South, which still held out. Rigaud, reduced in his means of defence, had the misfortune to see his towns fall one after another into the power of Toussaint, until he was driven to the last citadel of his strength—the town of Aux Cayes. As he thus yielded foot by foot, everything was given to desolation before it was abandoned, and the genius of Toussaint was completely at fault in his efforts to force the mulatto general from his last entrenchments.
He was foiled at every attempt, and his enemy stood immovably at bay, notwithstanding the active assaults and overwhelming numbers of his forces.
The government of France was too much engaged at home with her own revolution, to pay any attention to St. Domingo. The republicans in Paris, after getting rid of their enemies, turned upon each other. The revolution, like Saturn, devoured its own children; priest and people were murdered upon the thresholds of justice. Marat died at the hands of Charlotte Corday; Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette were guillotined, Robespierre had gone to the scaffold, and Bonaparte was master of France.
The conqueror of Egypt now turned his attention to St. Domingo. It was too important an island to be lost to France, or be destroyed by civil war; and through the mediation of Bonaparte, the war between Toussaint and Rigaud was brought to a close.
With the termination of this struggle, every vestige of slavery, and all obstacles to freedom, disappeared. Toussaint exerted every nerve to make Hayti what it had formerly been. He did everything in his power to promote agriculture; and in this he succeeded beyond the most sanguine expectations of the friends of free-
