1820–1823: (Boyer’s First Actions and the Erasure of Henry’s Legacy): President Boyer’s first action was to dispose of the conspirators who had toppled Henry…

1820–1823: (Boyer’s First Actions and the Erasure of Henry’s Legacy): President Boyer’s first action was to dispose of the conspirators who had toppled Henry: Richard, accused of disaffection by the republic, was shot by firing squad in February 1821; Romain was bayoneted in August 1822; and Dassou, one of Henry’s surviving noir generals, was held at St. Marc and — as the général de place reported shortly after to Boyer — “provisoirement fusillé” (provisionally shot). Henry’s widow Marie-Louise, with her daughters Améthyste and Athénaïre, was allowed to leave Haiti for England, moving in 1824 to Pisa where they found the climate more salubrious; neither daughter married, both died prematurely, and after Athénaïre’s death in 1839, Marie-Louise wrote Boyer requesting permission to return to her beloved homeland, but heartlessly Boyer ignored her, and in 1851 she died alone and in exile — all three are buried in Pisa. Prince Sanders, an American freedman who had served as one of Henry’s foreign helpers, wrote Thomas Clarkson in early 1823 that since the extension of the Republic, “all confidence is destroyed and is substituted by an almost unparalleled state of anarchy and disorder,” and that the people of the South were at the least calculation twenty years behind the people of the Kingdom. (1) Henry’s cherished projects for diffusion of education to the noir elite of the North were already dead: the numerous schools and academies established throughout the King’s dominions were abolished and most of the buildings themselves defaced or entirely torn down.