Revolutions - 4.16- Dying Like Flies

Episode Date: March 28, 2016

In the summer of 1802 the worst Yellow Fever epidemic on record hit Saint-Domingue--making it very difficult to re-impose slavery. 

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 4.16, Dying Like Flies. After arresting and deporting Tucson Louverture from Sandomang in June 1802, the young French general Charles Leclair was kind of surprised to discover the expulsion of General Tucson did not immediately spark a mass uprising. The cultivators in the fields had long ago grown disenchanted with Governor for Life Tucson, and his senior officers more or less engaged in a conspiracy to sit on their hands and do nothing, while their old leader and patron was shipped off.

But this was about the only piece of good news Leclair could point to for the rest of his short life, because from here on out, his attempt to reassert French control over Sandomang was going to be a running disaster. Now, some of these disasters would be of his own making, some would be beyond his control, but they would all combine to make the Leclair expedition one of the all-time great debacles in French history. But obviously, Leclair did not know how bad it was going to get, and he had some hope that the worst was in fact behind him. The 75-odd-day campaign he had waged between mid-February 1802 and the end of April had been hard and bloody, costing him somewhere between 6 and 9,000 men,

but the fighting was now over, and it was time to settle into peaceful administration. And to help him run the colony, Leclair had with him two senior partners. possibly reflecting the three-man-style consulate that governed France, Bonaparte had envisioned a similar three-man system for San Doming. Leclair would, of course, be the Captain General in charge of all military matters, but he would be joined by an administrative prefect who would be in charge of the civilian government and a grand judge who would run the legal system. I won't trouble you with their names because they're not going to last long once the yellow fever sets in. The first problem these guys faced was the problem. How to balance the rights asserted by the free black population with the need to keep them all doing plantation work. Now, LeClair started out displaying some generous leniency,

and he was in fact taken aback by how Draconian Tucson's final labor code was, and he said, it is so strict that I would never dare to propose one like this, given the current situation. So after the ceasefire in May, Leclair promulgated a new code, and while it was modeled on Tucson's, it was not as harsh, and in particular sought to curb the abuse of cultivators by the soldiers. But the big question on everybody's mind was, are the French going to reimpose slavery? Now, as we'll see in a moment, it's clear that reimposing slavery was Bonaparte's preference for the colony. But he also seems to have recognized that trying to re-enslave the black, right away would backfire. Not only is there no evidence that Leclair departed France with orders

to reimpose slavery, but Leclair himself was an idealistic young man, who was on record supporting emancipation. But that said, getting the blacks to work was imperative, because as it turned out, the colony was in much worse shape than Bonaparte or Leclair had expected. As we discussed two episodes back, the first consul recognized that the expedition would not be able to feed itself. But he did not realize that it would also not be able to pay for itself. So Bonaparte had sent Leclair off with almost no hard cash, the general theory being that when Leclair got to the colony, he would be able to use the mountains of coffee and sugar to get cash that would help him buy more supplies and pay his men. But despite Tucson Louvichure's best efforts,

the Sandal Meng economy had not come close to recovering from 10 years of revolution. And on top of that, the two most recent conflicts, the War of Knives, and then Leclair's own campaigns, represented a major step backward. Cities across the colony, including LeCap itself, were now burned out husks. Plantations everywhere had been destroyed by advancing and retreating armies over the past two years. Put bluntly, Sandomang was not producing what LeClair needed it to produce to pay for all the other stuff that he needed. This lack of hard cash was then compounded by his bad relationship with the United States, from whom he needed to buy supplies. Forcing merchants to take French debt notes as payment was considered little better than theft

by the Americans, who then went home and complained. This stirred up a little media firestorm in cities in New England and the Mid-Atlantic, an American public opinion turned sharply against the French. But it wasn't just public opinion that Leclair had to contend with, nor were his own mistakes, the sole cause of his problems. The one really big problem was that ever since President Jefferson's first conversation with the French envoy in the summer of 1801, when he said, yeah, we'll supply you and starve out General Tucson, very troubling news had come in from the American ambassador in London. The French and Spanish have signed a secret treaty to retrocede the Louisiana territory.

