1865, May 7 – November: (Salnave’s Insurrection: The Siege of Cap Haïtien and Four Future Presidents): Major Salnave had shown himself persistent, determined…

1865, May 7 – November: (Salnave’s Insurrection: The Siege of Cap Haïtien and Four Future Presidents): Major Salnave had shown himself persistent, determined, and desperate — having attempted to bushwhack War Minister Philippeaux from behind a bougainvillea one sultry evening in August 1864 at the Cap, where the bullet glanced and Philippeaux fell wounded but not dead, after which Salnave escaped over the Dominican border. On May 7, 1865, at the head of a band of Dominican freebooters from across the frontier, Salnave won over the garrison at Ouanaminthe and marched on the Cap, entering the city two days later at five in the morning without a shot fired, enthusiastically received — the ground having been well prepared by his main adherent, the eloquent Démesvar Delorme, who formed a revolutionary committee that proclaimed the secession of the North and bestowed on Salnave an accelerated promotion from major to major general. The first clash came at Puilboreau, a 3,000-foot mountain pass north of Ennery, where on May 15 General Morisset was wounded in an action whose fierceness recalled the War of Independence; a week later, at Chatard south of Plaisance, rebels appeared with a white flag asking to surrender but when Morisset went forward a treacherous volley blew in his face and the assassins vanished into a cloudburst. Headed by Lupérisse Barthélemy, Geffrard’s chief general, and the mulâtre general Nissage-Saget, more than 10,000 government troops marched north, pinioning Salnave within the Cap whose ancient forts had not seen action since 1803, and now commenced a six-month struggle reminiscent of the siege of Jacmel sixty-five years earlier. When Barthélemy tried to capture the Barrière-Bouteille, gateway to the Cap, the attack was flung back with its leader mortally wounded; Geffrard himself then took the field with his Tirailleurs and their French-trained commander Pétion Faubert, while Salnave had at his side the incarnation of the North, General Pierre Nord Alexis, Christophe’s nephew by marriage to the daughter of Pierrot — thus by August, four present or future presidents had joined the battle: Geffrard, Salnave, Nissage-Saget, and Nord Alexis. The convergence of these four men before the walls of Cap Haïtien — a city that had witnessed the burning of 1793, Leclerc’s landing in 1802, and Christophe’s kingdom — constituted, in James’s materialist reading of revolutionary history, a compression of all the structural contradictions of the Haitian state: the eternal tension between North and South, noir and mulâtre, military ambition and civilian reform, collapsing into a single armed confrontation that prefigured decades of civil war to come.