La Croix-des-Bouquets. Battle: fifteen thousand slaves under Hyacinthe drove out the Port-au-Prince army after six hours.

Pinchinat and Bauvais were obliged to use all their eloquence and all their skill to destroy these unfortunate impressions in the minds of the Blacks. At last they succeeded; and the enslaved repulsed Caradeux’s emissaries. The freedmen named as captain-general of the plantation gangs a young Black man, brave and intelligent, named Hyacinthe Ducoudray, and as major-general another Black man, Garion Santo. On 28 March demonstrations hostile to the whites broke out on the plantations. In the night of 30 to 31 March the enslaved rose without committing any disorder: not one colonist was killed, not one house was burned. They marched on the Croix-des-Bouquets fifteen thousand strong, Hyacinthe at their head, commanded by men of color scattered through their ranks. In all that multitude there were not sixty muskets. They were armed with knives, hoes, iron-tipped staves and slings. At three in the morning they attacked the whites, drawn up in order of battle around the town, with prodigious determination. The Blacks, fired to fanaticism by their sorcerers, ran to their deaths with gaiety, imagining that they would rise again in Africa. Hyacinthe, armed with a bull’s tail, went through the ranks saying that it turned the bullets aside. While he held the white dragoons in check, he had the national guard attacked from another side. The young colonists of Port-au-Prince who made up that corps, brave, proud and magnificently equipped as they were, could not withstand the impetuosity of the insurgents. They were losing ground when Philibert came up with his Africans and restored the fight. Both sides fought with equal fury. The regiments of Artois and Normandie, by brisk and sustained platoon fire, threw down whole lines of Blacks who hurled themselves in disorder on the bayonets. At intervals the dragoons made brilliant charges; but they were quickly driven back into the town by the insurgents, who clung with rage to their horses, let themselves be cut down by the saber, and unhorsed them. The most frightful carnage took place where Praloto’s artillery stood. The Blacks threw themselves boldly on the cannon; but they were crushed by the most murderous grapeshot. They were wavering a little when Hyacinthe revived their ardor with these words, waving his bull’s tail: Forward! Forward! Cannonballs are dust! At the same moment, braving death, he sprang forward at their head amid the bullets and the grapeshot. Insurgents were seen to seize the guns, hold them in their arms and let themselves be killed without letting go; others were seen to thrust their arms into the cannon to pull out the balls, crying to their comrades: Come, come; we have them! The guns went off, and their limbs were carried far away. After six hours of such combat, the army of Port-au-Prince was forced to yield to superior numbers; it broke ranks and took flight, after blowing up the powder magazine of the Croix-des-Bouquets and burning the provision store. The whites, giving everything in their path to the flames, returned to Port-au-Prince in the greatest disorder. They had lost more than 100 soldiers, and the insurgents counted at least 1,200 men killed. The men of color found all the guns in the town spiked. Hyacinthe, master of the Croix-des-Bouquets, committed no excess. What a difference between this insurrection of the enslaved of the West, directed by the freedmen, and that of the enslaved of the North, left to themselves. On the one hand, order, respect for property, not one murder; on the other, disorder, pillage and frightful vengeance. Among the insurgents, Halaou, Bébécoutard and Bélisaire, a man of color, had distinguished themselves, and they became famous chiefs. They organized their bands in the African manner: their heads laden with the feathers of cocks and peacocks, they had themselves carried in triumph, with the power of life and death over their followers.