1881–1882: (Smallpox, Sedition, and the Executions at St.

1881–1882: (Smallpox, Sedition, and the Executions at St. Marc): Nurtured in filth and congestion, smallpox first appeared in Port-au-Prince during December 1881 and spread rapidly throughout the country — with many cases unreported, authorities were soon recording as many as 258 deaths a week, Archbishop Guilloux wrote that over 60 burials a day were taking place not counting bodies dumped in La Saline, and Pastor Picot of the Wesleyan mission confirmed that smallpox, scarlet fever, and typhoid raged simultaneously through every street, with 105 buried in a single day. The epidemic did not subside until May 1882 and would not be fully spent until 1883. With sickness in the noonday came sedition by dark: on the night of December 8, 1881, General Désormes Gresseau — confederate of Mentor Nicolas — seized the arsenal at St. Marc and proclaimed revolution. Rising from a sickbed, General Turenne Lévieux again saved the day by retaking the arsenal. Declaring martial law in Port-au-Prince, St. Marc, and the Liberal stronghold of Jacmel, Salomon made hundreds of arrests — forty-eight of the chief prisoners were taken to St. Marc, tried in April 1882, and sentenced to death. The president reprieved twenty; the other twenty-eight, including Mentor Nicolas, were shot in batches at St. Marc and Gonaïves on May 5 and 6, while those whom Salomon spared he retained as hostages. The regime’s journal L’Oeil announced on May 20, 1882: each pamphlet sent into Haiti would provoke the execution of one more of those condemned to death by the special military court of St. Marc — a promise that transformed the printed word itself into an instrument of killing, demonstrating the degree to which the Domingue-Rameau-Salomon sequence had perfected the apparatus of state terror that the plantation had bequeathed to the republic.