1879, August 19 – October 23: (Salomon at Last: The Coup d’État and the Noir Restoration): When Salomon returned on August 19, 1879, there was little doubt w…

1879, August 19 – October 23: (Salomon at Last: The Coup d’État and the Noir Restoration): When Salomon returned on August 19, 1879, there was little doubt who the next president would be. In the wake of Boisrond-Canal’s departure, a caretaker government marked time; elections on September 29 utterly defeated the Liberals. Within seventy-two hours, the elections were in turn validated by a coup d’état: headed by General Richelieu Duperval — a loyal front man for Salomon — a cabal of noir officers overthrew the gouvernement provisoire during the night of October 2–3, having the two leaders under lock and key before dawn. Next morning, Port-au-Prince discovered it had a new provisional government whose chief minister was Lysius Salomon. Within three weeks, the National Assembly had revised the constitution to give the next president a seven-year term, and on October 23 Salomon was chosen by a vote of 74–13 and inaugurated three days later. A godson, André Chevallier, evoked the new president from childhood memory as a black giant with a bonnet of white hair — a cotton-headed Goliath of glossy-black face and mountainous nose who took children on his knees and slipped gold pieces into their hands. Born in Cayes in 1815, Salomon had been the nightmare of every Haitian regime from Geffrard’s to Boisrond-Canal’s, but in the words of J. C. Dorsainvil, he was not one of those ignorant noirs that criminal politics had too often hoisted to power — he was a statesman of remarkable intelligence and education who knew his people from top to bottom and possessed uncommon will power and energy. Twenty years of exile — first as a private citizen, then as ambassador-in-exile in Paris and London — had etched his character: Salomon’s spirit was hard as iron, and toward the Port-au-Prince elite there was no mercy in his heart, for in seventeen years his political foes had shot his two brothers, two uncles, his adopted son, and his brother-in-law.