So whatever that expedition in Sandalmang is up to, it's part of a much, bigger plan than simply reclaiming some little sugar island. The Louisiana territory and access to the Mississippi River were already a huge deal for the American government. The cotton explosion in the south was just getting underway, pushing American planters west. The Spanish controlling access to the Mississippi River was bad enough. The French Republic under Napoleon Bonaparte controlling it, that was something else completely. So instead of receiving support from the United States as they expected. General Leclair's agents ran into carefully worded proclamations of neutrality. Leclair dispatched an agent to Philadelphia to float a bond and try to raise some hard cash,

and this agent found nothing but hostile refusals to invest. Possibly, this was because word had gone round that it wasn't necessarily in America's best interest to be supporting this expedition. Failing to raise money in the private sector, these agents then turned to the Jefferson administration and asked point blank for a loan, to which Secretary of State James Madison said, No. Madison wouldn't even commit to stopping American merchants from trading with any rebels in San Doming, saying only that the merchants wouldn't be protected by the American Navy. Privately, both Jefferson and Madison were now happy to let the Leclair expedition turn into a Caribbean quagmire,

to forestall whatever other dreams for the Western Hemisphere, First Consul Bonaparte may be harboring. But money and economics and even international politics were about to become the least of General Leclair's worries. Because in April 1802, just as the initial French campaigns were winding down, the mosquitoes started to swarm, and the worst yellow fever epidemic on record hit Sandal Meng. Now, disease was expected and had been allegedly accounted for, but the yellow fever epidemic of 1802 came on so fast and was so destructive that it would wreck everything Bonaparte and Leclair had planned. There were two big reasons the epidemic got out of hand so quickly. First, and most obvious, between the soldiers and sailors and their various attendants and families, somewhere just shy of 40,000 people had arrived in the colony from Europe, every one of them susceptible to contracting the disease. Second, though, is that with so much of the

urban and municipal infrastructure of the colony devastated, what meager medical accommodations the colony had were totally inadequate. Sanitation was nonexistent. There was no treatment. Hospitals were just places you went to die. And boy, how did they start to die? On May 8, 1802, that is the day after the peace was worked out with Tucson and the other Creole generals, LaClair wrote back to Bonaparte reporting on the situation. Of the 20,000 soldiers he had come over with, he already was down to just 12,000. Now, most of those were casualties of the recent campaigns, but yellow fever was really starting to take its toll.

Leclair estimated that 200 to 250 men were contracting the disease every day with no end in sight. Hoping that he had accomplished enough of his mission to be relieved, Leclair then asked to be allowed to return home, no doubt praying that he would be replaced before the yellow fever forgot to him too. Those who contracted the disease followed a predictable clockwork pattern. They would get sick, they would get worse, and then they would die. And any new arrivals in Sandomang were now walking into a cloud of death and disease. Through the summer of 1802, men would arrive, step foot on shore, and be dead a week later.

Both naval and merchant ships would arrive in La Cap or Porta Prince or wherever, and immediately, everybody on board would just die. A ship from Bordeaux saw 40 of 48 passengers die within days of arriving. Every single person on a Swedish merchant ship died except for one cabin boy. The empty ship was then put up for auction. The Navy fared no better, and one of the criticisms of Leclair is that he just let the ship sit anchored in the harbor, where their crews died along with everyone else, instead of sending them out to sail around until the plague had gone dormant for the winter. By the end of summer, ships of the line that had crew complements of 400 were now being manned by skeleton crews of just 150, with many of those local coloreds and blacks pressed into service. And of course, disease knows no rank or privilege.

In short order, the grand judge and the administrative prefect and their entire families were dead. And the senior military staff of the expedition was utterly devastated. In total, 27 high-ranking French generals died either in combat or of yellow fever during the Leclair expedition, which apparently makes it the single deadliest campaign for French generals for the entire run of the Napoleonic Wars. The officers who had once eagerly signed up for the campaign were now begging to go home, and there was no single assignment more coveted than to be a courier put in charge of Leclair's dispatches back to Bonaparte. getting out of the colony was now every man's top priority. And just to jump ahead a little bit, by the end of the year, of the 40,000 or so who arrived in February, somewhere on the order of 20 to 25,000 would be dead by the end of the year.

