Revolution and became one of Christophe’s most trusted military advisers after the 1806 division of Haiti. When Christophe shot himself in 1820, Riché pledged loyalty to Boyer’s unified government. Decades later, after the mulatto elite orchestrated the overthrow of President Jean-Louis Pierrot in March 1846, they installed Riché as president, a choice designed to give the appearance of continued Black rule while keeping real power in mulatto hands. It was a pattern that had already been established with Guerrier and Pierrot: select an aging Black military man, let him sit in the presidential chair, and run the country from behind him. Upon taking office, Riché restored the 1816 constitution, which the 1843 document had supplanted. He died in office on February 28, 1847, and was replaced by another Black military officer named Faustin Soulouque. The mulatto elite assumed Soulouque would be as pliable as his predecessors. They were catastrophically wrong.