1820, October: (The Burial at La Ferrière and the Liquidation of the Royal Family): By the time Dupuy — faithful unto death — Marie-Louise, and an unwilling …

1820, October: (The Burial at La Ferrière and the Liquidation of the Royal Family): By the time Dupuy — faithful unto death — Marie-Louise, and an unwilling huddle of body-bearers had the King’s body buried in a heap of quicklime at La Ferrière, both the citadel and the palace below were overrun with looters. Richard gave his protection to Marie-Louise and her daughters, but as for Henry’s fat princeling Victor Henry and his half brother Eugène, they — along with Joachim, Baron Dessalines (nephew of the Emperor), and the arrogant Minister of Finance Vastey — were bayoneted twelve days later in the prison at the Cap, and the prince royal’s corpse was left to rot on a dunghill. With 20,000 men, Boyer reached the Cap — now Cap Haïtien again, no longer Cap Henry — on October 26, in time to seize £11 million in the royal treasury and balk Richard of the fruits of his conspiracy. The North was thus reunified with the republic, ending the sixteen-year division of Haiti into rival states that had commenced with the assassination of Dessalines in 1806. The Kingdom of Henry I — the most ambitious experiment in Black nation-building the hemisphere had yet seen — was dissolved in a fortnight, its schools shuttered, its institutions dismantled, and its cultivators released into the languid drift of the republic.