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"Gilded African." In Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte scoffed at the "First of the Blacks" as a "gilded African," and sent 90 ships and 40,000 veterans of the Egyptian campaign to retake Saint-Domingue. By treachery, the French captured Toussaint and shipped him off to France to die in a moutain prison. But in the end, black troops and yellow fever smashed the French for good.
The new nation picked the Arawak word Haiti (meaning Mountainous Land) for a name, then proceeded to split itself in two. In the north, the fabulous Henri Christophe made himself King, set up a ludicrous aristocracy and built a monumental stone fortress on a needle-top mountain—history's greatest feat of construction by Negroes. Christophe's labor force, mostly sugar workers, toiled from dawn to dusk to keep his treasury solvent. Once the King spotted, far below him, a subject asleep in the door of a hut. A 56-pounder was loaded, aimed, touched off; loafer and house vanished.
But such cruelty taught the Negroes, as they say now, that "the stick that beats the white dog will beat the black dog too." In the end, led by the rebel Duke of Marmelade, they revolted, and in 1820 Christophe, brought to bay, killed himself with a silver bullet—providing a theme, a century later, for Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones.
In the south, meanwhile, a mulatto general, Alexandre Petion, held office as President over a government of elite former freedmen. He gave black war veterans bits of land and ruled with an easy hand. When Christophe died, Haitians gratefully turned their backs on the Emperor's ruthless labor discipline and embraced the subsistence economy Petion developed. Sugar production, 67,000 tons in 1791, dropped to 15 tons in 1826. The less populous, Spanish-speaking eastern end of the island broke away, resumed the old Spanish name Santo Domingo, and became the Dominican Republic. The world forgot the drowsy little island, and Haiti itself seemed somehow hypnotized for nearly a century, while rivers ran dry, land was worked out, men grew torpid, and government degenerated into a quickening cycle of revolutions.
Enter the Marines. By 1912, rebellions had ousted eleven of 18 Haitian Presidents. Then, in the space of 43 months, one President was blown up in his palace, another was poisoned, three more deposed. The U.S., fearing the European powers might try to intervene, decided to act first.
A new revolt was forming near Cap-Haitien, under an ambitious politico named Guillaume Sam. Admiral William B. Caperton, U.S.N., on the U.S.S. Washington, met Sam unofficially and offered him tacit support, urgently warning Sam not to "loot or burn down the cities." But once in office, Sam balked at signing a treaty for U.S. occupation of Haiti. Instead, he jailed and massacred 167 suspected revolutionaries—then panicked and fled for asylum to the French legation. A raging mob broke into the building, found Sam hiding under a bed, dragged him out, literally tore him limb from limb, and paraded through Port-au-Prince with his head on a pole. Haiti's history had hit bottom. Admiral Caperton, waiting in the harbor, immediately landed two companies of marines and three of bluejackets, and the U.S. occupation began.