Fabre Nicolas Geffrard was born in 1806 in Anse-à-Veau, a town on Haiti's southern coast in the Grande Anse department.
He came from the free colored — mulatto — military and commercial class of the South, the social stratum that had dominated Haitian politics since the death of Dessalines and the period of Pétion's republic. His family background placed him within the western Haitian tradition of educated, literate, mixed-race military men who understood themselves as the legitimate heirs of...