inally left for
France, and Toussaint in 1800 was master of Hayti. He promulgated a
constitution under which Hayti was to be a self-governing colony; all men
were equal before the law, and trade was practically free. Toussaint was
to be president for life, with the power to name his successor.

Napoleon Bonaparte, master of France, had at this time dreams of a great
American empire, and replied to Toussaint's new government by sending
twenty-five thousand men under his brother-in-law to subdue the
presumptuous Negroes, as a preliminary step to his occupation and
development of the Mississippi valley. Fierce fighting and yellow fever
decimated the French, but matters went hard with the Negroes too, and
Toussaint finally offered to yield. He was courteously received with
military honors and then, as soon as possible, treacherously seized,
bound, and sent to France. He was imprisoned at Fort Joux and died,
perhaps of poison, after studied humiliations, April 7, 1803.

Thus perished the greatest of American Negroes and one of the great men of
all time, at the age of fifty-six. A French planter said, "God in his
terrestrial globe did not commune with a purer spirit."[83] Wendell
Phillips said, "Some doubt the courage of the Negro. Go to Hayti and stand
on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had and
ask them what they think of the Negro's sword. I would call him Napoleon,
but Napoleon made his way to empire over broken oaths and through a sea of
blood. This man never broke his word. I would call him Cromwell, but
Cromwell was only a soldier, and the state he founded went down with him
into his grave. I would call him Washington, but the great Virginian held
slaves. This man risked his empire rather than permit the slave trade in
the humblest village of his dominions. You think me a fanatic, for you
read history, not with your eyes, but with your prejudices. But fifty
years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of history will put
Phocion for the Greek, Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for the English, La
Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright, consummate flower of
our earlier civilization, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will
write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the
statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L'Ouverture."

The treacherous killing of Toussaint did not conquer Hayti. In 1802 and
1803 some forty thousand French soldiers died of war and fever. A n