ies in oblivion, while
there were continually present minds which had been debased by tyranny,
and hearts which had been outraged by cruelty; but all that could be
done was done. Vigorous employment was made the great law of society--
the one condition of the favour of its chief; and, amidst the labours of
the hoe and the mill, the workshop and the wharf--amidst the toils of
the march and the bustle of the court, the bereaved and insulted forgot
their woes and their revenge. A now growth of veneration and of hope
overspread the ruins of old delights and attachments, as the verdure of
the plain spread its mantle over the wrecks of mansion and of hut. In
seven years from the kindling of the first incendiary torch on the
Plaine du Nord, it would have been hard for a stranger, landing in Saint
Domingo, to believe what had been the horrors of the war.

Of these seven years, however, the first three or four had been entirely
spent in war, and the rest disturbed by it. Double that number of years
must pass before there could be any security that the crop planted would
ever be reaped, or that the peasants who laid out their family
burying-grounds would be carried there in full age, instead of perishing
in the field or in the woods. The cultivators went out to their daily
work with the gun slung across their shoulders and the cutlass in their
belt: the hills were crested with forts, and the mountain-passes were
watched by scouts. The troops were frequently reviewed in the squares
of the towns, and news was perpetually arriving of a skirmish here or
there. The mulatto general, Rigaud, had never acknowledged the
authority of Toussaint L'Ouverture; and he was still in the field, with
a mulatto force sufficient to interrupt the prosperity of the colony,
and endanger the authority of its Lieutenant-Governor. It was some
time, however, since Rigaud had approached any of the large towns. The
sufferers by his incursions were the planters and field-labourers. The
inhabitants of the towns carried on their daily affairs as if peace had
been fully established in the island, and feeling the effects of such
warfare as there was only in their occasional contributions of time and
money.

The Commander-in-chief, as Toussaint L'Ouverture was called, by the
appointment of the French commissaries, though his dignity had not yet
been confirmed from Paris--the Commander-in-chief of Saint Domingo held
his head-quarters at Port-au-Prince. A