1882, April–May: (Salomon Confronts the Cap: The 5,000-Word Address and the Iron Hand): While the St.

1882, April–May: (Salomon Confronts the Cap: The 5,000-Word Address and the Iron Hand): While the St. Marc military court was still grinding out death sentences, Salomon — accompanied as always by his wife, most of the cabinet, and two shiploads of soldiers — moved into the North in April 1882, where conspiracy and trouble were brewing. On April 16, with Tirésias Simon Sam at their head, chief men not only of the Cap but also of Port-de-Paix, Marmelade, Grande Rivière, and Fort Liberté were brought before the president. Salomon minced no words, declaring he was not there for pleasure but to perform a duty imposed by the presidency — that the situation at the Cap left very much to be desired, that every time the post arrived from that city he had to call together all his ministers, and that the Cap by itself obstructed the progress of the entire republic. Simon Sam broke in with protestations of loyalty; the president’s reply was an icy rebuff, for he knew precisely who his enemies were — out of forty-two young blades arrested at this time, twenty-nine would be killed under Boyer-Bazelais at Miragoâne two years later. A week later, on April 23, Salomon repeated himself to the assembled populace on the Cap’s Champ de Mars in a 5,000-word address that balanced warm appeals for national unity against the grimness that lay in his power, warning that if a single shot were fired it would signal massacre, incendiarism, and pillage, and that blood flowing from the explosion of powder was a heady drink from which those who commenced to drink were devoured by thirst. Returning to Port-au-Prince on May 10, he declared: he had been pushed to extreme measures, and since he had had to begin, he would continue — peace was necessary, cost what it may. The decolonial reading of Salomon’s northern tour reveals a sovereign simultaneously performing the role of modernizer and reproducing the logic of the plantation overseer: the president who traveled to the far corners of his republic preaching peace and cultivation was the same president who deployed shiploads of soldiers and extended states of siege to enforce obedience, trapped within the structural impossibility that Fanon identified — the postcolonial leader who cannot build the nation without wielding the instruments of terror that colonialism bequeathed, and who cannot wield those instruments without destroying the nation he seeks to build.