ld, and who were the controlling power of Italy,--a people mild,
civilized, full of humanity; the classical land of science and art." A
few war-ridden Italian provinces for an imperial domain that stretched
from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Superior and that extended westward no
one knew how far!

The bargain was closed by a preliminary treaty signed at San Ildefonso
on October 1, 1800. Just one year later to a day, the preliminaries of
the Peace of Amiens were signed, removing the menace of England on the
seas. The First Consul was now free to pursue his colonial policy, and
the destiny of the Mississippi Valley hung in the balance. Between the
First Consul and his goal, however, loomed up the gigantic figure of
Toussaint L'Ouverture, a full-blooded negro, who had made himself master
of Santo Domingo and had thus planted himself squarely in the searoad
to Louisiana. The story of this "gilded African," as Bonaparte
contemptuously dubbed him, cannot be told in these pages, because it
involves no less a theme than the history of the French Revolution in
this island, once the most thriving among the colonial possessions of
France in the West Indies. The great plantations of French Santo Domingo
(the western part of the island) had supplied half of Europe with sugar,
coffee, and cotton; three-fourths of the imports from French-American
colonies were shipped from Santo Domingo. As the result of class
struggles between whites and mulattoes for political power, the most
terrific slave insurrection in the Western Hemisphere had deluged
the island in blood. Political convulsions followed which wrecked the
prosperity of the island. Out of this chaos emerged the one man who
seemed able to restore a semblance of order--the Napoleon of Santo
Domingo, whose character, thinks Henry Adams, had a curious resemblance
to that of the Corsican. The negro was, however, a ferocious brute
without the redeeming qualities of the Corsican, though, as a leader
of his race, his intelligence cannot be denied. Though professing
allegiance to the French Republic, Toussaint was driven by circumstances
toward independence. While his Corsican counterpart was executing his
coup d'etat and pacifying Europe, he threw off the mask, imprisoned the
agent of the French Directory, seized the Spanish part of the island,
and proclaimed a new constitution for Santo Domingo, assuming all power
for himself for life and the right of naming his successor. The negro
defie