But even with the disease running rampant, Leclair wanted to keep pushing forward with his plans, and his next step was disarming the population of San Domain. Between the 30,000 guns, Sontanax and the Third Commission had come over with, the munitions left behind by the British when they withdrew, and then the additional 30,000 guns Tucson had bought from the Americans between 1800 and 1801, it's estimated there were something like 100,000 guns floating around out in the colony. So once it became clear that the deportation of Tucson wasn't going to spark a mass revolt, Leclair ordered his officers to begin the process of disarmament. And taking the lead in this process would be none other than General Desaline, who turned his fierce attention on any cultivator who thought they could defy the order to hand over their weapons. Desaline was a black supremacist. Yes, he was.

But as he's shown in his willingness to crush cultivators under his heat, Real solidarity was not an end unto itself. He was so ruthless in his methods that Leclair soon nicknamed him the butcher of the blacks and had very little reason to doubt Desaline's loyalty to the French. Running parallel to disarmament was Leclair's plan to reorganize the military forces under his command. On one side, he had the soldiers who had come over with him from France, and on the other, he had all these black and colored colonial units. Leclair wanted to integrate these two forces, combining colonial and European units into single demi-brigades.

Now, the standard method of military integration, though, was a lot like any merger between two companies, where the employees of one of the two companies are clearly being favored. As units were combined, entire black companies were simply slated to be disbanded. Drop off your weapons and go home. Now, since these men had a lot riding on their statuses, soldiers, rather than cultivators. They were not happy about this one bit. So many went home, but they did not drop off their guns.

Black and colored officers, meanwhile, might be retained, but with far less authority. Generals and colonels who had grown accustomed to autonomy now answered directly to white officers who hung right over their shoulders. Desaline, for example, was kept in a state of constant supervision. Lower level officers, captains, and lieutenants, found themselves little better than common soldiers now. And they, too, might simply find themselves unceremoniously dismissed from service one day. So anger and resentment was not confined to the men dismissed. It festered in the ranks of those who remained, both because of the indignities they now labored under

and the knowledge that their unit might be the next to be disbanded. Now, probably what Leclair should have done is put off any reorganized, plan until winter, when the yellow fever had passed, and he could properly assess what was actually left of his own strength. But this is hindsight talking. And when he got going with reorganization in June, he did not know that the yellow fever was going to be as bad as it was, nor did he know that news from France and Guadalupe and Martinique was going to fatally undermine his authority over the black and colored population. Back in France, on May the 20th, 1802, first consul Bonaparte, who was about to become First Consul for Life, Bonaparte, by the by, induced his

compliant tribunate to repeal one of the most revolutionary decrees of the French Revolution. The law of February 4, 1794, which outlawed slavery everywhere in the French Empire. This great law was now null and void. But this was just the du jour confirmation of what had already become de facto consulate policy. Bonaparte had already made it clear in Article 91 of the Constitution that the colonies would be governed by special laws and he had in fact already applied this mentality to the slavery issue a French colony way off in the Indian Ocean

had successfully resisted emancipation and when Bonaparte came to power he said that's fine you can keep your slaves I have no problem with that well now that the law of February 4th had been repealed he made this even more explicit by saying that slavery could continue in any French colony where it had not yet been abolished. In the Caribbean, this specifically meant Martinique. Now, we haven't talked about this because we've had plenty to talk about, but Martinique had been captured by the British in 1794, and so emancipation had never come to the island.

But the recent treaty of Amiens stipulated that the British would now hand the colony back to France, and so the slaves of Martinique, who had never been freed, would now never be freed. Bonaparte followed this up with an order, allowing France and allied merchants to once again partake of the slave trade. And then he followed this up with a law in July 1802 that forbade any black or colored from entering the metropole. That is all of France without explicit permission. Bonaparte is turning the clock now back to like the 17th. But what would prove even more troubling than the unbroken continuation of slavery in Martinique, or the racist laws being passed back in France, were events in nearby Guadalupe, where

emancipation had gone into effect. As a side project, the massive Leclair expedition, Bonaparte had sent a smaller force to Guadalupe to ensure the metropoles authority there, and since there were not as many slaves, nor had Guadalupe been racked by revolt on the scale of San Domang. The commander of the expedition had orders to reimpose slavery in all but name. And this is beyond even Tucson Louvertur's or Wellian freedom is slavery. The commander stripped free blacks of all civil rights, denied them the right to move around, and canceled all wages or profit sharing that may have been implemented since 1794.

