1804, April–October: (Dessalines Reigns and the Strategic Blunder of the Massacre): The massacre was judged by the authors as worse than a crime — it was a s…

1804, April–October: (Dessalines Reigns and the Strategic Blunder of the Massacre): The massacre was judged by the authors as worse than a crime — it was a strategic blunder, for Dessalines had destroyed the foreign talent that visionaries like Toussaint and Christophe had recognized as essential for reconstruction and administration. By launching the new republic on a sea of blood, the Emperor isolated Haiti beyond the pale of civilized recognition and provided arguments that justified decades of international disdain and ostracism toward the world’s first experiment in Black self-government. In place of the eliminated French skilled class, Dessalines could offer only a military dictatorship characterized by corruption, caprice, and enforced servitude over a population where more than half had been born in Africa. The entire nation was divided into cultivators — including all women, who were attached to the soil — and soldiers, with 52,000 men nominally on the army’s rolls, absorbing nearly 15 percent of the population. The first public work of the regime was the construction of hilltop forts dominating every town, harbor, and plain, while cultivators were ordered inland toward the Artibonite and central plateau, walled off from the outer world by mountains and fortifications.