Page:The black man - his antecedents, his genius, and his achievements (IA blackmanantecede00browrich).pdf/119

 arms and breast the marks of his tribe. Inured by exposure and toil to a hard life, his frame possessed a wonderful power of endurance. He was a bold and turbulent spirit, whose barbarous eloquence lay in expressive signs rather than in words. What is most strange in the history of Dessalines is, that he was a savage, a slave, a soldier, a general, and died, when an emperor, under the dagger of a Brutus.

A more courageous man than he never lived. Fearing that his men, during the attack upon the fort at Crete-a-Pierrot, would surrender it, he seized a torch, held it to the door of the magazine, and threatened to blow up the fort, and himself with it, if they did not defend it. Nearly all historians have set him down as a bloodthirsty monster, who delighted in the sufferings of his fellow-creatures. They do not rightly consider the circumstances that surrounded him, and the foe that he had to deal with.

Rochambeau, the commanding general, from the landing of Napoleon's expedition to the entire expulsion of the French, was a hard-hearted slaveholder, many of whose years had been spent in St. Domingo, and who, from the moment that he landed with his forces, treated the colored men as the worst of barbarians and wild beasts. He imported bloodhounds from Cuba to hunt them down in the mountains. When caught, he had them thrown into burning pits and boiling caldrons. When he took prisoners, he put them to the most excruciating tortures and the most horrible deaths. His ferocious and sanguinary spirit was too much for the kind heart of Toussaint, or the gentlemanly bearing of Christophe. His only match was Dessalines.