Hostilities ceased on the 1st of May.
Not one month past before Le Clerc seized Toussaint, his family, and about one hundred of his immediate associates, and placed them as prisoners on board the vessels then lying in the harbor. Many of the blacks were ordered to return to their labors under their ancient masters.
Toussaint, amazed at such an act of treachery and baseness, inquired the cause, but could obtain no other reply than that he must instantly depart. For himself he offered no excuse, declaring that he was ready to accompany his abductors in obedience to his orders; but as his wife was feeble and his children helpless, he begged earnestly that they might be permitted to remain. His expostulations were of course urged in vain.
Le Clerc, to rid the island for ever of a man whom he both feared and detested, prepared, soon after the capture of Toussaint, to send him to Europe, and with him a letter of accusation at once false, criminal, and malicious. A letter more dishonorable never crossed the Atlantic. Upon his arrival in France, Toussaint was immediately sent to prison in a remote province in the interior, and entirely secluded from the society of men.
Shut up in melancholy silence, in a dungeon horrid, damp, and cold, his suffering was not long. The Paris journals of April 27, 1803, say this—no more and no less: “Toussaint died in prison.”
As to his wife and children, they remained in close custody at Brest for about two months after their only friend was torn from them. They were then removed to the same province in which Toussaint had been imprisoned, without knowing anything either of his proximity or his fate. In this place, reduced to distress, they continued neglected and forgotten, a sad spectacle of fallen greatness.
Such was the fate of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Washington, but not “the Napoleon,” of Hayti.
LETTER XIII.
Republic of Hayti.
THE WAR RENEWED—“LIBERTY OR DEATH”—EXPULSION OF THE FRENCH—THE AURORA OF PEACE—JEAN JACQUES DESSALINES, FIRST EMPEROR OF HAYTI—PRINCIPAL EVENTS UP TO PRESENT DATE—GEFFRARD AND EDUCATION—POSSIBLE FUTURE.
“This is the moral of all human tales:
’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past—
First freedom, and then glory.”
—Childe Harold.