The revolt once started, blacks and mulattoes murdered whites without mercy and the whites retaliated.  Commissioners were sent from France, who asked simply civil rights for freedmen, and not emancipation.  Indeed that was all that Toussaint himself had as yet demanded.  The planters intrigued with the British and this, together with the beheading of the king (an impious act in the eyes of Negroes), induced Toussaint to join the Spaniards.  In 1793 British troops were landed and the French commissioners in desperation declared the slaves emancipated.  This at once won back Toussaint from the Spaniards.  He became supreme in the north, while Rigaud, leader of the mulattoes, held the south and the west.  By 1798 the British, having lost most of their forces by yellow fever, surrendered Mole St. Nicholas to Toussaint and departed.  Rigaud finally left for France, and Toussaint in 1800 was master of Hayti.  He promulgated a constitution under which Hayti was to be a self-governing colony; all men were equal before the law, and trade was practically free.  Toussaint was to be president for life, with the power to name his successor.

Napoleon Bonaparte, master of France, had at this time dreams of a great American empire, and replied to Toussaint’s new government by sending twenty-five thousand men under his brother-in-law to subdue the presumptuous Negroes, as a preliminary step to his occupation and development of the Mississippi valley.  Fierce fighting and yellow fever decimated the French, but matters went hard with the Negroes too, and Toussaint finally offered to yield.  He was courteously received with military honors and then, as soon as possible, treacherously seized, bound, and sent to France.  He was imprisoned at Fort Joux and died, perhaps of poison, after studied humiliations, April 7, 1803.

Thus perished the greatest of American Negroes and one of the great men of all time, at the age of fifty-six.  A French planter said, “God in his terrestrial globe did not commune with a purer spirit."[83] Wendell Phillips said, “Some doubt the courage of the Negro.  Go to Hayti and stand on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had and ask them what they think of the Negro’s sword.  I would call him Napoleon, but Napoleon made his way to empire over broken oaths and through a sea of blood.  This man never broke his word.  I would call him Cromwell, but Cromwell was only a soldier, and the state he founded went down with him into his grave.  I would call him Washington, but the great Virginian held slaves.  This man risked his empire rather than permit the slave trade in the humblest village of his dominions.  You think me a fanatic, for you read history, not with your eyes, but with your prejudices.  But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of history will put Phocion for the Greek, Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for the English, La Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright, consummate flower of our earlier civilization, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L’Ouverture.”