Hayti was the first country in the New World to imitate the example of the United States in throwing off all political allegiance to the Old World. It is following our example again. It has a Civil War. The North and South are arrayed against each other. But, in Hayti it is the North that is in revolt; while the South talks of "loyalty" and "union" and "sustaining the Government."
The accounts that have reached us have been vague and contradictory. But I have before me a file of the "Opinion Nationale of Port-au-Prince", from which the Government version of the rebellion can be readily enough gleaned. It does not flatter the armed Opposition. It does not recognise them as patriots. It publishes none of the multitudinous manifesto's which undoubtedly have been issued at the head-quarters of "the enemy". It characterises the leader of the rebellion, or one of them, as an assassin.
Fabre Geffrard, the President of Hayti, is a man of fine parts; an eloquent orator, a statesman fully alive to the needs of his people, a friend of progress, humane, affable, polished, and tolerably well cultivated. He was the man of all others to succeed the ignorant and brutal barbarian Soulouque. It was necessary in order that the castes of Hayti should be united, that a mulatto, with such qualifications, should appear as ruler, to soften, if not obliterate, their mutual prejudices. For the blacks and mulattoes in Hayti have been at enmity from the immemorial. It began before slavery disappeared. The mulattoes were free, wealthy, and slave owners. Their fathers flung treasures at them, but kept them at arms length. They left them estates, but would not suffer them to dine with them. They sent them to Paris to be educated, but ostracised them. This prejudice created that extraordinary feeling in the breasts of the mulattoes which caused Humboldt, to say that they hated their father and despised their mother.
The French Revolution developed these sentiments into martial action; for the educated mulattoes demanded the political rights for themselves which the National Assembly proclaimed. The St. Domingo planters showed precisely the same spirit which is manifested in South Carolina today. They resolutely declared that they would never share their privileges with "an inferior and bastard race". This coarse answer enraged the sensitive mulattoes, who had acted thus far precisely as our Republican party acted at the beginning of our own civil war - they had never asked any right for the slave, and resented the accusation that they desired to interfere with "the domestic institution". But the logic of events, there as here, quickly called the blacks to arms; and the rebellion was promptly suppressed, at the price of the abolition of slavery. Southonax, the French Commissioner, has the sublime honour of being the first man in history to conceive and execute the idea of immediate emancipation.
It would take too much of your space to tell how, during the Revolutionary War and after, the whites disappeared, and the jealousy between the blacks and the mulattoes rapidly developed itself and brought on most disastrous conflicts. It is enough to say that it was suppressed only during the vigorous administration of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the brief and bloody reign of the Emperor Dessalines; but burst out again with fresh fury in 1806, when the founder of Haytian nationality fell dead beneath the dagger of a band of assassins - one of them the grandfather of President Geffrard. He had become a very cruel and remorseless despot.
At his death Christophe, a black, became King of the North, and Pétion, a mulatto, President of the South. Christophe was the Peter the Great of Hayti - a wonderful man, but a rigorous tyrant. Pétion was more like our Madison - better calculated for an era of good feeling than sturdier times. This territorial division existed until the death of Pétion and the suicide of Christophe, in 1820, when not the North only, but the Spanish part also, were united under President Boyer, who held sway for twenty-five years. He was a mulatto, and favoured his caste. After four Presidencies of one year each Soulouque succeeded to the supreme power, and established a black man's Government; but, unfortunately, he represented the barbarism rather than the good qualities of the negro. He was overthrown on the 22nd December, 1858, by President Geffrard.
Geffrard set to work in the right spirit to reform all abuses. He reduced the army and reorganised it; he encouraged education, and established, for the first time, a school for girls; he applied to the Pope for decent priests, who would have been a very great novelty in Hayti; he tried to remodel the courts and to reform the Executive; he urged the sanctity of marriage to the country folks; he did his best to abolish the prejudices of the two great classes of his countrymen, and to invite a large emigration.
He did a great deal of good. But he lacked firmness - he did not dare; he was a gentle conciliator - not an unyielding reformer; he had infinite faith in persuasion when audacity was wanted. Long ago - in 1859 - I predicted that his work would be accomplished in a few years, and that the situation would demand as his successor a bold black man, inspired with the spirit of progress, to drive the country ahead. That reformer must be a pure negro, because he alone could command the confidence of the blacks, who would not tolerate the same rigouous rule from a mulatto that they would applaud in one of their own colour.
