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9034: 8874: Re: 8869: Ft. Liberte info requested (fwd)
From: madison bell <mbell@goucher.edu>
Fort Liberte was known as Fort Dauphin until the French Revolution reached
Haiti. During the Haitian Revolution it was the theater of a big
massacre-- in 1794 the Spanish, who then occupied the town (which is near
the border) had invited a lot of French planter refugees back to the colony
with the idea that they would fight to regain their lands from the French
Jacobins. For reasons never entirely clear, they instead turned these
colonists over to a large black army under the command of Jean-Francois,
who massacred all of them, about 800 people.
In 1802 Fort Liberte was the first landfall of the French expedition under
command of Leclerc. A division under command of Rochambeau, later
notorious for his creative cruelty, attacked the town, overcame resistance,
and put the garrisons of the forts to the sword. This happened a couple of
days before Christophe burned Cap Haitien to deny it to the French;
Christophe had certainly been informed of events at Fort Liberte and
probably Toussaint Louverture as well. I.e. it made a peaceful resolution
of the situation impossible. Such a result would have been unlikely
anyway, but the Fort Liberte episode supported Louverture's argument, which
he maintained to his death, that Leclerc was wholly responsible for the
hostilities, since he launched this attack before making any attempt to
present his credentials properly.
msb
http://faculty.goucher.edu/mbell/Master_of_the_Crossroads/Moc_Title_Page.htm