1848, November – 1849, April 16: (The Elimination of All Rivals and the Architecture of Tyranny): Having neutralized the mulâtre elite, Soulouque turned his …

1848, November – 1849, April 16: (The Elimination of All Rivals and the Architecture of Tyranny): Having neutralized the mulâtre elite, Soulouque turned his attention closer to home, for it was not his intent simply to eliminate the jaunes so as to make way for equally powerful noir kingmakers — the logic of his consolidation required the destruction of every autonomous center of power regardless of color, a pattern that Glissant might recognize as the creolized reproduction of the totalizing impulse inherited from the plantation. Pierre Noir, the piquet chieftain of the South who had grown too prosperous and too conspicuous preying on foreign merchants, was first: in November 1848 Soulouque’s agents arrested him at Les Cayes and had him shot outside town. Similien’s turn came next — confident of the army’s support, he began to aspire for higher office, an ambition he betrayed over a bottle of tafia, whereupon Soulouque one morning publicly relieved him at the end of guard mount as if he were the old officer of the day, and when the general turned to the troops for support, not a bayonet stirred, and the cell in which he ultimately found himself was that which David Troy had occupied. On August 15, when Soulouque returned to the capital, the zinglins received him with traditional triumphal arches of palm and banana fronds — he liked it all, saying “Ça bon!” — but not all citizens were equally pleased, as one of the president’s first measures was to forbid emigration from Haiti on pain of death, while mulâtres in Port-au-Prince were specially enrolled on a dread roster in the Palais National. By April 16, 1849 — exactly a year after the massacre of the mulâtres — Soulouque had settled accounts with every element capable of opposing him: upper classes, piquets, zinglins, and army had all in their turn been brought to heel, and the outstanding unsolved problem that confronted him lay in the East.