Fabre Geffrard, born at Cayes, in the year 1806, was the son of a general who had shown himself humane under Dessalines, and had been with Petion, one of the chief promoters of the constitution of 1806. Left early an orphan, young Geffrard entered the army at the age of fifteen, and only after twenty-two years' service obtained his captain's commission. He took part--unwisely, as events proved--in the revolution of 1843, which overturned the able but indolent Boyer, and distinguished himself at the head of a small body of troops against the government forces, deceiving them as to his numbers by the rapidity of his movements, and as to his resources by supplying provisions to his famished enemies at a time when he himself was short of rations. When the revolution, which had originated with the most impatient of the mulattoes, led in turn to a rising of that portion of the blacks who represented absolute barbarism, and whose axiom was that every mulatto should be exterminated, Geffrard marched against and defeated the black leader, Arcaau; but, true to that humanity which seems the very basis of his character, we find him in turn defending the middle classes from the blacks, and the insurgent blacks, when taken prisoners, from the National Guard. He became lieutenant-general during these movements; but General Riche, who was made president in 1846, and who bore Geffrard a grudge for having on a former occasion made him a prisoner, sent him before a court martial, which, in Hayti, means sending one to death. Through the adroitness, however, of Riche's minister of war, the general was acquitted. The president of the court martial was Soulouque, who seems to have imbibed, on this occasion, a strange friendship for the man whose life he had been the means of preserving, and who thus spared him, in an otherwise unaccountable manner, during his subsequent rule, and even forced on him the title of duke, which Geffrard did not care to assume. In two disastrous wars which he undertook, in 1849 and in 1855-6, against the Dominican republic, Geffrard alone won credit. In the former he was wounded at the head of the division; in both, by his courage, his activity, his cheerfulness, and above all, by his anxious care for the welfare of his soldiers, he exhibited the most striking contrast to Soulouque's imbecile generalship and brutal indifference to the safety of others.