Digneron. Guimbeau’s band driven from it.

Borel returned to Port-au-Prince and came out again a few days later with eight field pieces, 1,800 foot and a hundred dragoons, determined this time to hold every proprietor of the plain to ransom. His army, marching in two columns, camped at Santo and at Beaugé. The mass of the Black people of the Cul-de-Sac did not stir; Hyacinthe, who had refused to take part in the expedition, had withdrawn to Les Varreux; Bauvais, at the head of the men of color of the Croix-des-Bouquets, too weak to attack Borel, watched all his movements. On 12 March the whites attacked a band of Africans commanded by one Guimbeau, and drove them from Digneron. On the 18th Guimbeau assailed Beaugé and would have carried it, had not the Black men who fought for the whites under the orders of Philibert put up the most spirited resistance against him. Had Hyacinthe raised the ateliers, the whites would have been cut to pieces. Borel returned to Port-au-Prince laden with booty. He then resolved to take vengeance for the massacre of the whites of the Arcahaie by the Black people at the instigation of the men of color. Captain general Lapointe commanded in that town, and Juste Leroux was its mayor. Borel sent to the Arcahaie three hundred men of the regiment of Artois under the orders of Canteloup, an implacable enemy of the freedmen, on the pretext of stifling a slave revolt that had broken out in the mornes, but in reality with the aim of arresting Lapointe and having all the people of color massacred. Immediately after the troops landed, Lapointe gathered the whole population of the town around the church, won it to his side, had Canteloup arrested and shipped him with the battalion of Artois to Port-au-Prince. Borel failed in this enterprise, which was to have delivered to him the fine, rich quarter of the Arcahaie and procured him new riches.