1816–1818: (Henry the Builder: La Ferrière, Sans Souci, and the Spread of Education): Amid so many enterprises, Henry had two overriding preoccupations: buil…

1816–1818: (Henry the Builder: La Ferrière, Sans Souci, and the Spread of Education): Amid so many enterprises, Henry had two overriding preoccupations: building palaces and monuments, and the spread of education, without which Haiti could never raise herself from the state in which the French had left the Blacks. Commencing in 1816 with the aid of the British abolitionists Clarkson and Wilberforce, (14) Henry brought a succession of English schoolmasters to Haiti, and by 1817 he had schools going at the Cap, Milot, Port-de-Paix, Gonaïves, and St. Marc, where truancy on its first offense was punished by a salutary week’s confinement on bread and water. When we think of Henry the builder, we think of La Ferrière — truly one of the world’s wonders — and of Sans Souci, yet Henry also built or began palaces at Limbé, Port-de-Paix, Jean Rabel, Môle St. Nicolas, Gonaïves, Fort Liberté, St. Marc, and that of 365 doors at Petite Rivière de l’Artibonite. How many thousands of prisoners and workers died hauling the great stones and guns of La Ferrière will never be known; the German military engineers who oversaw its building were never again allowed to step outside its walls, some of which rise sheer for 140 feet, with a main gun gallery 30 feet deep and 270 long, holding 200 guns mainly captured English pieces from the Duke of York’s disastrous Low Countries campaign of 1794 and brought to Saint-Domingue by Leclerc as his siege train. With its thousands upon thousands of cannonballs and commanding embrasures jutting from its 2,600-foot summit like the prow of a ship breasting a green wave, the Citadel-Henry embodies to this day the imagination, daring, pride, and power of its kingly author.