1910, August 7–14: (Leconte Takes Power: The Great-Grandson of Dessalines Enters the Cathedral): At virtually the hour that Firmin was vainly striving to reg…

1910, August 7–14: (Leconte Takes Power: The Great-Grandson of Dessalines Enters the Cathedral): At virtually the hour that Firmin was vainly striving to regain his native soil, Cincinnatus Leconte entered Port-au-Prince and repaired to the cathedral for mass. From Fort National the old cannon boomed a twenty-one-gun salute as Leconte was proclaimed chef du pouvoir exécutif. On August 14, the National Assembly obligingly ratified events, and the great-grandson of Jean-Jacques Dessalines — born September 29, 1859 — became Haiti’s president. That Leconte traced his lineage directly to the Liberator invested his accession with a symbolic weight no other president since Soulouque had carried: in a political culture where ancestry functioned as both legitimation and obligation, to be Dessalines’s descendant was to inherit not merely a name but a covenant with the revolution itself — the unfinished promise of 1804 that Black sovereignty would someday be more than survival, that it would become flourishing. Whether Leconte could honor that covenant, or whether the structures he inherited would devour him as they had devoured every predecessor, remained the question that history was about to answer with terrible swiftness.