1804-01-00: (Dessalines Orders the Killing of Remaining Whites in Haiti, a Campaign of Retributive Violence Against the Former Slaveholding Class That His Wi…

1804-01-00: (Dessalines Orders the Killing of Remaining Whites in Haiti, a Campaign of Retributive Violence Against the Former Slaveholding Class That His Wife Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité Attempted to Moderate): In January through March 1804, immediately following the declaration of independence, Dessalines ordered the killing of thousands of white people and uncooperative mulattos who remained in Haiti. The campaign was retributive violence directed at the former slaveholding class, an attempt to ensure that no remnant of the colonial population could serve as a fifth column for a French reconquest. Dessalines’s wife, Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité, attempted to moderate the slaughter, sheltering some of the targeted population. The killings were real, and they were deliberate, and they are the part of Haitian independence that the slaveholding world would never stop citing as evidence of Black barbarity, conveniently omitting the three centuries of systematic torture, rape, starvation, and murder that had preceded them.