ions where the whites resided, the blacks
continued to labor as quietly as before." Colonel Malenfant says, that
when many of his neighbors, proprietors or managers, were in prison, the
negroes of their plantations came to him to beg him to direct them in
their work.

He adds, "If you will take care not to talk to them of the restoration
of slavery, but to talk to them of freedom, you may with this word chain
them down to their labor. How did Toussaint succeed?--How did I succeed
before his time in the plain of the Culde-Sae on the plantation Gouraud,
during more than eight months after liberty had been granted to the
slaves? Let those who knew me at that time, let the blacks themselves,
be asked: they will all reply that not a single negro upon that
plantation, consisting of more than four hundred and fifty laborers,
refused to work: and yet this plantation was thought to be under the
worst discipline and the slaves the most idle of any in the plain. I
inspired the same activity into three other plantations of which I had
the management. If all the negroes had come from Africa within six
months, if they had the love of independence that the Indians have, I
should own that force must be employed; but ninety-nine out of a hundred
of the blacks are aware that without labor they cannot procure the
things that are necessary for them; that there is no other method of
satisfying their wants and their tastes. They know that they must work,
they wish to do so, and they will do so."

Such was the conduct of the negroes for the first nine months after
their liberation, or up to the middle of 1794. In the latter part of
1796, Malenfant says, "the colony was flourishing under Toussaint, the
whites lived happily and in peace upon their estates, and the negroes
continued to work for them." General Lecroix, who published his "Memoirs
for a History of St. Domingo" in 1819, says, that in 1797 the most
wonderful progress had been made in agriculture. "The Colony," says he,
"marched as by enchantment towards its ancient splendor: cultivation
prospered; every day produced perceptible proof of its progress."
General Vincent,[U] who was a general of brigade of artillery in St.
Domingo and a proprietor of estates in the island, was sent by Toussaint
to Paris in 1801 to lay before the Directory the new constitution which
had been agreed upon in St. Domingo. He arrived in France just at the
moment of the peace of Amiens, and found that Bonapar