1800-03-00: (Louverture’s Forces Drive Rigaud, Pétion, and Boyer Into Exile, Ending the War of Knives Between Black and Mulatto Factions and Consolidating Lo…

1800-03-00: (Louverture’s Forces Drive Rigaud, Pétion, and Boyer Into Exile, Ending the War of Knives Between Black and Mulatto Factions and Consolidating Louverture’s Control Over the Entire Colony at a Cost of Over Forty Thousand Lives): In March 1800, Louverture’s forces defeated the mulatto army of André Rigaud in the south, driving Rigaud, Pétion, and Boyer into exile in France. The conflict, sometimes called the War of Knives, was the bloodiest internal struggle of the Revolution, with Dessalines crushing mulatto resistance at a cost of over forty thousand lives. The war laid bare the caste fracture that the colonial system had engineered between Black and mulatto populations, a division that the shared experience of fighting the French had papered over but never healed. Louverture now controlled the entire colony, but the unity was maintained by military force, not political reconciliation. The exiled mulatto leaders would return two years later with Leclerc’s army, and the cycle of factional violence would resume.