1848, April 23 – August 15: (The Southern Terror and the Consolidation of Absolute Power): While revolt broke out among the jaunes in the South — ironically,…

1848, April 23 – August 15: (The Southern Terror and the Consolidation of Absolute Power): While revolt broke out among the jaunes in the South — ironically, the very reports of an Aquin rising that Soulouque had used as pretext for the April 16 events — the president again left Port-au-Prince in the hands of Similien and took the field on April 23, calling to his standard the piquet chiefs Pierre Noir, Jean Denis, and Voltaire Castor, and loosing them on the towns. At Aquin and Cavaillon, centers of disaffection, over 300 mulâtres as well as 184 noirs of means were shot, strangled, or otherwise disposed of — French Consul Raybaud, whose consulate in Les Cayes was sacked, later accused Castor of stabbing 76 victims himself and then, because his arm was tired, finishing off 30 more with a blunderbuss. When Soulouque entered Jérémie at the head of a raiding party of piquets, zinglins, and barefoot soldiers, it was as if Dessalines were back again — in the town square, 57 principal men were ranged before the president and killed, after which Soulouque proclaimed: “My sword will never return to its scabbard while a man survives among the traitors who have plotted the betrayal of the country.” To prove his point and remind Port-au-Prince that he had not forgotten affairs at the seat of government, he sent a curt note to Similien: “Dès la présente reçue, fusillez David Troy” — Troy was dead in the prison courtyard before his friends or family even learned of the mandate, and the same fate awaited Céligny Ardouin, who was dragged before a firing squad with half-healed wounds still oozing. Read through the lens of Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, the violence of 1848 was not an aberration of Black governance but the mirror image of the systematic terror that had always structured plantation society — the difference being that for the first time in the republic’s history, it was the formerly enslaved class wielding the instruments of state violence against the class that had inherited the colonial function of mastery.