_!i4 (TJ'.A AND PORTO RICO 



savage. Toussaint, ever loyal to the authority of his 

 country, treated with the French commander-in-chief and 

 retired to his estate, where he was subsequently arrested 

 in circumstances of the greatest treachery, hound with 

 topes, and carried prisoner to France. The indignities to 

 which he was subjected can hardly be believed as the acts 

 of French officers who broke their plighted word. In 

 France he was separated from his family and cast into a 

 prison, where he died from cold and neglect, the suspicion 

 being justified that the close of his illustrious life was in- 

 tentionally hastened. 



Thus ended the career of a man of whom the Marquis 

 d'Hermonas said that " God in this Terrestrial globe could 

 not commune with a purer spirit." " The one mistake of 

 his life appears to have been his refusal, when urged to do 

 so by England, to declare the independence of all Haiti. 

 Had he accepted the English proposals and entered into a 

 treaty with the Americans, it is not likely that Bonaparte 

 would have ever attempted an expedition against him, and 

 the history of Haiti might have been happier." 



With the exile of Toussaint ended the influence of the 

 white race in Haiti. A most fearful epidemic of yellow 

 fever fell upon the French army and almost annihilated it. 

 Forty thousand of them perished in 1802-03. The Haitians 

 saw their opportunity, and aroused their countrymen to 

 expel the weak remnants of the French army. The foreign 

 fleets left Haiti's shores to engage in their own warfares. 

 Rochambeau, pushed by an army of thirty thousand 

 blacks, pinched by hunger, and having no hope of rein- 

 forcements, surrendered to the English and embarked for 

 Europe, leaving an independent country to the victorious 

 blacks. 



Thus ended in 1804, after fifteen years of horrible war- 

 fare, one of the darkest chapters in the history of the West 

 Indies, and colonial Haiti was lost to civilization. The 

 Haitian negroes have since been left to work out their own 

 destinies. At first they set up an empire after the Napo- 



