Former Haitian president Sylvain Salnave was executed on this date in 1870.
Salnave was a general who in 1866 overthrew and replaced president Fabre Geffrard — an act which “profoundly unsettled the country.”
Salnave stood at the head of a triumvirate that promulgated a new and more democratic constitution in 1867, abolishing the president-for-life position that his predecessors had asserted — but the political rearrangement collapsed within months and saw the the president and legislature at loggerheads, and then at outright civil war as regional risings multiplied against Salnave.
The president held out under bombardment in the capital of Port-au-Prince until the last days of 1869, when he fled to what he believed was the safety in the Dominican Republic — only to be arrested by the Dominican general Jose Maria Cabral and handed back over to the now-triumphant Haitian rebels. They had Salnave tried on January 15 and immediately executed that same day.
On this day..
- 2007: Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, Saddam Hussein aides
- 1811: The slaves of the German Coast Uprising
- 1648: Francis Ferdinand de Capillas, protomartyr of China
- 1784: Cassumo Garcelli, a Tuscan sailor on Boston Common
- 1944: Zinaida Portnova, Komsomol hero
- 1973: Lim Seng, under Philippines martial law
- 69: Galba, in the Year of the Four Emperors
- 1999: Recak Massacre
- 2000: Kasongo, child soldier
- 2009: A day in the death penalty around the world
- 1895: Charles Stokes, in the heart of darkness
- 1943: Sue Logue, George Logue and Clarence Bagwell
- Themed Set: The Spectacle of Private Execution in America