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A royal chamber of public instruction is named in the official gazette

28 December 1818 · Haitian

The 1800sSovereignty1 source
28 December 1818 · Haitian

A royal chamber of public instruction is named in the official gazette

Dukes, counts and barons are made inspectors of the academies and national schools by name.

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Manigat reproduces from the Gazette Royale d'Haiti of 28 December 1818 the full composition of the royal chamber of public instruction newly created by Christophe, seated at the palace of Sans-Souci, together with the corps of inspectors and supervisors covering the whole kingdom. The comte de La Taste presided and the baron de Dupuy was vice-president, with the comte de Limonade, the duc de la Marmelade, the duc de Dondon, the comte du Terrier-Rouge, the comte d'Ouanaminthe, the comte de Mont-Rouis, the barons Joseph and Louis Dessalines and several chevaliers as members, and Vastey among the secretaries. A resolution of the chamber then named inspectors and special supervisors for the academies and national schools already established in the kingdom's towns, with separate lists for Cap-Henry, Sans-Souci and elsewhere. Manigat uses the roll to show that education was staffed by the highest nobility of the realm.

Baron de DupuyBaron de VasteyComte de La TasteHenry Christophe Cap-HenrySans-Souci
Where this comes from Manigat, L. F. (2007). Henry Christophe, Alexandre Pétion, en deux médaillons distincts: La politique d'éducation nationale du premier, la politique agraire du second. Média-Texte. p. 43.in the library
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Meanwhile, and next door

1816 to 1831 · Caribbeanspan

Three British Caribbean revolts demand a law that was never passed

Barbados, Demerara and Jamaica rose insisting that emancipation had already been granted and hidden.

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Within fifteen years of Waterloo the British islands produced three risings that rank among the biggest anywhere in the Americas: Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831. Geggus points out that the timing of each tracked a development in the antislavery movement in Britain, and that each set of rebels called for the enforcement of a freedom law they wrongly took to have passed at home and to be hidden by officials on the spot. He counts over twenty such episodes between 1789 and the early 1830s where the enslaved insisted that a law had already freed them, or had cut their week down to three days of work. He traces the syndrome back to an aborted rising on Martinique in August 1789 and connects it to reform efforts in England, France and Spain that slaveholders publicly resisted.

BarbadosDemeraraJamaicaMartinique
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1818 to 1821 · Diasporaspan

Two French doctors try to expose a New York physician's Haitian past

The attack forced him to write down what he had seen at Trou Coffy in 1791.

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In 1818 two French medical writers, Fournier and Begim, published an attack on Felix Pascalis of New York. They called him a man who had never really been a doctor at all. Then they went further and named his connection in Saint-Domingue with the insurgent leader they called the pious Romain and with the camp at Trou Coffy, accusing him of presiding over the killing of white civilians and the mutilation of their bodies. Pascalis demanded two thousand dollars in damages. He also wrote to Jean Deveze in Paris, who had run the fever hospital at Bush Hill in Philadelphia in 1793, and obtained from him a signed declaration in February 1820 that his conduct during the Trou Coffy affair had deserved glory. To make his case he set down in 1821 a long memoir of what he had seen, the Anecdote historique. That document, written to save a medical reputation in Manhattan, is one of the fullest eyewitness accounts of any 1791 insurgency in the colony.

Felix PascalisJean Deveze New YorkParisTrou Coffy
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1806 to 1820 · Haitianspan

The cultivators who fought France refuse the state that follows

Thousands allied with Rochambeau rather than join Dessalines, and Goman held the south.

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Girard follows the losing side of independence. Thousands of angry cultivators refused incorporation into Dessalines's army and chose instead to ally with the French commander Rochambeau, and even after the evacuation he went on fighting renegade bands numbering between fifteen hundred and four thousand, one of which called itself the Rochambeau army. He captured and executed their most prominent leader, but lower class opposition to the new landowning elite did not disappear. It took state form in the independent territory that Jean-Baptiste Perrier, known as Goman, held in the south for fourteen years, and reappeared in the Piquet risings of the eighteen forties. The article treats this continuity as the real long term consequence of the labour policy Dessalines had enforced first for Louverture and then for France.

Donatien de RochambeauJean-Baptiste PerrierJean-Jacques Dessalines Grand'AnseSouthern Haiti
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