And this actually did spark a violent rebellion on the island. one that ended dramatically with cornered rebels hold up on a plantation blowing themselves up, rather than accepting re-enslavement. But for our purposes here, the important thing was that at an early stage of this fight, the French arrested and deported 1,200 black foremen from Guadalupe. And at some point, in July 1802, French naval vessels holding many of these prisoners paid a call to Le Camp. And while bobbing in the harbor, a number of the captured Guadalupe foreman managed to escape. When they told their story to the locals in Sandomang,

words spread through the colony faster than fire through a cane field. Guadalupe was being re-enslaved, and we are next. This chilling news led blacks all over the colony to resist anything Leclair and his officers were trying to do, which really ticked off Leclair. On August the 6th, he sent an angry letter to the first consul, which said, I asked you, Citizen Consul, to do nothing that might make the blacks fear for their freedom until I was ready, and I was making rapid progress towards that moment. All of a sudden, there arrived the decree that legalizes the colonial slave trade, along with letters from merchants in Nantes and La Havre asking if they can sell blacks here.

Worse still, the general in command of Guadalupe has just issued an order reestablishing slavery. With the situation now more dangerous than ever, Leclair asked, in this letter, and almost all of his subsequent letters, to be relieved of his command. Requests that would never be granted. So though all the senior black and colored military officers and all the soldiers under their command had submitted to French authority, that did not mean that everyone under arms had submitted. As I mentioned back in episode 4.9, there were all over San Domeng, independent, unaligned

communities of blacks who rejected slavery, the labor code. It's plantation work, military service, everything. These communities had not reconciled themselves to Andre Rigo or to San Loveture when they had been in charge, and they sure as hell were not going to reconcile themselves to Leclair. So after the regular army defected to the French, these communities continued to wage guerrilla campaigns from their mountain bases of the interior, and these guys were everywhere in the north, the west, and the south provinces. These communities fought a lonely campaign for independence until the word from Guadalupe hit,

at which point they became the fighting guerrilla wing of a much larger but massively decentralized resistance movement. Down in the South province especially, black workers in both the cities and the fields started to organize. Their leaders were not grand admirals or governors general, but butchers and fishermen, random foremen and cultivators. certainly as many women as men. The old leadership may have abandoned them, but they were determined to die before returning to slavery. Now, resistance could be as low level as the old slave strategies of work, slowdown, sabotage, and theft.

But in both Jeremy and Lecai, out on the edge of the southern peninsula, coordinated efforts aimed at assassination, destruction of property, and probably more soon developed. But the French authorities were on the lookout, and these nascent conspiracies were uncovered and their leaders executed or deported. Except that is now not enough to get the job done, because their places were simply taken by a new cohort of resistance leaders. The summer of 1802 soon turned into one of those classic occupation dynamics, where the French had to continually up their level of repression, which only sparked even greater and wider determination to resist. The woman who today might not want to get involved would tomorrow start plotting to slit your throat

after you summarily arrest and execute her son on some flimsy pretext. On August the 25th, Leclair wrote back to Bonaparte acknowledging the problem. Now Bonaparte had been pressing him to arrest the black officers and deport them, but Leclair said, It seems to me that you do not have a very clear idea of my position to judge from the orders you send me. You order me to send me to send the black officers. generals to Europe. It is quite simple to arrest them all on the same day, but I am using these generals to stop the revolts that are still breaking out, and in some districts are taking on an alarming

appearance. It is not enough to have deported Tucson. There are 2,000 leaders here who need deporting. And frankly, every day there were 2,000 more. With resistance brewing, a fallout from the military reorganization started to become a major problem. through July and August, discharged soldiers started merging with the guerrilla bands and the civilian resistance bringing with them arms, supplies, to say nothing of their military experience and training. And then a principal object of the resistance became getting soldiers still in service to desert their posts and come over to the rebels. And they did. Every day they did. Sometimes it was just one soldier walking away from his post or maybe a small group leaving together.

Other times it would be whole units deserting together. They'd go out on patrol and just never come back. Or even scarier for the white soldiers, blacks would suddenly turn on them in the middle of a fight. They'd all be fighting some guerrilla band together, and suddenly the black soldiers would turn and start firing on the whites, who had minutes before been their quote, unquote, comrades. Meanwhile, the senior black and colored officers had grown thoroughly disenchanted with the French. word that they were now barred from the metropole, that colors were forbidden to use the title citizen, that the slave trade had been reactivated? It all spelled their inevitable doom.

