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 h…

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.