Henri Christophe

Henri Christophe made himself king of northern Haiti, built the largest fortress in the Americas, and shot himself with a silver bullet when his own troops turned on him. He was born in the British Caribbean, probably Grenada, was brought to Saint-Domingue as a slave and worked in a hotel in Cap-Francais; he is said to have served with the French volunteers at Savannah in the American war. He rose under Toussaint Louverture in the revolution and burned Cap-Francais himself in 1802 rather than leave it to Leclerc's expedition. After independence and the assassination of Dessalines in 1806, the country split: Christophe took the north, Alexandre Petion the south, and the two fought intermittently for a decade. He was elected president of the north and crowned himself Henry I in 1811, creating a nobility with titles like the Duke of Marmalade, a royal Dahomey-style guard and a court modelled on European monarchy. He kept the plantation system running with a labour code that tied workers to estates, which produced export earnings, schools, a legal code and the treasury that made the north far richer than Petion's south, and which also made him hated by the people it bound. The Citadelle Laferriere, built on a mountain at the cost of thousands of lives, was designed against a French return that never came and is now a World Heritage site. He was paralysed by a stroke in 1820 and, when the garrison at Saint-Marc mutinied and his guard deserted, killed himself in the palace of Sans-Souci. His son was bayoneted days later, and Jean-Pierre Boyer reunited the country. Aime Cesaire wrote a play about him and Eugene O'Neill a version of the ending. The palace and the Citadelle are the largest structures built in the Americas by formerly enslaved people, and both were raised within twenty years of independence.

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