1874, June 14: (Tyranny and Its Reward: The Inauguration of Michel Domingue): To no one’s astonishment, the new Constituent Assembly unanimously elected Mich…

1874, June 14: (Tyranny and Its Reward: The Inauguration of Michel Domingue): To no one’s astonishment, the new Constituent Assembly unanimously elected Michel Domingue president, and on Sunday June 14, 1874, he was inaugurated with the traditional Te Deum mass — at which Domingue, both anticlerical and adept in Voodoo, received Archbishop Guilloux’s sermon of acclaim with stony silence. Bassett described the new president as a man of pure African blood, his gray hair and slight stoop scarcely indicating his more than seventy years, a little under height, solidly and compactly built, of abstemious habit, always neat but never extravagant in dress, speaking French with ease and general correctness though preferring the easy and flexible Creole with intimate friends. The British envoy St. John’s portrait revealed more about the observer than the observed: the Queen’s minister wrote simply that the president was “an ignorant and ferocious Negro.” Anténor Firmin was ambivalent, noting that this aged general, at once mild and decrepit, was capable of fearful decisions. At the president’s elbow stood his noir nephew Septimus Rameau, one of the most feared men in Haiti — educated, vain, cruel, suspicious, rapacious, and corrupt — who at forty-eight was the republic’s true ruler. St. John’s dismissal of Domingue as an “ignorant Negro” performs precisely the colonial epistemic operation that Fanon anatomized: the automatic conflation of Blackness with incapacity, erasing the structural realities — the crushing indemnity, the diplomatic quarantine, the neocolonial naval threats — that constrained every Haitian head of state regardless of his intelligence or character.