There have been several attempts to overthrow Geffrard, most of them from the Soulouque faction - the barbarous element. But there was one effort to inaugurate a revolution originated by the enlightened class; and when it was recorded that Mr. Duval and Mr. André Germaine had been imprisoned as conspirators I believed what I had only feared before, that the love of office and the poisonous lips of flatterers had made the good Geffrard false to his great mission.
I read now that Geffrard has released André Germaine; but I hear also that the Revolutionists are gaining ground. If Horace Greeley or Mr. Sumner had been imprisoned for conspiracy, and released only when a revolution was rapidly increasing in strength, we would rejoice at the fact, but we would hardly thank the Government. The celebrated sentence would leap to the lips of the hearer "C'est trop tard!"
On the 10th of May last the President of Hayti issued an Order of the Day, two Decrees (Arrétés), and a Proclamation to the People - in all of which it was announced that a condemned criminal named Turin Salnave, had "fomented a sedition" in the North. The Proclamation bears the marks of Geffrard's own style , and therefore I translate it, as a statement of his view of the insurrection:
PROCLAMATION
Fabre Geffrard, President of Hayti
HAYTIANS! - A sedition fomented on Dominican territory by a band of foreigners, seized, by surprise, on the 7th of May instant, the town of Ouanaminthe, whose commandant it arrested. This band threatens to invade the neighbouring localities, and to throw them into anarchy. Its means are menaces and fallacious promises; its object is easy to divine; it is the satisfaction of odious ambitions, of blind cupidity; it is still more - it is the idea of a Separation that the insensates dream of. Their chief; it is the said Turin Salmave, condemned by contumacy, hardly eight months ago, by the verdict of the Court Martial at Cape Haytien, to the penalty of death for rebellion and assassination.
Haytian! In these circumstances I need only to say to you, Remain faithful to the Government of the 2nd of December, to the head of which I have been called by the unanimity of your suffrages. I call you to the defense of the menaced integrity of your territory; I call you to the defense of your Republican institutions; I call you , in brief, to join your efforts in order, at any cost, to maintain this Union which was the strength of your fathers, and on which depend our future, our independence, our nationality!
The evils and the bitter trials which have been imposed on the inhabitants of the Eastern Part, are not they a lesson? Will you not profit by them? Will you abandon the flag of the Union, the flag under which your fathers fought, to run the risks and chances of an unknown future, under the guidance of a man condemned for assassination?
No! You will not hesitate; you will not sacrifice the welfare and the destinies of your country; you will never permit yourselves to be led into a path at the end of which there are but ruins and disasters.
Citizens! The Government will not fail under the new task which circumstances impose on it. Have confidence in its patriotism. The most energetic measures will be taken to crush out the rebellion and to maintain the public tranquillity.
Soldiers! your fidelity and your loyalty are known to me; these sentiments, I am certain of it, will be as great as the peril which menaces the country.
Citizens and Soldiers! let us express the unanimity of our sentiments by these sole watchwords:
Long live the Republic, one and indivisible!
Long live the Constitution!
Done at the National Palace, at Port-au-Prince, May 10th 1865, the sixty-second year of Independence.
The Order of the Day decreed that any armed Dominican found on Haytian territory should be regarded as a foreign enemy and shot. The Decrees outlawed Salnave and every individual who should aid him, directly or indirectly; and authorised any citizen to "à lui courir sus!" which means, in homely English, to bell the cat. They further put the Department of the North under martial law.
On the 15th and 17th of May Geffrard issued two additional Orders of the Day, which are so characteristic of Haytian military or revolutionary literature that I will give them, also, without abridgement:
FABRE GEFFRARD, President of Hayti
To the National Guards of the Republic:
National Guards! The National unity is menaced! The Union of the children of Hayti is broken! The country is in danger! A handful of fractionists banded together on Cape Haytien under the leadership of the perfidious and treacherous General François Jean Joseph (illustration below) and of Turin Salnave, the assassin of General Phillippeau, have raised the flag of civil war, have declared that the Northern People separate themselves from the legitimate Government of the Republic!
The insurrection is concentrated in the North: Gonaives, St. Mark, and the populations of the Artibonite remain faithful to the National flag.
I call you to rally to sustain the army for the defense of that which you hold dearest - the unity of our territory, our independence, and our nationality!
Do not suffer this handful of rebels to impose on you anew the despotism of a king or of an emperor! For the rebels of the Cape have already effaced from our device the word EQUALITY, and they are ambitious of power only that they may impose on you involuntary labour, and profit by your sweat to enrich themselves, as under the rule of King Christophe.
Our fathers did not wish you to bear the shame of this régîme.
Let us imitate their example; let us remain united. Let us fight the hydra of anarchy; let us defend our republican institutions!
