Le Cap. Galbaud’s attack; battle, pillage and burning of the town.
Galbaud, who kept up relations with Gauvain and the other royalists of the town, took from Cambis the command of the squadron anchored in the roads of Le Cap, and on 20 June issued a proclamation against the civil commissioners in which he called them the scourges of Saint-Domingue. The same day, in the morning, César Galbaud landed in the town with 3,000 men without meeting any obstacle, so little did the commissioners expect this stroke. Almost all the patriotic troops come from France were holding, in the countryside, the republican cordon that protected Le Cap against the attacks of Jean François. Gauvain came to reinforce him at the head of 200 young royalists on foot and of the former horsemen of the national guard.
This army amounted to 3,500 men; it divided into two columns. The first, under Gauvain’s orders, marched against the main entrance of the National Palace, which the freedmen held and where the civil commissioners were; the second, commanded by César Galbaud, was to turn it and assail it from behind. General Galbaud remained on board a ship with a reserve corps.
As Laveaux was ill, Sonthonax and Polvérel entrusted the command of the troops of the line and of the freedmen to Colonel Antoine Chanlatte, a man of color, and to Mars Belley, a Black officer.
The men of color, attacked first by the first column, resisted with energy; not even grapeshot could shake them. Having driven Gauvain back into the rear courtyard of Government House, they threw themselves on his troops with the bayonet; the volunteers of Le Cap fell back; the sailors, attacked in their turn with impetuosity, took flight; and the rout was complete.
Immediately after Gauvain’s defeat, the men of color rushed upon the column that had turned Government House, made up almost entirely of the seamen of the squadron, took a howitzer from it, overthrew it, made César Galbaud prisoner and led him to the civil commissioners.
The whole white army withdrew to the shore. The men of color, not being numerous enough to force it to re-embark, did not pursue it.
The next day, 21 June, at daybreak, General Galbaud landed on the shore at the head of a new column of sailors. He marched on the arsenal, which fifty freedmen held under the command of a white man. This man, having forbidden the men of color to fire, telling them that the seamen were brothers whose quarrel was only with the civil commissioners, went forward to meet Galbaud, embraced him and handed the arsenal over to him. Most of the freedmen were slaughtered. Polvérel, to stop this carnage, sent his son to the sailors under a flag of truce; but they, without respect for the law of nations, arrested him. Galbaud, master of several forts that commanded the government palace, assailed the men of color. His well-served artillery silenced the fire of the civil commissioners’ battery. Antoine Chanlatte, unable to hold out against forces eight times greater than his own, advised Polvérel and Sonthonax to withdraw to the Haut-du-Cap. At eleven in the morning the freedmen and the civil commissioners had reached the Bréda plantation. The sailors, masters of the town, no longer listened to the voice of the royalist youth and gave themselves up to the most frightful pillage. The enslaved who were in Le Cap and the evildoers of every party and every color followed their example. It was no longer possible for Galbaud to keep order; he withdrew to the fleet; the carnage became frightful; many white townsmen fleeing death came to seek asylum at Bréda with the men of color, who received them generously. Fire broke out in the town, and the conflagration, spreading with prodigious speed, covered Le Cap with whirlwinds of flame and smoke. It was then a frightful calamity.