1847, July–1848, April 9: (The Rehearsal and the Purge: Soulouque Breaks the Mulâtre Establishment): The first tremors were felt in July 1847 when Soulouque …

1847, July–1848, April 9: (The Rehearsal and the Purge: Soulouque Breaks the Mulâtre Establishment): The first tremors were felt in July 1847 when Soulouque resolved to go to the Cap but, unwilling to leave Port-au-Prince with his ministers and potential rivals behind, announced that the chief among them would accompany him — when they incautiously demurred and then more incautiously resigned, Soulouque rejoined: “Ministers or not, you are not going to stay behind,” and on July 28 they went north as hostages for the peace of the capital. In their absence, Similien wasted no time executing secret orders: he doubled the guard at Fort National, sited two fieldpieces with port fires burning to cover the palace entrance, harangued noir soldiers and assembled zinglins about the “ingratitude” of the mulâtres, and mysterious fires began to break out in the houses of hommes de couleur while fearful fugitives knocked at the gateways of foreign consulates. The events of August and September 1847 were but a rehearsal for what followed: as Lent of the new year drew in, David Troy — leading elite mulâtre politician and richest businessman in Port-au-Prince — was caught with a house full of weapons and clapped into prison, while Soulouque’s agents ranged the Cul-de-Sac and the mountains issuing ten rounds to every peasant with word that at the signal gun from Fort National, all were to swarm into town with musket and machete. On Sunday, April 9, 1848, a band of zinglin leaders who congregated at the Palais National every Sunday morning pressed Soulouque to dismiss his mulâtre cabinet and proclaim himself président-à-vie; the president acceded promptly, and within an hour proclaimed a new government in which, among other leading noirs, Lysius Salomon — the fiery young man of Castel Père — became a Minister. What was unfolding was not mere factional violence but what Wynter would recognize as an ontological rupture — the noir masses, overrepresented in the fields and barracks but systematically excluded from the category of the political human, were now seizing the machinery of the state itself.