Gather, then, from all parts of the Republic; range yourselves around your chiefs and under your flag.
May the unanimity of your sentiments prove to our enemies our energetic resolution to perish rather than to suffer any dishonour, from whatever part it come!
National Guards of the Capital! It belongs to you to set the example of fidelity and loyalty. I have confidence in you, and I count upon you.
Long live the National Unity! - Long live the Constitution! - Long live Liberty!
Done, etc. etc.
GEFFRARD
The next Order was addressed
To the General Officers and to the Officers of all grades of the Department of the North:
Officers! I, Fabre Geffrard, President of Hayti, the chief whom you spontaneously acclaimed on the 22nd of December, to whom you swore fidelity and devotion, on honour, in the face of God and of the glorious National flag, and who has never had but one thought - how to advance your welfare and the country's.
In this supreme moment, in which the country makes an appeal to all its children to preserve it from the great evils with which a handful of traitors, of ambitious men, of fractionists threaten it - before the blood shed at Puilboreau cries out for vengeance against those who shed it - before Haytian blood is poured out anew, I appeal, for the last time , to your honour and to your oaths. I adjure you to return, to range yourselves under the flag of the Republic around the delegate of the legitimate Government at Gonalves.
You will be welcomed with joy there, and as brothers who, for a moment fallen and misled, return to reason and to honour.
Listen to the voice of your conscience, the voice of honour, and of fidelity to oaths.
Listen! Throw down the fratricidal arms that are in your hands, and draw your swords for the defense of the country, shouting "Long live the Union Long live the Republic, one and indivisible!"
Whatever the pretences of the rebels may be, the name of their new leader, François Jean Joseph, and the omission of the word EQUALITY from the National device, stamps the "secessionist movement" (as the Opinion Nationale terms it) as a revolt of barbarism against civilisation. I send you a portrait of Joseph, which he presented to me a few years ago, as a token of his regard for my "sentimens philanthropiques!" He was a General at Cape Haytian under the Emperor Soulouque, and was the first to declare in favour of Geffrard. He is a pure black - a man of great brutal force, of barbarous energy; and all his instincts are antagonistic to liberal ideas and a high civilisation. He was made a member of Geffrard's Cabinet, as Minister of the Interior, and he might then have been seen at his Bureau any day in a faultless uniform, basking himself on the balustrade; while behind him, in the room, toiling at his desk, sat the real Secretary - the intelligent and industrious Auguste Ellie. Joseph's duty as Minister was to sign the papers that Mons. Ellie brought to him. He was simply a figure-head, put there to conciliate the blacks.
There was another pure negro in Geffrard's Cabinet, but he was a man of real force - Lamothe (at right, on right), now in exile in Jamaica, whither he fled to escape from condemnation for conspiracy.
This revolt is simply an insurrection of the Soulouque party, of the more ignorant blacks, against the mulattoes, or the Geffrard party; and all our good wishes should go with the legitimate Government.
Perhaps the objection that the friends of Hayti have against Geffrard may be made more intelligible by saying that they regard him as the M'Clellan of Hayti, while the times call aloud for a Grant. The country needs a man who shall push on and hold on, and dare and dare and always dare; while Geffrard, it has been seen, has contented himself with fine rhetoric and timorous advances against the spiritual Richmond of his people. He lacks audacity. But as between M'Clellan and Major Turner, of the Libby Prison, no Northern man would have hesitated a moment, so as between Geffrard and François Jean Joseph and his horde of semi-barbarians we "shout" with "the order of the day" just quoted, "Long live the Republic, one and indivisible!"
Joseph's design is to make "the North" - Christophe's kingdom - an independent, retrogressive, black South Carolina; while what the Progressive party of Hayti seek is to unite the whole island under one intelligent Government.
It is thus expressed by M. Heurtelon, the Wendell Phillips of the Negro Republic: We are in the midst of events which sadly afflict all patriotic hearts - all those who are interested in the future, the prosperity, the fair fame of our nationality. Instead of employing our forces, our energy, all the means in our power, to effect the interior improvements which our society need, lo! By an aberration of mind hard to understand, hard to excuse, forgetting the holy ties of fraternity which unite all the children of Hayti, we are ready to run against each other, we are preparing to rush at each other. What do I say? We go to fight between ourselves? The strife has commenced! Blood has flowed…..Brothers of the North!……your dearest interests, the interests of the country, the interests of our race, demand that we shall remain strictly united. All divisions among ourselves will but enfeeble and finally compromise our nationality. Our country, already small in territory, not sufficiently peopled, in order to maintain unity ought not draw back from any sacrifice. The Republic must remain one and indivisible. To the end that liberal and progressive ideas may receive among us a complete development, and enable us to assure the prosperity of our Republic, to shed afar off the light of our civilisation, it is of the first necessity that we put a stop to conspiracies and revolutions. Successive revolutions have never, in any country, been favourable to a good fructification of liberal ideas.
