1873, March 3–4: (The Last Rising at Gonaïves and the Massacres of Montmorency Benjamin): The noirs of Gonaïves rose one final time under their perennial reb…

1873, March 3–4: (The Last Rising at Gonaïves and the Massacres of Montmorency Benjamin): The noirs of Gonaïves rose one final time under their perennial rebel leader Gallumette Michel, supported by the last surviving Legros — Jules — and by the elder Zamor, whose son would someday become president. On the night of March 3–4, 1873, at the head of some thirty insurgents, Gallumette seized the powder magazine at Chevallier’s old stronghold Fort Bauteau by the waterside, raising the potent rallying cry of “Salomon!” — but even that incantation could not match the ferocity of the général de place Montmorency Benjamin, who raised the town against the rebels. Within twelve hours the insurrection was crushed and all sixteen leaders, from Gallumette down, had either been hacked to pieces in the streets or marched before a firing squad. Until Nissage personally intervened a month later, Benjamin continued arresting and executing without mercy — four years afterward people still spoke of “the massacres of Gonaïves,” and U.S. Minister Bassett reported bodies left unburied in the scorching sun to be devoured by ravenous animals, with one documented case of scavengers beginning their work before the victim had expired. The episode distilled in miniature the structural violence that the decolonial lens reveals at the heart of Haiti’s post-independence order: the very noirs who had fought for Black sovereignty now turned the instruments of revolutionary violence upon one another in contests over which faction of the formerly enslaved would command the state apparatus that colonialism had bequeathed — a self-consuming cycle in which the rallying cry of “Salomon” invoked liberation while the bayonets of Benjamin enacted the discipline of the plantation transposed into republican form.