1908, January–March 16: (Stormy 1908: The Fake Earthquake, the Firminist Debacle, and the Massacre of the Coicous): January 1908 dawned stormy as deputies we…

1908, January–March 16: (Stormy 1908: The Fake Earthquake, the Firminist Debacle, and the Massacre of the Coicous): January 1908 dawned stormy as deputies were to be chosen who would confer on Tonton Nord the second term he now planned — Mère Alexis, his shrewd uneducated wife, was behind it all. Dr. Louis-Joseph Janvier, Haiti’s foremost constitutional scholar, made the error of announcing his candidacy for Port-au-Prince; on January 3 he was arrested, dragged through the streets, beaten, and imprisoned, saved from a firing squad only by his frantic promise to recall every copy of an imprudent electioneering pamphlet. On January 15, while the regime was congratulating itself on successful elections — fifteen of Nord Alexis’s relatives or godchildren among those elected — a messenger dashed to the palace from the cable company reporting that an earthquake had devastated Gonaïves. By late afternoon the truth became known: the telegram was a ruse. Jean-Jumeau had slipped in by sailboat from St. Thomas, raised the banner of Firmin, and held Gonaïves and St. Marc, while Firmin himself with twenty-five followers would arrive from St. Thomas aboard a British merchantman. But there was one fatal flaw: the U.S. Secret Service in New York had intercepted Firmin’s arms and war chest — 2,000 rifles, 100,000 cartridges, and $400,000 — wiping out his logistics at a stroke. Nord Alexis packed soldiers aboard would-be relief ships under Cincinnatus Leconte and sailed them to St. Marc, which was shelled, torched, and retaken. When Firmin reached Gonaïves he learned there were no arms; Jean-Jumeau armed 500 men with old swords and machetes and marched to meet the government army at Carrefour Croix-Marchand, where he was run down with only seven men left, trussed up, and shot — and when six bullets failed to kill him, three soldiers were ordered to chop him with machetes, and when they refused they were shot and three others hacked him to death. Mérisier Jeannis was caught at Habitation Desrue, shot, his head cut off and — with a soldier on each side holding an ear — dangled through the streets and exposed on a pole in the Jacmel market place. On the night of March 14–15, betrayed by none other than the poet Massillon Coicou’s own cousin General Jules Coicou, Nord Alexis’s Police du centenaire ranged the capital in a pogrom of the elite unequaled since 1883 — heavily cloaked and masked, armed with revolvers, carbines, and kokomakak, they dragged victims from their beds. Massillon Coicou was hemmed in beneath the statue of Dessalines on the Champ de Mars, beaten, and hauled off to the cemetery where graves had already been dug; his two brothers Horace and Pierre-Louis met a similar fate. Only on March 16 did the bloody rampage halt, when H.M.S. Indefatigable arrived and fired signal guns.