Port-au-Prince. Pétion takes the oath before the Senate
Senators Thélémaque and Auguste Daumec were sent as a deputation to the President of Haiti to announce his nomination to him. Pétion received their congratulations, as well as those of the most respectable citizens; amid the acclamations that surrounded him he announced that he would take his oath on the following day. Immediately after the return of Daumec and Thélémaque to the Senate, 17 guns announced to the nation the nomination of the president of Haiti; and the Senate’s act was published through the town a moment later. The Senate’s vote was greeted by the entire population of Port-au-Prince with incredible demonstrations of joy.
The same day, 9 March, the Senate by a law abolished the quarter of subvention, which was ruining the cultivator, and replaced it with a land tax of ten gourdes per thousand pounds of coffee. Sugar, syrup, tafia and rum were declared free of all export duties; they were made subject to the dues for weighing and gauging. Sugar and syrup bore a duty of four gourdes per thousand pounds by way of land tax. The rum distilleries were required to pay the land tax on the syrup they consumed. The export duties on coffee were fixed at two gourdes per hundredweight. A deduction of four deniers was to be made on all payments effected at the public treasury, other than payments for the pay of the troops and the salaries of the nation’s employees. The same day, the assembly organized the coasting trade.
The next day (10 March) the Senate met with calm and dignity and, after it had been read, adopted the minutes of the last sitting. Its president announced that General Pétion, senator, named President of the Republic of Haiti at the sitting of 9 March, was about to come into the assembly to take the oath prescribed by the Constitution. Immediately after these words, a salute of artillery announced the President of Haiti. The Senate decided that its members would receive him seated and with their heads covered. The President of Haiti appeared, preceded by the secretary of state Blanchet and by Generals Bazelais and Wagnac and a great number of civil and military officers. Suffering from rheumatic pains and plainly dressed, he could barely hold himself up, leaning on crutches. Mr. Lewis, an officer of the navy of the United States, was part of the procession. The President of Haiti crossed the hall to the sound of music and reached the bar of the assembly, where a seat had been set to receive him. The president of the Senate, after offering chairs to the secretary of state, to Generals Bazelais and Wagnac and to Mr. Lewis, addressed the following speech to the President of Haiti:
“Citizen General,”The Senate, having felt the necessity of organizing the government, proceeded at yesterday’s sitting to the nomination of the President of Haiti. The votes of its members gave the majority to you, and you have been proclaimed President of the Haitian Republic. The Senate, in raising you to the first magistracy of the State, believed it was rendering public homage to your virtues and to the republican sentiments that have always distinguished you. Entrusted with the keeping of the laws and with the armed force, you will become, President, an object of emulation for all those of your companions in arms who pursue the same career as yourself. Your attachment to the Republic, your submission to the laws and your zeal in having them executed are the powerful motives that led the legislative body to place you at the head of the government and of the armed force. May the Gods preserve in you the happy character with which nature has endowed you, and make you always the object of public admiration! Never forget, President, that the safety of the Republic depends on the harmony that must exist between the executive power and the legislative body; to depart from it would be to endanger the safety of the State and expose it to being torn apart. The political crisis must cease once the government is organized.”
The President of Haiti, standing and bareheaded, replied in these terms:
“Senators,”Raised by your choice to the first magistracy of the State, become in some sort the trustee of the happiness and the destinies of our country, I have the honor to declare to you that I should be alarmed at the extent of the obligations you lay upon me, were I not certain of finding in your enlightenment, in your wisdom and in your energy all the resources I shall need. This thought, Senators, must reassure me; and, accepting with confidence the new mission with which you honor me, my heart will now pronounce within the Senate the oath that the Constitution prescribes for the President of Haiti.
“I swear faithfully to fulfill the office of President of Haiti and to maintain the Constitution with all my power. May the arms entrusted to the people for the defense of liberty be turned against my breast, if ever I should conceive the audacious and impious design of assailing its rights; if ever I should forget that it is after having helped to punish with death a tyrant whose existence was a wrong done by nature, and after having helped to proscribe another who by his mad ambition has kindled among us the fire of civil war, that I see myself raised to the presidency of Haiti.”