English troops took possession of Jérémie in the name of the king of England.

But this general liberty was bound to draw a new war upon the colony. The {{*grands planteurs*|the great plantation proprietors}} could not reconcile themselves to so complete a social renovation. Did we not see them, from the time when the question was only the political emancipation of the {{freedmen|*affranchis*: free people of color and free Black people}}, hasten to invoke the support of England to maintain their abusive privileges? How much more, when in the name of the Republic Sonthonax and Polvérel raised up so many millions of men, treated until then with less care and consideration than beasts of burden, was it to be expected that nothing would halt their parricidal resolve to withdraw the colonies from the power of the mother country. One of the principal ringleaders of the treason bore the name Venault de Charmilly. Do not ask history who this man was. It is with him as with most of his kind: his cradle is unknown to all; we know only that he was a plantation proprietor in Saint-Domingue, that he long frequented the antechambers of the cabinet of Saint-James, that his maneuvers had as their aim the delivery of the colony to the English, that he was awaiting in Jamaica an expedition with which to go and restore the privileges of the white skin, and that finally, on 3 September, the governor of that island, Sir Adam Williamson, to whom the cabinet had left the task of concluding the bargain definitively, accepted the proposals of Venault de Charmilly. On the 20th of the same month, two hundred men of the 13th regiment, commanded by Colonel Whitelock, disembarked from the ship *Europa*, carrying Commodore Ford, and took possession of Jérémie at nine o’clock in the morning, in the name of the king of England; to the sound of 42 cannon shots the British flag was raised on the fort of Orléans and on the fort of the Presqu’île (1). Thus the hatred against republican France unmasked itself completely; thus the proud victors of Camp-Desriveaux unmasked the project so long conceived of separating from the mother country, from that France who was far more their fatherland than ours; and this because that fatherland had called the men of my race to the enjoyment of the rights inherent in human nature.