Les Cayes. Council condemns Moreau and Lafleur; anarchy; Aoua murdered

Meanwhile several assassinations were being committed at Les Cayes. The authorities met on the 16th to deliberate on the fate of Generals Moreau and Lafleur, who were held prisoner. Borgella, David Troy and Faubert were invited to attend the deliberation. Borgella said that he had not come to Les Cayes to take part in assassinations; that Gérin had sent him there to lead the troops to the Bridge of Miragoâne, but that he saw that instead of flying to meet the enemy they were giving themselves up to private vengeance. David Troy for his part spoke with such warmth in Lafleur’s favor, representing him as a virtuous citizen, that he stirred the displeasure of Voltaire and Racolier. Racolier, a violent and pitiless officer, will take upon himself the most odious executions. Borgella, David Troy and Faubert, unable to make the voice of reason prevail, left the room. The council of the conspirators, without having heard the two generals, decided that they would suffer the capital penalty. Racolier went to Lafleur and told him that he was to be taken to Camp Gérard, where Moreau was. Lafleur, convinced that they meant to take his life, mounted his horse and set out followed by a company of dragoons. As soon as he reached the Fonfrède crossroads, the dragoons shouted to him: Halt! general, halt! Lafleur, seeing death behind him, spurs his horse and takes flight. The dragoons dash after him, Racolier at their head, overtake him in front of the Labarère plantation, cut him down with their sabers, throw him to the ground and split his head. They abandon the corpse and ride off at a gallop toward Camp Gérard. A moment later a woman bowed down by years, to whom grief had given the strength to follow close behind Lafleur, reaches the place of the murder, embraces the corpse, digs a grave with her trembling hands on the spot where the unfortunate man had fallen, and buries him, helped by a few charitable souls of the plantation. This old woman was the mother of General Guillaume Lafleur.

Racolier had reached Camp Gérard with his squadron. General Moreau was at breakfast when he heard the sound of the trumpet. He asked those around him what the noise was. It is the dragoons of Les Cayes, they answered. He rose from the table and said: My friends, it is all over. He hastily took his coat and his hat and awaited the fatal moment with profound resignation. Racolier appeared in the room, his face burning and his eyes bloodshot. He said to him: General, I have received orders to take you to Les Cayes. Let us go, comrade, I am ready. After this answer, which shows that his soul had already left the earth, Moreau mounts his horse. When he reaches the Touya crossroads, a quarter of a league from Gérard, he says: What! are we not well enough here? No, general, a little farther on, they answered him. They came onto the Pémerle plantation and halted in a wooded, dark and very lonely spot called La Ravine. Moreau dismounted and asked for a pencil, which was given him. He took some paper from his pocket, wrote a few lines about his private affairs, and said to Captain Moulite Tuffet: Comrade, you are a man of honor; give this paper to my wife. He then accused himself of having carried out Dessalines’s orders too harshly. As the horsemen were making ready to fire on him, he begged them to wait a little longer. He entrusted a few words for his wife to the same Captain Tuffet. Then he cried out with the greatest composure: My friends, fire now.* The officers of the squadron, not one of whom was moved, discharged their pistols into him almost at point-blank range. He met death with all the courage he ought to have shown at Garata when, on 8 October, he was arrested by Mécerou’s band. The horsemen withdrew without even burying him. Madame Geffrard, the widow, forgetting the wrongs he had done her husband, had him buried.

Moreau, from the beginning of his military career, had never made himself loved by his companions. After the fall of Rigaud, under Toussaint Louverture, when he became a battalion commander, he adopted toward his brothers an attitude that kept them away from his circle. Promoted to the rank of general under Dessalines, his ambition knew no more bounds, and to satisfy his immoderate passion for honors he made himself, in the department of the South, the executor of the sovereign’s secret orders. The population of Les Cayes had come to hold him in horror; and his character, far more than his devotion to the head of the State, brought him to the scaffold, for a multitude of officers loyally attached to the Emperor were spared during the reaction.

As for General Guillaume Lafleur, he had always given shining proofs of his great heart. Under Toussaint, after the civil war, he rendered countless services to the proscribed. He would not have been sacrificed, although he had shown himself resolved to defend the cause of Dessalines, had events not chained his destiny to that of Moreau, whom no one wished to save. When one recognizes that one cannot strike a guilty man without sacrificing an innocent one with him, one absolves the guilty to save the innocent. In any case, Moreau did not have a noble heart; but he did not deserve death.

How greatly must we deplore these frightful reactions, which leave deep seeds of discord in families and cause the son sometimes to fall victim, half a century later, to the furies his father unleashed.

David Troy and most of the senior officers of Les Cayes left for Port-au-Prince. The day before, the 13th demi-brigade had set out for Miragoâne and the 17th for Jérémie. The town of Les Cayes was given over to anarchy. Aoua, that intrepid seaman, commander of the squadron of the South, who had been arrested in the first days of the revolt, was dragged from his cell by his own sailors, who hauled him at eight in the evening into the ditches of the town and cut his throat.