Dessalines reached Les Cayes after burning the logwood stacks of the cultivators of the southern peninsula as far as Torbeck, and set Inginac to verify property titles.
Eight days had passed at Jérémie, eight days of balls, of amorous lusts and of spoliation. On 21 August (1), the emperor was at Les Cayes, after having continued to ruin the cultivators of the southern part of the Peninsula, by having all their stacks burned as far as Torbeck.
General Moreau, provisionally commanding the division, hastened to confirm him in the fear that Boisrond had suggested to him of the approaching arrival of André Rigaud, and in that of the conspiracy formed by Geffrard and Christophe. Searches were ordered among Geffrard’s papers. It is said that friendly hands made disappear from these papers everything that could compromise those implicated.
Yet His Majesty needed a vengeance, whatever it might be: He stopped childishly at persecuting the memory of Geffrard. Not long before, passing through Anse-à-Veau, he had raised mere guides of Jean-Louis François to the rank of officers; here, at Les Cayes, he had Geffrard’s secretaries returned as common soldiers into the 17th demi-brigade. Carrying further the weight of iniquities, seeing everywhere enemies against whom it was necessary to be severe, he disorganized the garrison, by transferring, without plausible motive, officers from a corps in which they had won their ranks to another corps to which they were completely strangers. He gave finally to a law of 16 June, which forbade the building of distilleries (*guildives*) without a permission signed in his own hand (1), a retroactivity such that he had some of these establishments demolished that dated from ten years back (2). He dismissed several officials for no apparent reason.
He had the property titles examined even more rigorously than elsewhere. This examination, at the head of which he had placed M. Inginac, director of the domains of the West, summoned expressly from Port-au-Prince, rightly aroused public animosity.