Alexandre Pétion

Alexandre Sabès Pétion was born in Port-au-Prince on the second of April 1770, the son of Ursula, a free woman of color, and Pascal Sabès, a wealthy Frenchman. As a young man of the gens de couleur libres, he was sent to France in 1788 to be educated and to study at the Military Academy in Paris, where he trained in the arts of war that would soon serve his homeland.

He returned to a Saint-Domingue aflame with revolution. Pétion took up arms in the long struggle for freedom, at first among the French forces and later beside Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the nationalist cause. His artillery and generalship helped carry the final campaigns that drove out the colonial army and won independence, the rebels entering Port-au-Prince in 1803.

In 1807 the Senate named him the first President of the Republic of Haiti, a seat he held until his death. He redistributed plantation lands to the peasantry and his soldiers, earning the tender name Papa Bon-Cœur, "good-hearted father." Amid this reform he received the exiled Simón Bolívar in 1815 and 1816, granting him arms, ships, and men — asking in return only that Bolívar free the enslaved across the lands he would liberate.

Pétion died on the twenty-ninth of March 1818, worn by his labors. From a small, newly free nation he armed a continent's liberation and bound it to emancipation. May the good-hearted father be honored, whose generosity carried freedom far beyond his own shores.