1844-04-00: (The Piquets Revolt Erupts in Southern Haiti, Armed Black Peasants Rising Against Mulatto Rule and Demanding a Black President, the Colonial Cast…

1844-04-00: (The Piquets Revolt Erupts in Southern Haiti, Armed Black Peasants Rising Against Mulatto Rule and Demanding a Black President, the Colonial Caste System Reasserting Itself Within the Structures of the Republic): In April 1844, a Black former army officer named Louis Jean-Jacques Acaau unleashed the Piquets Revolt in southern Haiti. The Piquets were armed Black peasants who took their name from the pikes they carried as weapons, the southern counterparts to the Cacos militia of the north. They demanded an end to mulatto rule and the election of a Black president, articulating in violence what the political system refused to acknowledge in law: that independence had removed the white colonial class but preserved the racial hierarchy beneath it, with the mulatto elite governing in the name of a revolution that Black people had fought and died to win. The revolt overthrew Rivière-Hérard in May 1844 and brought to power Philippe Guerrier, a Black army officer who had been born into slavery in 1757 and had fought in the Revolution under Christophe. Guerrier was the first Black president of a unified Haiti since Dessalines. He was also eighty-seven years old, and the mulatto elite calculated, correctly, that he would not live long enough to threaten their structural control of the economy and the state.