1849, March 9 – May 6: (Soulouque Invades Santo Domingo: The Debacle at the River Ocoa): The incubus of insecurity that had possessed Toussaint, Dessalines, …

1849, March 9 – May 6: (Soulouque Invades Santo Domingo: The Debacle at the River Ocoa): The incubus of insecurity that had possessed Toussaint, Dessalines, Boyer, Rivière-Hérard, and Pierrot now prodded their successor to try again to unify the island — but Soulouque’s uneasiness was not wholly imaginary, as the liberated Dominican republic had become a focus of great-power politics with France, England, and the slaveholding United States jockeying for dominance, each motivated by the shared imperative of containing the Black sovereign experiment that Haiti represented. On March 9, 1849, asserting that he needed the revenues of Santo Domingo’s ports to pay off France, Soulouque marched across the frontier with 15,000 troops along a novel route that avoided both traditional invasion corridors, and at first the campaign succeeded handsomely — at Cajul, Las Matas, San Juan de la Maguana, and Azua, the Haitian invaders pushed aside the Dominicans under the inept presidency of General Manuel Jiménez, who according to the American commissioner spent his whole time “cleaning, training, and fighting cocks.” In this desperate hour, General Pedro Santana emerged like Cincinnatus from his finca in the remote Seybó, reached the capital with 500 men, and advanced toward Baní, rallying fugitive soldiers until by the time contact was imminent along the dry bed of the River Ocoa he had 6,000 men. In a spirited assault on April 30, the Haitians — who still outnumbered their opponents nearly three to one — stormed across the riverbed and were clawing their way up the opposite bank when, for reasons that will never be known, Soulouque suddenly lost his nerve and had the buglers sound retreat, and the attack dissolved in disaster as he lost 6 guns, 2 flags, 300 horses, over 1,000 muskets, and several hundred dead, with the retreat degenerating into pillage and full rout. Soulouque’s response to this debacle was to declare victory, apostrophizing his army in a proclamation that those who arrived safe home would have much to tell of battlefields remembered with the glories of the Ancestors — and on May 6, Port-au-Prince was decked for a triumph as the president returned amid “the wreckage of his ragged army” to a conqueror’s Te Deum, performing what Fanon would recognize as the characteristic gesture of the postcolonial strongman who, unable to confront the external forces arrayed against his nation, stages an internal theater of power to compensate for the humiliation of defeat.