Deaths from yellow fever increased. Soon the order for the disarming of the indigenes proved premature. It seemed to be the fate of all orders signed by the unhappy young Captain-General. An old kind of war broke out, with a new name for the enemy.
Within a month news came from thirty places that as many bands of peasant "brigands" had flown to arms and were storming the French outposts, laying waste French farms, and murdering with insane fury every white man, woman, and child they could find.
Christophe and Dessalines found opportunity for a private conference. "Our hills will wait for us," one had said. And the other, "If I surrender a hundred times it will be to betray them a hundred times." They considered carefully.
The plague had scarcely started. Reinforcements by the thousand were still coming out from France. The brigand chiefs were fools, they concluded, and their raids as puerile and premature as LeClerc's orders. The conflict just ended had proved all too clearly that nothing could be accomplished without organization.
Christophe marched against the brigand leaders in the north. He knew the hills. Now he was equipped with the best guns, supplies, and munitions France could find. With the shock of a thunderbolt he fell upon them and saw to it the leaders were hanged.
Word came from Cap Francois that the young fool LeClerc was again unconsciously aiding the cause of rebellion.
He had instituted a reign of terror that would have shamed the Paris of Robespierre.
LeClerc had grown lank from worry. His high forehead was beaded half the time with unnatural sweat. The fingers that wound foolishly in his beard were as gaunt, white, and thin as those of a man whose years were double his own. He had begun to hate everything. He hated Rochambeau, stocky, violent Rochambeau, his second in command. He hated the general's big nose—like that of a cheap actor of tragedies. He hated his pomposity, his cocksureness, his cruel little pig's eyes. But, with so miserable a record of mistakes behind him, LeClerc began against his will to listen to Rochambeau's advice. Rochambeau had lived in Saint Domingue. He knew the country, knew the "niggers." He said that no one of them was to be trusted. All were tainted by the mood of rebellion. They should be slaughtered like the worthless cattle they were. No half measures. Saint Domingue wanted a thorough house-cleaning. It was vermin-filled. It would be cheaper and more efficient to repopulate the island with fresh cargoes of docile blacks from the Guinea coast. Rochambeau lifted his white fat hands. "Perish the blacks or perish the army. Make your choice, monsieur!" Orders began to come from Pauline's palace. All brigand prisoners were to be executed. There need be no care wasted deciding who was rebellious and who was not.
Blood is vintage wine to men who are in mortal fear. Plague was riding swift over the sweltering, crowded town. The gods of Africa had sown a dread disease that rarely in history has affected a negro and has still more rarely spared a white.
Those who died of yellow fever during the day were wrapped in sheets and put outside the doors. At midnight creaking carts went through the empty streets, picked up the dead and hid them in great trenches in the fields beyond the city gates.
The officers of France turned dissolute. They found mulatto women, drank and whored with them. Life was as cheap as love. Sometimes the gaiety of the cotillions the officers held in the bare barrack halls was marred by a young lieutenant, stricken suddenly by the plague, slumping down through the brown arms that embraced him in the dance. Scarcely a single party reached its conclusion in the dawn before one or more of the guests lapsed grotesquely into death, But the dances always went on.
Out of revenge for nights like that, negro and mulatto prisoners by the hundred were taken aboard the ships in the harbor, manacled wrist to wrist in a long line and forced to jump overboard—to drag each other down to death in a tangled human chain of screaming desperation. When the supply of handcuffs ran short it was found convenient to cram the negroes into the ships' holds, batten down the hatches, and burn sulphur candles until they were suffocated. And when the military surgeon suggested that the bodies which the tide brought up on the beach were a source of dangerous contagion it was a still easier matter to force gangs of prisoners to dig deep common graves for themselves and then shoot them from behind so that they pitched into the pits.
Alexandre Sabes Pétion, a young quadroon, bastard son of a French painter and a mulatress of Port au Prince, held a commission in LeClerc's army. He had fought with conspicuous talent against Dessalines.
But it was becoming evident the whites would seek complete revenge against all blacks and "men of color."
One afternoon Pétion talked with Dessalines at the Cap. Both were soldiers, each admired the other's prowess and neither bore spite. Dessalines left the city to join his regiment and the quadroon rode out with him a little way along the road. They were an ill-assorted pair. Pétion, a thoughtful, educated gentleman, no darker than a white man burned by a few seasons of Caribbee sun. Dessalines, violent, heedless, unlettered and sooty black. But at the town gate of Cap Francois they shook hands. Then Dessalines lashed his horse and galloped into the mountains.
Pauline, frightened lest the fever stalk even to the palace of a Bonaparte, removed with her court to a small island a little way off the coast, safely beyond the marshy flats on which Cap Francois was built. There she and her people found no trouble in forgetting.
Several of the youngest and most gallant officers who had just arrived with fresh troops attached themselves to her. Pauline began at last to enjoy Saint Domingue. LeClerc several times sent word that he was ill with fever, but he begged her not to be alarmed.
A French priest invited General Dessalines to dine with him. Some French officers, who wished for an opportunity to meet Dessalines, were coming. Dessalines was flattered.
He arrived at the priest's house to find the guests assembled and a long table set for a banquet with white linen, flowers, wine glasses, and tall candlesticks. The black General was to be the guest of honor.
