1880–1881: (Salomon’s Nationwide Tours and the Warning at the Cap): Only too well aware of the materials he had to work with, Salomon set out to instruct the…

1880–1881: (Salomon’s Nationwide Tours and the Warning at the Cap): Only too well aware of the materials he had to work with, Salomon set out to instruct the country in person, making a series of nationwide visits unprecedented for Haiti’s Port-au-Prince-bound chiefs of state — in Jacmel, his own Cayes, throughout the North, he traveled from town to town with the same message: revolutions had debased and destroyed the vitals of the nation. Sometimes the president spoke more sharply, as when he smelled disaffection at the Cap in March 1881, warning that if a single musket went off in that town it would signal events beyond precedent in all revolutionary annals, and that once the people’s anger was let loose he would be powerless to recall them to their senses. Salomon was no fool — toward the end of his regime he remarked on the difference between himself and Soulouque: the police used to come and tell Soulouque everything, whereas it was Salomon who provided the police the information they needed to keep watch. Within four months of his inauguration his antennae quivered: on April 5, 1880, he arrested Nord Alexis and swept up opponents in both cities, and ten weeks later caught another net of prominent Bazelais mulâtres along with the unexpected Richelieu Duperval, who had paved Salomon’s own way to power and was — like Toussaint — lured into the country on a false errand and seized.