revenge the rebels spared neither persons nor things. Armed with pikes, axes, knives, spears,—torch in hand,—they destroyed and exterminated everything that came in their way. Fire and death marked their passage. Jeannot,[1] self-appointed avenger of Ogé and Chavanne, was merciless. In less than eight days 200 sugar refineries and 600 coffee plantations were reduced to ashes; the plain of the North was one immense cemetery.
Jean-François, who had assumed the title of generalissimo and grand-admiral of France, led his followers to the very entrance of Cap-François. On November 14, however, they were defeated; Boukmann was made prisoner and beheaded; his body was then burnt and his head, stuck on the end of a pole, was exposed in the centre of the Place d'Armes of Cap-Français, with a sign bearing the words: "Head of Boukmann, chief of the rebels." The colonists gave no quarter. All the prisoners were at once put to death. Two wheels on which they were tied and their bones broken, and five gallows were kept constantly busy.[2]
Whilst these events were taking place in the North, on August 26, at the Diègue plantation,[3] the "affranchis," in pursuance of the plan adopted on the Rabuteau plan-
- ↑ In order to put a stop to the terrible reprisals of Jeannot, Jean-François had him shot. But no white man was punished on account of the cruelties inflicted by the colonists on the blacks and mulattoes.
- ↑ Rabau (Résumé de l'histoire de Saint-Domingue, p. 77), quoted by Mr. Benito Sylvain (loc. cit. p. 91), says: "Some planters buried the blacks up to their shoulders, and with pincers forced them to open their mouths and to swallow boiling syrup. Others had their prisoners sawed between two boards. I stop; my pen cannot describe such dreadful scenes." A black man, called Bartolo, who at the risk of his life had taken his master to Cap-Français for safety, was sentenced to death for having participated in the uprising; his denunciator, Mangin, was the very colonist whose life he had saved. "The whites," says Colonel Malenfant, "considered every black man as an enemy, and increased in that way the number of rebels; for they massacred indiscriminately all the slaves they could lay their hands on, even those who were peaceful and had not deserted their plantations." (Benito Sylvain, Du sort des Indigènes, etc. (p. 92.)
- ↑ Situated in the neighborhood of Port-au-Prince.
