d the Corsican.

The First Consul was now prepared to accept the challenge. Santo Domingo
must be recovered and restored to its former prosperity--even if slavery
had to be reestablished--before Louisiana could be made the center of
colonial empire in the West. He summoned Leclerc, a general of excellent
reputation and husband of his beautiful sister Pauline, and gave to
him the command of an immense expedition which was already preparing
at Brest. In the latter part of November, Leclerc set sail with a large
fleet bearing an army of ten thousand men and on January 29, 1802,
arrived off the eastern cape of Santo Domingo. A legend says that
Toussaint looking down on the huge armada exclaimed, "We must perish.
All France is coming to Santo Domingo. It has been deceived; it comes
to take vengeance and enslave the blacks." The negro leader made a
formidable resistance, nevertheless, annihilating one French army
and seriously endangering the expedition. But he was betrayed by his
generals, lured within the French lines, made prisoner, and finally
sent to France. He was incarcerated in a French fortress in the Jura
Mountains and there perished miserably in 1803.

The significance of these events in the French West Indies was not lost
upon President Jefferson. The conquest of Santo Domingo was the prelude
to the occupation of Louisiana. It would be only a change of European
proprietors, of absentee landlords, to be sure; but there was a world
of difference between France, bent upon acquiring a colonial empire and
quiescent Spain, resting on her past achievements. The difference was
personified by Bonaparte and Don Carlos. The sovereignty of the lower
Mississippi country could never be a matter of indifference to those
settlers of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio who in the year 1799 sent down
the Mississippi in barges, keel-boats, and flatboats one hundred and
twenty thousand pounds of tobacco, ten thousand barrels of flour,
twenty-two thousand pounds of hemp, five hundred barrels of cider, and
as many more of whiskey, for transshipment and export. The right of
navigation of the Mississippi was a diplomatic problem bequeathed by
the Confederation. The treaty with Spain in 1795 had not solved the
question, though it had established a modus vivendi. Spain had conceded
to Americans the so-called right of deposit for three years--that is,
the right to deposit goods at New Orleans free of duty and to transship
them to ocean-going ves