The 1804 Haiti massacre was a massacre carried out against the remaining white population of native French people and French Creoles (or Franco-Haitians) in Haiti by Haitian soldiers by the order of Jean-Jacques Dessalines who had decreed that all those suspected of conspiring in the acts of the expelled army should be put to death. Throughout the nineteenth century, these events were well known in the United States where they were referred to as "the horrors of St. Domingo" and particularly polarized Southern public opinion on the question of the abolition of slavery.