Port-au-Prince. Dessalines arrives; troops kneel before him; David Troy condemned and pardoned

Dessalines left Marchand on the thirteenth of January and arrived at Port-au-Prince on the 15th of the same month. The troops he reviewed knelt before him. From then on this became the custom throughout the empire. One can understand that at the festival of Independence, when men had assembled to pronounce the oath to live free and independent or to die, the movement of genuflection should have been made: they were prostrating themselves before the God of the fatherland. In France, under the Republic, the crowd knelt at patriotic festivals at the last verse of the Marseillaise; it carried revolutionary delirium so far as to prostrate itself before the goddess of Reason; that was still to bow before the image of a sacred principle. But it was painful to see a people that had vanquished its oppressors, that had run to victory singing hymns of liberty, prostrate itself in the dust before a warrior as before the Almighty. Dessalines had become not only Emperor but a dazzling God, upon whom the soldier no longer dared raise his eyes.

On arriving at Port-au-Prince he had met there David Troy, formerly a squadron leader under the French, a Black officer who had followed Lavalette at the evacuation and who had just returned to Haiti, no longer able to live abroad. As we know, David Troy had commanded at Le Mirebalais for the French in 1802 and 1803. Almost every Indigenous family of that district had the arrest or death of some relative to lay at his door; the ropes that had served to hang those unfortunates were still hanging from the trees in the woods of Le Mirebalais. He was accused of having been responsible for the hanging of Henriette Saint-Marc at Port-au-Prince. David Troy was one of those brilliant Indigenous officers who had upheld the French cause with the greatest distinction. Dessalines summoned him to the palace to announce the fate he was preparing for him. As soon as David Troy caught sight of the emperor, he threw himself at his feet and embraced his knees. Dessalines thrust him away, saying: “I am not the good Lord, that men should kiss my feet.” He ordered him put to death. But General Pétion, a witness of this scene, obtained his pardon by dint of entreaty. Dessalines, wishing nonetheless to punish him, stripped him of his rank of squadron leader and made him enter the 4th demi-brigade as a private soldier. At the same time Mentor and Dartiguenave had returned to the country. The former had left Saint-Domingue in 1797 with Sonthonax, when Toussaint had indirectly forced the civil commissioner to embark. The latter, formerly a lieutenant of Rigaud, had left the country after Rigaud’s fall. Dessalines confirmed Mentor in his rank of adjutant general and Dartiguenave in his rank of colonel.