In August, one of Tucson's most loyal generals, a guy named Charles Balear, officially Tucson's nephew, but possibly his illegitimate son, had already turned, and along with his wife, Santi, was secretly coordinating and aiding the rebels of the West Province from his position as a general in the French army. Shortly thereafter, though, he took to the mountains and declared himself in insurrection. But the other generals were not ready to go that far just yet, and General Desaline took the lead in tracking down the rebellious Belair and Santee. With the colony slipping out of his control, Leclair's letters back to Bonaparte showed the general slowly descending into a fog of despair, paranoia, and anger. These letters had two constant refrain,

You have to send me more troops, and you have to send me home. Perhaps thinking it unseemly for a man to beg for reinforcements while also begging to leave, Bonaparte continued to send more men, but not approved Leclair's request to be relieved of his command. Between July and October 1802, the First Consul would send 10,000 more men. But with the depressing reports about Yellow Fever in hand, the First Consul was no longer willing to send his best men, and instead started using brigades of foreign auxiliaries from countries now under French domination, mostly Swiss and Germans, but most famously Polish battalions, because you can't do early modern revolutionary history without the Poles showing up somewhere.

So the first Polish Legion of 2,500, arrived in early September 1802, after being told that the French were carrying on the struggle for freedom and equality in the new world. But then on arrival, the Poles discovered that this had all been a lie, and that clearly the French were fighting to impose slavery, not abolish it. After suffering from a heavy dose of disillusionment, combined with yellow fever and death in combat conditions they were not prepared for, the polls would famously start to defect to the ranks of the blacks. Who, it was obvious, were the ones actually fighting for freedom and equality. and it was just before the polls arrived in early September that we get our first piece of really hard evidence that the French were actually fighting for re-enslavement. At the end of August, Leclair responded to a coded message from the head of the naval ministry by saying, quote,

Do not think of reestablishing slavery here for some time. I think I will be able to do everything so that the person who replaces me will have nothing to do but put into effect the government order. but after the innumerable proclamations that I have issued here assuring the blacks of their freedom, I do not want to have to contradict myself. Assure the First Council, however, that my successor will find everything in place. And from the context of this letter, it's clear that the government order he referred to was slavery. But events were now moving very quickly, and Leclair's mind was racing. No longer a cavalier idealist, Leclair was now an aggressive parent.

He refused to leave his residence in Le Cap and allowed almost no one to enter, hopefully quarantining himself from the plague that swirled all around him. Seeing black and colored rebels everywhere, colonial soldiers deserting to the enemy and his own men dying like flies, Leclair's promise to, quote, have everything in place was about to take very sinister overtones. Leclair now believed that to impose French rule, he had, quote, Nothing left but terror. And so terror is what he ordered.

Men and women captured under arms had always been executed. But by the end of summer, the killing became indiscriminate. At the end of August, 60 men were hanged in a single day in Le Cap. In early September, the prisons of Le Chai were emptied, with as many as 350 men and women killed in one mass execution. With Plantation Foreman now identified as likely resistance ringleaders, It basically became a crime to be a foreman, and arrests and executions were quick and devoid of any legality. French units simply went out on patrol, rounded up anybody who might be a resistance member, which at this point was anyone, and hanged, shot, or crucified them as a lesson to the others.

But the only lesson the black seemed to learn was we have to resist these French bastards at all costs. But the guys who got the worst of it were the black and colored soldiers who remained loyal to the French. The men who had stayed behind when their comrades deserted were not rewarded for their loyalty, but punished for their imaginary future crimes, either because the French officers thought they would inevitably desert, or believing that some had stayed behind on purpose to undermine the military from within, arrests and executions of the men who refused to desert the French became a daily occurrence in September and October, which only, of course, increased the number of desertions.

The black and colored officers, meanwhile, were all themselves on the verge of deserting. Desaline, by this point, was no longer destroying the weapons he was seizing. He was stockpiling them for later, or oftentimes just making a show of disarming civilians and then sending their guns back as soon as the white officers weren't looking. But it was not just the black generals like Desaline. Alexander Petion, who had come over with the expedition and fought valiantly at the vicious siege of Cretotapurot in April, was now ready to bolt. Leclair's turn to terror, coupled with the news that he was banned from returning to France because of the color of his skin, left Petion ready to switch sides as soon as it would have the most impact.

