St. Domingo, its revolution and its hero, Toussaint Louverture.

Chapter 16: FOOTNOTES:

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The discourse surveys the colony's exploitation under plantation agriculture and the transatlantic slave trade, outlines the social divisions among wealthy planters, poor whites, free people of color, and enslaved Africans, and recounts repeated insurrections leading to a revolutionary upheaval. It offers a condensed life of Toussaint Louverture, following his rise from slavery to military and political leadership, the island's brief emancipation and prosperity, renewed warfare with metropolitan forces, and the eventual treachery, defeat, and death of the leader, concluding with the revolution's consequences for the colony.

VIII.

Let us look at France: she had grown desperate in her revolutionary fever; had risen en masse against the powers of Europe, and had beaten them back. Dugommier even had carried the war across the Pyrenees, and his soldiers, like demons, shouting the ça-ira, threatened Spain. The Convention at Paris on the 4th of February, 1794, confirmed and proclaimed the FREEDOM of all the slaves![32]—news of which came slowly across the Atlantic, and reached the ears of Toussaint upon the heights of Dondon.

FOOTNOTES:

[32] Biographie Universelle. Art. Toussaint L.