1804, April: (The Massacre and the Acts of Mercy at Les Cayes and Jérémie): The soldiers initially recoiled from the order to begin the slaughter of the rema…
1804, April: (The Massacre and the Acts of Mercy at Les Cayes and Jérémie): The soldiers initially recoiled from the order to begin the slaughter of the remaining French, as the deed seemed too horrific for even hardened veterans to commence. General Clervaux broke the paralysis by riding down a white woman and killing her nursing infant against a boulder, an act so savage it roused the troops to action with saber and bayonet. (3) Throughout the countryside, similar atrocities were replicated, including at Les Cayes where women and children were tricked aboard a ship, bound back-to-back, weighted with stones, and cast into the sea at midnight. Yet amidst this horror, Duncan Macintosh, a Scottish-American merchant from Baltimore, spent the bulk of his fortune bribing Haitian officials and smuggling over 2,400 whites to safety aboard American merchantmen in the harbor. In Jérémie, Laurent Férou received the order to kill the women with open revulsion and secretly directed Captain Gaspard to evacuate every Frenchwoman and child to Cuba before disclosing Dessalines’s warrant.