1804 Haiti massacre

The 1804 Haiti massacre was carried out against the remaining white population of native French people and French Creoles (or Franco-Haitians) in Haiti by Haitian soldiers under orders from Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who had decreed that all suspected of conspiring in the acts of the expelled army should be put to death. Throughout the nineteenth century, these events were well known in the United States, where they were called "the horrors of St. Domingo" and they polarized Southern public opinion on the question of the abolition of slavery.

The massacre, which took place throughout Haiti, occurred from early February 1804 until 22 April 1804 and resulted in the deaths 3,000 to 5,000 men, women and children.

Squads of soldiers moved from house to house, torturing and killing entire families. Even whites who had been friendly and sympathetic to the black population were imprisoned and later killed. A second wave of massacres targeted white women and children.

The French colony of Saint-Domingue, known as the "Pearl of the Antilles," was one of the richest colonies in the world. Enormous wealth was extracted through the implementation of a harsh system of slavery:

Thousands of slaves were imported from Africa to work on the tobacco, cocoa, cotton, and indigo farms. By the mid eighteenth century Saint-Dominique had become the most lucrative colony in the Caribbean. Over 40 percent of all European sugar and 75 percent of all European coffee as well as much of France's eighteenth century wealth and glory came from the slave labor in the plantations of "la perle des Antilles," Saint-Dominique.

Henri Christophe's personal secretary, who was a slave for much of his life, expresses the following of the treatment of slaves in Saint-Domingue:

Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to consume faeces? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man eating-dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?

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