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By Root 869 0

the English soldiers were able to occupy a lot of ground without firing a shot. Indeed it soon developed that this particular batch of redcoats preferred not to fire any shots at all if that could be avoided, but instead to win territory with bribes whenever they could. But since the British were not directly dependent on black auxiliaries, there was nothing to stop them from arming French emigres and colonists who took their part; these men formed militias who were willing and eager to fight. Thus, although the colored general Andre Rigaud held Les Cayes and the surrounding region on the southern peninsula for the French republicans, the British were able to bypass his positions and press as far north as Leogane, threatening Port-au-Prince, where Commissioner Polverel was in residence. To the north of Port-au-Prince, the British occupied Saint Marc and began building fortifications there and at Petite Riviere, a nearby town in the interior, in the foothills of the Cahos mountain range.

Allied with Spain in the European war with France, the British were theoretically supposed to cooperate with the Spanish in Saint Domingue, but in reality the two nations were in competition for possession of the sugar colony's vast revenues—provided either one of them could ever stabilize the situation there. Nonetheless a British delegation called at Spanish-controlled Gonai'ves, where they were greeted by one “Tusan … a Negroe, who they called the Spanish general, commanding the place.”12 In the end, and despite some interesting proposals, the British and Spanish forces never managed to launch any combined operations against the French republicans; they left it at respecting each other's positions.

In the first eight months of their effort the British managed to gain a third of French Saint Domingue while losing no more than fifty men in battle. However, the tropical climate was equally fatal to all European troops, without any prejudice as to their nation. It was not yet known that malaria and yellow fever were mosquito-borne illnesses, though there was a general awareness that newly arrived troops were healthier in the mountains than cooped up in the miasmal towns of the coast. Occupying the mountains, however, involved combat risks that the British were reluctant to run. Illness soon began to make terrible inroads into their force, though for a while they could compensate by the use of the better-acclimated French colonial militias. The Spanish, in fact, had similar difficulties maintaining European troops in the field, though they could compensate with their acclimated black auxiliaries.

Despite these weaknesses of their adversaries, the French republicans were in a difficult spot. They too suffered from a shortage of European troops, and from the diseases to which new arrivals were prey. The strongest alliances Sonthonax had built were with the gens de couleur and the anciens libres—a significant faction but one vastly outnumbered by the huge mass of black nouveaux libres, who despite the abolition of slavery were conspicuously failing to flock to the republican banner. In April 1794, Sonthonax and Polverel were trapped under British siege at Port-au-Prince, while Laveaux was pinned down at Port de Paix. Communications between these towns and the other republican territories at Le Cap and Les Cayes were interrupted on sea by British naval power and on land by either British or Spanish occupation. Then there were sizable tracts of territory (at Gros Morne, Grande Riviere, Saltrou, and the Cul de Sac plain outside Port-au-Prince) which no one could say who controlled for certain—if anyone actually did control them.

When he looked at the checkerboard that French Saint Domingue had become, Toussaint could see plainly that all three colonial powers were in almost equally precarious situations. The weight he himself could bring to bear might be decisive—wherever he chose to throw it.

Did the British make him an offer? It would have been characteristic for them to have done so. At around that same time, the British made an overture