Author: Rainsford, Marcus
Biography:
RAINSFORD, Marcus (1757/8-1817: ancestry.com)
The first historian of the Haitian Revolution was born in County Kildare, the younger son of Edward Rainsford of Sallins. In 1759, his father leased the family’s St James’s Gate brewing business to Arthur Guinness for £45 per annum for 9,000 years. Having graduated from Trinity College, Dublin (MA 1773), in 1779 to 1780 he fought in America. He was at Jamaica in Lord Montagu’s Duke of Cumberland Regiment from 1781 to 1783. At Plymouth in Jan. 1791, he was indicted for challenging a captain of marines. Promoted lieutenant in the Rutland Milita Regiment of fencible cavalry in Sept. 1794, he fought in the Netherlands against France. He was at St Domingo in 1795 mustering black troops for the 3d West India Regiment; early in 1797 he was in England recovering from an injury; he returned to the West Indies later that year. In 1798, the schooner he was aboard was stranded at Fort Liberté. There he was arrested as a spy. He would have been executed had Toussaint l’Ouverture not commuted his death sentence. He resigned his commission in 1800, but ten years later he reenlisted as an ensign in the 1st Royal Veteran Battalion. His soldier’s income and, from 1811, his £100 military pension, proved insufficient; he was repeatedly imprisoned for debt, in 1798, 1802, 1800, 1813, and 1814. A marriage license was issued to him and his housekeeper, Eleanor Houghton, on 25 June 1817. No marriage took place, but he named her his executor and the prime beneficiary of his estate. He died age 59 in London and was buried 4 Nov. 1817 at St Giles in the Fields, Holborn. The first canto only of his poem The Revolution, a patriotic celebration of the settlement of 1688, was published anonymously in Edinburgh and London in 1791. He also authored St. Domingo; Or, an Historical, Political and Military Sketch of the Black Republic (1802); A Memoir of Transactions that took place in St. Domingo, in the Spring of 1799 (1802); and, the first extended history of the Haitian Revolution, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (1805). Duke University Press published a scholarly edition of An Historical Account in 2013, edited by Paul Youngquist and Grégory Pierrot. The ODNB entry on Rainsford is inadequate. (ancestry.com 29 Sep. 2023; PRO 11/1611; London Gazette [1-5 May 1810], 642; London Gazette [6 Nov. 1813], 2195; Alumni Dublinenses) JC