As he stood talking, an old negro servant hobbled toward him carrying a bowl of water and a napkin. He began to rinse his fingers. The officers courteously drew a few paces apart from him. Dessalines realized the old woman's eyes were beseeching his with blazing intensity. He looked at her. Her lips and fingers moved in a signal of the secret code learned by all the faithful blacks in the months before the leaders met and drank the wild boar's blood at Bois Caiman. Dessalines' beady eyes narrowed to fierce points. He wiped his hands on the napkin and gently thrust the servant aside.
He wrenched his sword from his scabbard. With the sudden bellow of a wounded bull he jumped to the banquet table and in five great running strides reached its further end, leaving a wake of smashed glasses and scattered silver. His horse was tied just outside the window. In a single leap he was in the saddle. Before the Frenchmen could recover from their astonishment they could see him, the window frame around his neck and his horse lashed to a frenzy, disappearing down the sunlit road. His roaring voice came back to them. "Aux armes! Aux armes! Vive l'indépendance!" In an instant they could catch responses already echoing down the valleys.
A laborer in a field replied. A woman by the door of a wattled mud hut on the hill above heard and repeated the call. The Frenchmen paled and looked at one another. Everywhere around them faint but impassioned cries were troubling the sunlit silence of the tropic afternoon. Within two hours 200,000 voices had joined in and the news had spread to every acre where men lived amid all the vast extent of the colony of Saint Domingue. The blacks, at last, were ready. The old servant woman, still holding her napkin and bowl, slipped away unnoticed. She smiled proudly to herself. No one, perhaps, would ever know; but it was she who had saved Saint Domingue. The order had been given for the arrest of Jean Jacques Dessalines and she had warned him. Soldiers with swords in their limp hands were even then emerging crestfallen from their hiding place in an adjoining room. For the first time there was unity. Pétion, accompanied by other mulatto officers, had deserted from the French, taking troops with him. Christophe held the 30,000 guns he had at LeClerc's order confiscated from the peasants and was ready to equip an army at the expense of disorganized brigands and frightened women. The cultivators, convinced at last that the reéstablishment of slavery was the aim of the French, were avid now.
The only response of the French to their new danger was to drown 2,000 negroes who were enlisted in all good faith in their army.
On the first of November—it was still the unhappy year 1802—just a fortnight after the renewal of hostilities, young Captain-General LeClerc, completely confused and desperate, sank into the last unconsciousness of yellow fever. During the night he ventured alone into finality.
Pauline, supported by her weeping ladies, emptied her palace of all the fineries she had brought to costume a governor's lady and accompanied her young groom's body home to France.
Napoleon, out of family pride, had the coffin put in the Panthéon, the hall of heroes. Pauline for a time was inconsolable, but in the following year she married a prince of Italy and learned to laugh again.
Rochambeau succeeded to the command vacated by LeClerc. He sent a ship to Cuba to bring back a cargo of bloodhounds. The training of these beasts became his favorite amusement. In public shows held on Sunday afternoons they were taught to tear the vitals out of black men and be docile to all whites.
In Europe, the vanity of Bonaparte had swollen too quickly. England, jealous and frightened of her neighbor, dispatched a fleet to the West Indies. Her warships barricaded the ports of Saint Domingue.
Rochambeau relinquished his hold on all positions in the interior and concentrated his resources in the coastal cities.
The negro and mulatto leaders agreed to an organized command under Jean Jacques Dessalines.
In the spring of 1803, Jean Jacques, with only victories behind him, leapt to an eminence before his troops, took a tattered French tricolor banner in his heavy hands, and rent it twice from top to bottom. In his left hand he held the blue strip, in his right the red. For years in the minds of the negroes of Saint Domingue the tricolor flag had symbolized the union of the blacks, the whites, and the mulattoes—blue, white, and red. Dessalines let the white strip float to the dust. He stamped it down and proclaimed, while the soldiers shouted hoarsely, that never after should whites share in the island's destiny.
At the end of a year's fighting the French held only Cap Francois and a fortified position at the end of the northern peninsula. Dessalines, Christophe, Pétion, and a dozen other rebel leaders were moving down upon them from the mountains above the Cap.
Five strong forts, garrisoned by fevered, despairing veterans, guarded all approaches to the town. An English war squadron was patrolling the exit from the harbor.
The armies met at dawn. Five black regiments made simultaneous attacks on as many forts, dividing the attention of the French. But the whites behind their battlements on the hilltops had heavy artillery to train on the ragged negroes who strove to scramble up the bare inclines toward them.
They mowed the attackers down like grain. A black captain named Capois had his hat knocked off by a rifle bullet. The next instant a fifty-six-pound cannon ball killed his horse under him. He struggled free from his stirrups, rose, and swinging his saber, shouted to his men to advance.
Rochambeau and his guard of honor witnessed the by-play. They broke into sudden cheers. A drum was sounded in the fortress and an hussar appeared, holding a white flag. The firing ceased. The messenger rode down to where the wondering Capois stood, his saber point resting on the ground. The Frenchman dismounted, clicked his heels, and bowed. "Captain-General Rochambeau," he said, "sends his admiration to the officer who has just covered himself with so much glory."
Capois bowed awkwardly. The messenger remounted and soon disappeared behind the wall of the fort. The invisible drum rolled again and the fight went on. In the evening the French salients fell. Ten days later General Rochambeau and his officers were prisoners aboard the English ships and the negro armies entered Cap Francois.
The French had been driven into the sea, exiled forever from dominion on the western rim of the Atlantic. The slaves were masters.
Rochambeau, just at the end, had found his imported bloodhounds useful. They had been of little effect against armed soldiers, but when famine attacked the beleaguered town they served well as food.
Dessalines demobilized his army.
