1912, August 7: (The Explosion at the National Palace: The Death of Leconte and the End of Hope): How and whether Leconte would have coped with the Cacos wil…

1912, August 7: (The Explosion at the National Palace: The Death of Leconte and the End of Hope): How and whether Leconte would have coped with the Cacos will never be known. At 3:00 A.M. on the hot night of August 7, 1912, Port-au-Prince was shaken by an enormous explosion, followed by a volcano of flame soaring skyward from the National Palace. Whether by accident or design, the Antoine Simon’s Italian powder — stored in the palace basement — had finally gone off, taking with it a million rounds of ammunition and assorted other explosives squirreled away by presidents who felt safer with them under their feet than out of their sight. The entire floor of Leconte’s bedroom dropped into the holocaust; his daughter and son-in-law narrowly escaped out a window before the building collapsed. With that building — built by Salomon — also died the president’s grandson, three hundred soldiers of the Garde Présidentielle, and the hopes of many that Leconte might somehow be the leader who would bring Haiti into the new century. Roger Farnham, anything but a respecter of Haitian politicians or of the Germans to whom Leconte was linked, privately wrote Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in 1914 that the administration of President Leconte was probably the best Haiti had had for many years, that a real effort was made to administer the country honestly, that at one time the National Bank estimated fully ninety percent of customs revenues were actually being collected, and that Leconte had told Farnham his life was being threatened by office-holders because of his effort to collect all customs — they told him he must loosen up or he would be put out of office. The explosion that killed Leconte — whether sabotage or the accumulated negligence of a century of storing gunpowder beneath presidential beds — extinguished the last indigenous attempt to reform the Haitian state from within before foreign occupation would impose reform from without. In the decolonial reading, Leconte’s death was the structural terminus of a contradiction that had haunted every modernizing Haitian leader from Christophe to Salomon: the president who tried to collect all customs, to appoint honest judges, to educate the peasantry, was by those very acts dismantling the patronage apparatus through which every faction — Caco, merchant, German banker, American railroad man — extracted its share, and the accumulated explosive force of all those displaced interests, stored like gunpowder in the basement of the state itself, required only a spark.