Croix des Martyrs. Whites led out and killed there.

Dessalines came out of the palace and crossed the crowd gathered on the square before the government house. It greeted him with loud acclamations. He went off to ride through the town. The citizens went to their homes expecting some great event, but still uncertain whether the massacre would be general. As for the whites, they were resigned to the frightful fate that threatened them. In the evening the town was illuminated on every side; the streets were full of strollers, soldiers and senior officers. Colonel Lamarre, who had come from Petit-Goâve to Port-au-Prince, was greatly excited; from time to time he stopped at the houses of Haitian families and told the women, who seemed very anxious, not to be alarmed and to stay shut in their homes when they heard cries. At ten o’clock on the evening of 16 March the slaughter began at several points of the town at once. Platoons of soldiers, guided by men armed with daggers who belonged to the navy, to commerce and to the administration, entered the houses of the whites and cut their throats. Frightful howls filled the town; an old man named None, who lived in the rue des Fronts-Forts, was among the first to be killed. The massacre went on until daybreak. Then the killers rested a little. Toward eight o’clock they began the carnage again. The whites who had not perished in the night were arrested, led out of the town and sacrificed at the Croix des Martyrs. At the same time the director of the domains, Balthazar Inginac, was placing seals on their dwellings so that they would not be pillaged. By Dessalines’s orders their movable goods were to be carried into the State’s warehouses. Officers tried several times to break the seals; when Inginac opposed them he was dragged off to prison; but as soon as Dessalines learned of his imprisonment he had him set at liberty, saying that he had done his duty. Several employees, Sabourin and Toulmé, to escape the fury of the governor, who suspected their devotion to the cause of independence, were obliged to declare that they had killed many whites when they had not sacrificed a single one.