Nérette. Beauvais’s fifty men beat the Grand-Fond militia.

The new confederates were fairly well armed: they carried hunting knives, lances, pikes, sabers and swords; most of them were mounted, some on mules, some on horses. Like all men of the people who rise in revolt, they were without uniform, in smocks, jackets and straw hats. They had just organized when they learned that a squadron of the white militia, made up of enslavers of the Grand-Fond, was coming down to Port-au-Prince under the command of a white colonist named Jean-François Lespinasse. At once Beauvais called for fifty volunteers to go and meet the whites. The whole little army came forward. He was obliged to choose fifty himself, and set off at their head. He met the enslavers at La Coupe on the Nérette plantation on 30 August 1791, at the entrance of the road that leads to Port-au-Prince. There a cavalry fight broke out. The whites, after losing three men, took flight, most of them wounded. The success of the men of color had never been in doubt; they were driven by the fury of despair, their hearts sustained by the justice of their rights, and determined to conquer or to die; the whites, for their part, had not expected this attack; and their surprise at seeing themselves assailed by their freedmen, until then so humble before them, contributed not a little to their defeat.