February 1804 · Southern Province Theater
February 1804
In February and March 1804, Dessalines ordered the systematic killing of the remaining white French colonists in Haiti — men, women, and children who had not already fled the island. Estimates of those killed range from 3,000 to 5,000. Polish soldiers who had defected to the Haitian side were spared and given citizenship. Those deemed 'white by conduct' — doctors, priests, and others who had served the revolution — were also exempted in some cases. Dessalines reportedly justified the massacres as a necessary prevention of any future restoration of slavery: as long as white planters remained on the island with their legal claims to land and to the people who had been enslaved on it, the possibility of French return and re-enslavement existed. The massacres were also acts of revenge for 13 years of atrocity.
Commanders