But there was still some internal maneuvering to contend with. And so while Desaline, for example, prepared to make his own break, he continued to hunt General Belair and his wife Santi. Eventually, he tracked them down, had them arrested, and then forwarded them on to the French for execution in early October. Belair had often been talked about as the man who might one day succeed Tucson Louvichure as governor, and Desaline took the opportunity to eliminate a strong rival from the equation before the War of Independence got going in earnest.

In mid-October, though, the time had come for everyone to bolt. The yellow fever epidemic was finally starting to slack. The white forces were now at their weakest, and from here on out would only get stronger. General Petion, and another guy named General Clarevaux, who had been one of Tucson's top-colored officers, had been put in charge of La Capp's outer defenses. Specifically, the fortifications where once Sontanac's and Paul Varel had fallen back to at the Battle of La Capp, There, they made contact with the same guy that Sonsonax and Paul Varel had made contact with, Makaya.

Makaya was still out there running the rebels of the North Plain, and Petion and Clarevo and Makaya put together a plan for a joint assault on Le Cap. This mixed force of regular army and Mackaya's guerrillas struck on October the 13th, and before the Frenchman Manning Le Cap's inner line knew what was happening, a horde of black and colored soldiers were upon them. This attack finally brought Leclair out of hiding, and he personally rushed to the walls to lead the defense. In all likelihood, he probably did not think he was going to make it out of this alive,

but Leclair and his men somehow held the line, and when morning dawned, LeCap had not fallen. But though this attack failed, it was the signal that it was time for everyone to pick sides once and for all. Christoff defected on October the 16th and attacked Portapai. Desaline, who probably knew what Petion was about to do, turned on his superiors, and on October the 24th, attack Gonaiv. And with the atrocities committed by the whites, you can bet that no quarter was offered to anyone who fell into the hands of the rebels. The generals made their move not a moment too soon, because by this point Leclair had snapped completely.

On October the 7th, just days before Petion's attack on Le Cap, Leclair wrote what turned out to be his last letter to Bonaparte. And in it he said, here is my opinion of this country. You must destroy all the blacks of the mountains, men and women, and keep only children under 12 years old. Destroy half those of the plain. And not leave in the colony a single man of color who is worn an epaulet. Otherwise, the colony will never be quiet. And at the beginning of each year, especially after murderous seasons like this one, you will have a civil war that will comprise the possession of the country.

If you wish to be the master of Sandomang, you must send me 12,000 men without wasting a single day. Seeing nothing but an island of men and women who would never accept French rule, Leclair was now advocating a program of nothing less than genocide. Basically, his plan was to wipe out the entire population of Sandomé so that the they could start over with new slaves from Africa. And it would appear that Leclair was not joking. After the attack on Le Capp, he issued a general arrest order for every black and colored soldier still under French authority. The thousand or so black men of the Le Cap garrison, unfortunate enough to have remained loyal to the French, were rounded up and marched onto ships waiting in

the harbor. On Leclair's orders, sacks of flour were tied around their necks, and they were unceremoniously pushed overboard. In a single day, these thousand men were drowned one by one in the Lecap Harbor, their bodies washing ashore over the course of the next week. And as had happened in the Vonday, mass drowning soon became the quickest and most cost-effective method of execution, and one white officer who was sickened by the slaughter, estimated that something like 4,000 men and women were drowned across the colony over October and November 1802. This would mark the beginning of a cycle of horrific atrocities and counter atrocities committed by both sides in the War of Independence that can now be said to have officially begun with the defection of the generals in October.

But though Leclair set it in motion, he would not live long enough to do anything but set it in motion. Very possibly as a result of the contact he had had with the troops during the battle to defend Le Cap, General Leclair came down with a fever on. October the 22nd. He hung out in okay shape for a few days, but on October the 29th, he collapsed and was stricken with the very worst that yellow fever has to offer, which I'll spare you the very gross details of. On October the 2nd, 1802, almost exactly a year after marrying into the Bonaparte family and being put in charge of this all-important mission, Leclair died at the age of 30. But as I just said, Leclair's death was an end to nothing, but his own life.

Next week, the war of independence will be waged in brutal earnest, as both sides sought to terrorize and murder the other into submission. General Desaline will emerge as the commander-in-chief of the Creole rebels, and with him would come the final death of Tucson Louvature's dream for tricolor harmony. There could be no peace, no liberty, no independence for the blacks and colors of Sandalmang, if even a single white was left alive.