Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/295

 prison. This melancholy termination to his sufferings took place when he was sixty years of age.

The forcible suppression of Toussaint's government, and his treacherous removal from the island, did not prove a happy stroke of policy; and it would have been preferable for France to have at once established the independence of St. Domingo, than to have entered on the project of resuming it as a dependency on the old terms. Leclerc, with all the force committed to his care by Bonaparte, signally failed in his designs. The contemptuous and cruel manner in which the blacks were generally treated, and the attempts made to restore them as a class to slavery, provoked a wide-spread insurrection. Toussant's old friends and generals, Dessalines, Christophe, Clerveaux, and others, rose in arms. Battle after battle was fought, and all the resources of European military skill were opposed to the furious onsets of the negro masses. All was in vain: before October, the negroes, under the command of Dessalines and Christophe, had driven the French out of Fort Dauphin, Port de Paix, and other important positions. In the midst of these calamities, that is, on the 1st of November, 1802, Leclerc died, and Pauline Bonaparte returned to France with his body. Leclerc was succeeded in the command by Rochambeau, a determined enemy of the blacks. Cruelties such as Leclerc shrunk from were now employed to assist the French arms; unoffending negroes were slaughtered; and bloodhounds were imported from Cuba to chase the negro fugitives through the forests. Rochambeau, however, had a person to deal with who was capable of repaying cruelty with cruelty. Dessalines, who had assumed the chief command of the insurgents, was a man who, to great military talents and great personal courage, added a ferocious and sanguinary disposition. Hearing that Rochambeau had ordered 500 blacks to be shot at the Cape, he selected 500 French officers and soldiers from among his prisoners, and had them shot by way of reprisal. To complete the miseries of the French, the mulattoes of the south now joined the insurrection, and the war between France and England having recommenced, the island was blockaded by English ships, and provisions began to fail. In this desperate condition, after demanding assistance from the mother country, which could not be granted, Rochambeau negotiated with the negroes and the English for the evacuation of the island; and towards the end of November, 1803, all the French troops left St. Domingo.

On the departure of the French, Dessalines, Christophe, and the other generals proclaimed the independence of the island "in the name of the blacks and the people of color." At the same time they invited the return of all whites who had taken no part in the war; but, added they, "if any of those who imagined they would restore slavery return hither, they shall meet with nothing but chains and deportation." On the first of January, 1804, at an assembly of the generals and chiefs of the army, the independence of the island was again solemnly declared, and all present bound themselves by an oath to defend it. At the same time, to mark their formal renunciation of all connection with France, it was resolved that the name of the island be