[babopeddy]

The Whites--or at least most of them--rallied to their own defense, and Le Cap Français was made into an armed stronghold, while similar measures were taken in other parts of the colony. Nevertheless, more than 2,000 Whites were murdered during the first two months of the 1791 insurrection.

The following 13 years were chaotic. The race war between the Whites and the Blacks was intermittent. The mulattoes sometimes took the side of the Whites and sometimes the side of the Blacks. The White rabble, often swayed by Republican propaganda and by their own greed and envy, were nearly as undependable as the mulattoes. A substantial portion of the colony's upper-class Whites, despairing of any possibility for the restoration of order and sanity, left for France or America.

The French government vacillated, sometimes aiding the colonists against the rebellious slaves and sometimes attempting to make Saint-Domingue conform to crackpot Republican theories of universal égalité et fraternité by appointing mulattoes and even Blacks to positions of authority in the colony. Where the latter held sway, they ruled like African potentates, using a combination of capricious terror and the dispensing of government largess to their favorites to maintain their positions. The two most prominent of these Black Republicans were Pierre Dominique Toussaint L'Ouverture and Jean Jacques Dessalines, both monsters of iniquity.

In 1794 the French government, still in the thrall of Republican madness, proclaimed the emancipation of Saint-Domingue's Blacks. Toussaint L'Ouverture, despite his bloodthirsty cruelty and extraordinary bent for deceit and treachery, proved himself the ablest leader of the Blacks. After a successful incursion into the Spanish end of the island in 1801, he became the Black warlord of Hispaniola, with the blessing of the Republicans.

Although he was happy to parrot back to the various Commissioners sent over by France the Politically Correct slogans about "equality" and "liberty" which they wanted to hear, Toussaint L'Ouverture understood that in order to retain the favor of the French government he had to restore the colony to production, and the only way to do that was to force his fellow Blacks, who had been happily idle since 1794, to begin working again. Without calling it slavery, he used an iron hand to bend them to his will. His Black generals, most notably Dessalines, knew how to deal with their own kind. They toured the plantations trailed by retinues of executioners. Idlers and shirkers were seized and buried alive or tied to boards and sawed in half. These demonstrations were remarkably effective in inspiring the other Blacks to work harder than they ever had under their White masters.

More than brutality was required to repair the damage which Republican folly and Black rebellion had done to Saint-Domingue, however. Toussaint L'Ouverture could compel his Blacks to work, but he could not replace the genius for organization and administration with which the Whites had built a stable, peaceful, and productive colony. Disorder, punctuated by atrocities and massacres, continued to make the island a hellish proof of the incorrectness of the egalitarian theories which had brought on the disaster in the first place.

Back in France, the star of Napoleon Bonaparte was rising. By 1801 Napoleon had become virtual dictator and was well on the way to winding up, at least temporarily, the various wars in which post-revolutionary France had been involved, so that he was free to concern himself with the affairs of Saint-Domingue and France's other colonial possessions. And Napoleon, unlike his Republican predecessors, was blessed with a clear head, untroubled by fantasies of "equality.