negro chief, justly apprehending insincerity, stood out and defended himself gallantly for a brief space; but stronghold after stronghold yielded to numbers and discipline; and at length he too submitted, on condition that he should be permitted to retire in safety to his plantation.  Some obscure rumours of insurrection were soon made the pretext for arresting him; and he, being put on board ship, and sent to France, was shut up in a dungeon, where either the midnight cord or dagger, or the wasting influence of confinement and hopeless misery, ere long put an end to his life.  His mysterious fate, both before and after its consummation, excited great interest.[43] The atrocious cruelty of the French soldiery, in their subjugation of St. Domingo, equalled (it could not have surpassed) that of the barbarous negroes whom they opposed; but was heard of with disgust and horror, such as no excesses of mere savages could have excited.  As if Heaven had been moved by these bloody deeds of vengeance, disease broke out in the camp; thousands, and among them Leclerc himself, died.  For the time, however, the French armament triumphed—­and, in the exultation of victory, the government at home had the extreme and seemingly purposeless ungenerosity, to publish an edict banishing all of the negro race from their European dominions.[44] But the yellow fever was already rapidly consuming the French army in St. Domingo; and its feeble remnant, under Rochambeau, having been at length expelled, in November, 1803, the independence of Hayti was formally proclaimed on the 1st of January, 1804.

The course of Napoleon’s conduct, in and out of Europe, was calculated to fill all independent neighbours with new or aggravated suspicion; and in England, where public opinion possesses the largest means of making itself heard, and consequently the greatest power, the prevalence of such feelings became, from day to day, more marked.  The British envoy’s reclamation against the oppression of Switzerland, was but one of many drops, which were soon to cause the cup of bitterness to overflow.  As in most quarrels, there was something both of right and of wrong on either side.  When the English government remonstrated against any of those daring invasions of the rights of independent nations, or crafty enlargements, through diplomatic means, of the power of France, by which this period of peace was distinguished, the Chief Consul could always reply that the cabinet of St. James’s, on their part, had not yet fulfilled one article of the treaty of Amiens, by placing Malta in the keeping of some power which had been neutral in the preceding war.  The rejoinder was obvious:  to wit, that Napoleon was every day taking measures wholly inconsistent with that balance of power which the treaty of Amiens contemplated.  It is not to be denied that he, in his audaciously ambitious movements, had contrived to keep within the strict terms of the treaty:  and it can as little be disputed that the English cabinet had equity with them, although they violated the letter of the law, in their retention of the inheritance of the worthless and self-betrayed Knights of St. John.