1883, March–September: (The Siege of Miragoâne, the Fall of Jacmel, and the Battle of Derrière-la-Loge): Boyer-Bazelais’s first act was to proclaim a Central…

1883, March–September: (The Siege of Miragoâne, the Fall of Jacmel, and the Battle of Derrière-la-Loge): Boyer-Bazelais’s first act was to proclaim a Central Committee of the Revolution with himself as chef d’exécution — the manifesto had already been printed in Kingston. Salomon, always well served by his spies, had timely intelligence within forty-eight hours and was even able to estimate rebel strength at 106, a creditably close count. On May 6, with backing from the diplomatic corps, Salomon sent the French chargé Burdel to Miragoâne with a final offer — protection after surrender, safe-conduct into exile, and government assumption of the rebellion’s debts — but Bazelais haughtily dismissed the emissary, sealing his own death warrant. On April 13, the Cacos of Trou du Nord revolted and were brutally squelched, but in the South on May 27 — a Sunday of fierce fighting that the forlorn Miragoâne diarist Charles Desroches called the most terrible day they had endured — Jérémie rose, and Langston assessed it as stronger in natural defenses than Miragoâne, with inhabitants more intelligent, active, and determined than anywhere else in the country. Worse still, on July 22, while the broken-backed Miragoâne siege dragged on in discouragement and dysentery, Jacmel exploded — the very night after Salomon’s military secretary Vériquain had visited with Dessalinian warnings, forty-four bold Liberals seized the arsenal and threw all of Salomon’s people into jail. Salomon’s reply was to send 800 piquet volunteers armed only with spears, pitchforks, and machetes. During the night of August 2–3, the piquets attacked in a desperate struggle swirling around Jacmel’s Masonic lodge Parfaite Sincérité — ever after known as the battle of Derrière-la-Loge — in which the combatants hacked and blew each other to pieces, and at dawn the Jacméliens saw heaped-up wounded and corpses with chests smashed in, sides ripped open, eyeballs gouged, and skulls laid open. Every home in every quarter had someone to mourn, and the city’s rage was uncontrollable: at ten that morning Vériquain and thirteen other government hostages were dragged from prison and shot.