1844-05-03: (Rivière-Hérard Relinquishes the Presidency and Flees Into Exile, His Government Destroyed by Military Failure in the Dominican Republic and Peas…
1844-05-03: (Rivière-Hérard Relinquishes the Presidency and Flees Into Exile, His Government Destroyed by Military Failure in the Dominican Republic and Peasant Insurrection at Home): On May 3, 1844, Charles Rivière-Hérard relinquished the presidency of Haiti and fled into exile in Jamaica, where he would die on August 31, 1850. His tenure had lasted barely a year. He had overthrown Boyer promising reform, but his attempt to reconquer the Dominican Republic had failed, and the Piquets Revolt had demonstrated that the Black peasantry would no longer tolerate mulatto dominance without resistance. Rivière-Hérard was succeeded by Philippe Guerrier, an aging Black general whose presidency would begin the pattern that defined mid-nineteenth-century Haitian politics: the mulatto elite selecting Black military figures as figurehead presidents, calculating that they could be controlled, and discovering, sometimes too late, that they could not.