The final consequence of repeated revolutions has always been to obliterate the moral sense of the people, and to leave them, feeble, brutalised, to Despotism, to Tyranny…..In the actual state of the Republic, we say, in all sincerity, that the duty of all good citizens, to whatever party they belong, is to gather around the Chief of the State and avert, as quickly as possible, the secessionist movement which is manifested in the Department of the North. The political Ideal which we pursue, it is not, certainly, Separation, Division, but rather the Union of the entire island by the progress accomplished, by the guarantees of continued prosperity, of peace, of security of all kinds which we may be able to offer to our brethren in the East.
I had intended to give a record of the rebellion in Hayti, but I find that it would read, after our Titanic strife, as a caricature, or but needlessly recall that remote and peaceful period when all was quite along the Potomac. There have been skirmishes in Hayti, in which a few persons - a very few - have been killed or wounded; but why chronicle such small deeds in the land where Grant and Sherman have hardly yet washed themselves of the dust of battle?
The last news is that the rebels still hold the Cape, but that it must soon surrender; and that Geffrard has been worsted in every engagement, and has been advised to resign. That is to say, the latest intelligence is quite as contradictory as every thing in and from Hayti is and has always been during my recollection. The official news, of course, is favourable to the Government, and we have no means of obtaining the rebel version of the situation. But a private letter contains this intelligence:
The government troops have been worsted in almost every encounter, and are rapidly deserting to the insurgents. Salnave, who commands the rebel army, was in Dominica fighting against Spain. He was under sentence of death in Hayti for political offences. He took possession of Cape Haytien with about five hundred Dominicans and an equal number of Haytians. Since that time he has received upward of a thousand Dominicans more, and large numbers of Haytians. Geffrard's best troops have been badly whipped, and a great many deserted, one regiment having gone over in a body, officers and men.
A short time ago Salnave discovered a traitorous general among his officers, who was holding correspondence with Geffrard, and had laid a plot to retake Cape Haytian. Salnave allowed him with his men to advance nearly to the gates, and then opening an enfilading fire upon them with grape and cannister, nearly annihilated him, wounded the general, who ran away, and cut his aide and horse nearly into mince-meat.
I am informed Geffrard has been advised to leave as soon as possible, as his troops are not to be relied upon, the common soldiers caring little who is President so that they get their pay. Salnave pays his soldiers twenty-five gourdes a month, and eight gourdes a day for subsistence. Geffrard pays four gourdes a month, and four gourdes a day for rations; and a gourde is only worth about seven American cents. The result is easily seen. Foreigners have never yet been injured in Haytian revolutions.
Damier, the present Minister of Public Instruction, will probably be elected by the Senate as President, should Salnave succeed. Under the new order of things greater privileges are promised to whites, a treaty of commerce will be made with Dominica, and improvements receive liberal encouragement. ……………
This letter was dated Port-au-Prince, June 26, and my file of newspapers of the same date contains no official war bulletin. It is possible, therefore, that Geffrard may be compelled to abdicate.
Damier, the successor indicated, is a pure black. He is not a man of remarkable energy, but I think he is a man of good heart. He talks English fluently. He was Haytian ambassador at the court of St. James when one James Buchanan was the American plenipotentiary there. Three incidents are told in Hayti of these two representatives of the American republics. The old grey-haired public functionary twice evaded a recognition of equality - once by staying away from a banquet when the Haytian ambassador was ticketed to be placed next to him; and once, on being introduced, by dropping a handkerchief and stooping to pick it up instead of shaking hands. Some one asked the O.G.H.P.F. what he thought of the Haytian ambassador. "I think" he said, "that he would be worth $1500 in New Orleans."
If Geffrard falls, and is succeeded by Joseph, it will be a triumph of barbarism; if he is succeeded by Damier, it will be but a change of Administration - for the Minister of Instruction is a friend of progress. But if no change occurs, let us hope that Geffrard will learn the lessons from the insurrection: That barbarism is not a thing to be conciliated or bribed, but to be crushed under and exterminated; and that, whatever flattering lips in the National Palace of Port-au-Prince may say, there is no lasting renown to be gained by benevolent views and able rhetoric merely, but only by a wise and iron-willed and fearless statesmanship.
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