The legislature elects General Michel Domingue president for eight years

On 11 June 1874 the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies elected General Michel Domingue president of Haiti. He was born at Les Cayes in 1813 and had commanded troops in the South; he had backed Nissage Saget in the civil war against Sylvain Salnave. Domingue was a soldier, not a statesman. In September he handed the real power to his nephew Septimus Rameau as vice-president of the Council of Secretaries of State, and Rameau ran the country into the ruinous 1875 foreign loans. An insurrection drove them both out in April 1876; Domingue died in exile at Kingston in 1877.