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colony that he was now their commander in chief, and had also set about organizing a new colonial assembly. When Toussaint got the news at Gonai'ves, he immediately sent two battalions, commanded by Charles Belair and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, to reinforce Pierre Michel at Le Cap, while he himself remained where he was, poised to strike in any direction, sending a stream of dispatches and messengers to other towns warning them not to rebel, as well as a report to the French consul in Philadelphia. When he marched north toward Cap Francais he routed Villatte from a fort he'd occupied near Petite Anse; Villatte departed, snarling that he hoped “Laveaux would have his throat slit by the blacks he was caressing.”68 In fact, Villatte's party had managed to start a rumor that Laveaux and Perroud had imported two shiploads of chains for the restoration of slavery, and the two Frenchmen were threatened by a black mob until Toussaint opened the general warehouse to let the crowd see that no such chains were there.

In gratitude, and also to secure himself and his government against further suspicion from the nouveaux libres, Laveaux proclaimed Toussaint lieutenant governor that April I on the Place d'Armes, and announced that henceforward he would do nothing without Toussaint's approval. Toussaint, exhilarated, shouted to the crowd: “After God, Laveaux!”69 —an exclamation he had recently heard addressed to himself by Datty's men around Port de Paix. On the same day, Dieudonne died in his southern prison, suffocated not by a “bilious choler” but by the weight of his chains.

*This summary of Toussaint's tactics in taking over the Cordon de l'Ouest has a certain ring of plausibility.

†The Spanish governor, presumably.

*These reasons may have included black mistrust for anciens libres Igens de couleur.

*For Toussaint's horses.

*Guybre, a white Frenchman.

*Macaya was a Congolese, an important tribal affiliation.

FOUR

Closing the Circle

Trained as a lawyer and skilled as a diplomat, Leger Felicite Sonthonax was, above all, a survivor. The order for his and Polverel's arrest in Saint Domingue was signed by Robespierre, but by the time the two recalled commissioners arrived in France, Robespierre had fallen and the Terror was over. Sonthonax and Polverel were tried before a more moderate National Convention, by a committee predisposed in favor of abolition, though their accusers and prosecutors were a group of colonists who had lost their property. The various phases of the proceedings went on for over a year, from September 1794 to October 1795, and generated the first in-depth and reasonably objective report on events in French Saint Domingue since 1791, authored by Garran de Coulon, who presided over the commissioners' trial. Polverel died before it was over, but on October 25,1795, Sonthonax won complete vindication, emerging from the cloud of his disgrace as a kind of hero. Three months later, he was appointed head of the Third Civil Commission to Saint Domingue, a body which also included Julien Raimond, an homme de couleur who had tirelessly lobbied for the rights of his class since the 1780s, and Philippe Roume de Saint Laurent, an experienced colonial hand who had been a member of the First Civil Commission. Marc Antoine Giraud and Pierre Leblanc brought the number of commissioners to five. Citizen Pascal, a white Frenchman who would marry one of Julien Raimond's daughters, was appointed as the commission's secretary general.

The ship bearing the Third Commission sailed into Cap Francais on May n, 1796; Sonthonax especially was received as a great emancipator. The French government had directed him to proclaim the abolition of slavery all over again, which he did with great enthusiasm; his popularity was also enhanced by his consort, Marie Eugenie Bleigeat, a femme de couleur attached to him since his first tour of the colony, who had borne him a son in Paris. During this honeymoon period of 1796, the head commissioner was so beloved by the nouveaux libres that they were supposed to have taught their