On June 20, 1793, at Cape Francois trouble was renewed by a quarrel between a mulatto and a white officer in the marines.  The seamen came ashore and loaned their assistance to the white people, and the Negroes now joined forces with the mulattoes.  In the battle of two days that followed the arsenal was taken and plundered, thousands were killed in the streets, and more than half of the town was burned.  The French commissioners were the unhappy witnesses of the scene, but they were practically helpless, having only about a thousand troops.  Santhonax, however, issued a proclamation offering freedom to all slaves who were willing to range themselves under the banner of the Republic.  This was the first proclamation for the freeing of slaves in Santo Domingo, and as a result of it many of the Negroes came in and were enfranchised.

Soon after this proclamation Polverel left his colleague at the Cape and went to Port au Prince, the capital of the West.  Here things were quiet and the cultivation of the crops was going forward as usual.  The slaves were soon unsettled, however, by the news of what was being done elsewhere, and Polverel was convinced that emancipation could not be delayed and that for the safety of the planters themselves it was necessary to extend it to the whole island.  In September (1793) he set in circulation from Aux Cayes a proclamation to this effect, and at the same time he exhorted all the planters in the vicinity who concurred in his work to register their names.  This almost all of them did, as they were convinced of the need of measures for their personal safety; and on February 4, 1794, the Conventional Assembly in Paris formally approved all that had been done by decreeing the abolition of slavery in all the colonies of France.

All the while the Spanish and the English had been looking on with interest and had even come to the French part of the island as if to aid in the restoration of order.  Among the former, at first in charge of a little royalist band, was the Negro, Toussaint, later called L’Ouverture.  He was then a man in the prime of life, forty-eight years old, and already his experience had given him the wisdom that was needed to bring peace in Santo Domingo.  In April, 1794, impressed by the decree of the Assembly, he returned to the jurisdiction of France and took service under the Republic.  In 1796 he became a general of brigade; in 1797 general-in-chief, with the military command of the whole colony.

He at once compelled the surrender of the English who had invaded his country.  With the aid of a commercial agreement with the United States, he next starved out the garrison of his rival, the mulatto Rigaud, whom he forced to consent to leave the country.  He then imprisoned Roume, the agent of the Directory, and assumed civil as well as military authority.  He also seized the Spanish part of the island, which had been ceded to France some years before but had not been actually surrendered.  He then, in May, 1801, gave to Santo Domingo a constitution by which he not only assumed power for life but gave to himself the right of naming his successor; and all the while he was awakening the admiration of the world by his bravery, his moderation, and his genuine instinct for government.