Dessalines ordered mass slaughter of white civilians during his retreat

Evidence

Descourtilz wrote that he had witnessed them being slaughtered by the hundreds under Dessalines’s direct orders. His account was corroborated by Lacroix, who described finding 800 corpses in the town of Verrettes as he pursued Dessalines’s retreating troops, and coming across other piles of bodies along the route they had taken into the mountains. Seeking to spare his troops from the stench of one group of bodies piled up near their camp, and lacking shovels to build a mass grave, he burned them. Instead of removing the odor, this move filled the air with an even more acrid smell, one he was never able to remove from his clothes. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 963

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to the episode described earlier in this same book of the French colonial world’s mass violence; also echoes the terror in the French Revolution that framed all sides’ tactics.

Related

• Dessalines’ troops massacred hundreds of white prisoners during retreat. (similarity 0.92)
• Dessalines ordered massacres of whites fearing they would restore slavery (similarity 0.91)
• Dessalines disposed of captured whites and covered up the killings. (similarity 0.90)
• Dessalines burned Saint-Marc and massacred its white residents in retreat. (similarity 0.86)
• Northern plantation uprisings in 1801 killed hundreds of whites before Dessalines suppressed them. (similarity 0.85)
• Dessalines pre-authorized killing of French-allied whites but spared culturally assimilated ones. (similarity 0.83)
• Dessalines publicly renounced the French mission and its massacres. (similarity 0.81)
• Dessalines justified massacring whites as punishment for pro-slavery conspiracy (similarity 0.80)
• Dessalines waged brutal counterinsurgency against former comrades while serving the French (similarity 0.80)
• Dessalines served as a brutal instrument of Leclerc’s counterinsurgency (similarity 0.80)
• Dessalines publicly promised independence and total expulsion of whites (similarity 0.79)