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By Root 930 0

and though many of them were slaughtered by organized fire, the sheer force of their numbers was still enough to rout the white military. As the weeks wore on, though, the rebels began to notice their casualties. Accordingly, their tactics changed. “They did not expose themselves en masse with the former fury,” wrote Des Fosses, a French combatant, “they formed groups, hiding in thickets before falling on their enemy. They even withdrew swiftly into the undergrowth. We were dealing with an enemy who, instead of making a concerted attack on the colors, was disposed in small groups so that they were able to surround or wipe out isolated or small detachments. It was a new type of warfare, more dangerous because it was unknown.” Unknown at least to European soldiery, who in the eighteenth century had a confirmed habit of confronting each other on open ground in tightly composed squares. The guerrilla tactics so bewildering to the French troops were common in African wars of the period (in which many of Saint Domingue's slaves had first been captured), and also very well adapted to Haiti's mountainous jungle terrain. Toussaint's letter of October 15 suggests that he may well have had an influence on the tactical change.

In November, Boukman was killed in a battle with the regular French army on the plain near Acul. The whites, still more or less besieged, impaled his head on a stake on the public square of Cap Francais with a sign reading “The head of Boukman, leader of the rebels.”7 When news of Boukman's death reached Grande Riviere, there was a spontaneous lunge to slaughter all the white prisoners there in reprisal. However, cooler heads prevailed, if by a narrow margin.

When the rebels first overran the Northern Plain, they had swept many prisoners from the plantations and taken them into their camps around Grande Riviere. The more temperate leaders saw the value of the white captives as hostages, but for others they were tempting victims for torture and rape. The not-so-temperate leader Jeannot had control of a good many prisoners, and amused himself by torturing a few of them to death every day. Finally, the other rebel leaders decided he had gone too far. Jeannot was apparently lighting a fire to roast the remaining white captives alive when a party led by Jean-François arrived, put Jeannot through some sort of hasty court-martial, and executed him just as summarily.

The white prisoners were not set free after Jeannot's execution, but they were no longer egregiously mistreated. Procurator Gros, one of Jeannot's surviving captives who'd been a legal functionary before the rebellion, was drafted as Jean-François's secretary. Much correspondence needed to be done, for the surviving rebel leaders were preparing to negotiate terms with the whites.

In France, the revolution had been hurtling forward for two years. The feudal privileges of the aristocracy and the clergy had been abolished early on. In late June 1791, Louis XVI and his family were captured at Varennes while attempting to flee the country and brought back to Paris as prisoners in all but name. Procurator Gros, still a prisoner of the rebels in the territory they controlled around Dondon, Valliere, and Grande Riviere, was startled at just how well his captors seemed to be informed of these events in Europe and how interested they seemed to be in the fate of the French monarchy.

The slave insurrection in French Saint Domingue was alarming to British slavery-based colonies in the Caribbean, especially in nearby Jamaica. The idea that French Jacobin ideology could provoke revolt among African slaves was unthinkably awful—and yet it had happened just next door. At the same time, as England verged upon war with France, the chaos in France's heretofore most prosperous colony presented an interesting point of vulnerability. Philibert-François Rouxel de Blanchelande, the military governor of French Saint Domingue, appealed to both his British and his Spanish neighbors for help; the British kept mum, while the Spanish Santo Domingans were already giving covert support