Basel. By the treaty signed there (22 July 1795) Spain ceded its part of the island to France.
The Spanish colony, as we have seen, had been ceded to France by the treaty of Basel. But the French government, preoccupied with European affairs, had for five years neglected to take possession of it. On the other hand, the troubles that had never ceased to agitate Saint-Domingue from 1795 to 1800 had not allowed the administrators of the French colony to send troops to Santo Domingo. The flag of His Catholic Majesty flew over every point of the Spanish part. France had only one agent at Santo Domingo: Brigadier General Antoine Chanlatte, a man of color, the same who had played so great a part at the time of the first concordats between the freedmen and the whites, and afterwards under the civil commissioners Polvérel and Sonthonax.
It will be remembered that after Hédouville embarked, Toussaint had brought to the Cap the agent Roume, who was invested with all the national powers. Roume had delegated General Chanlatte to replace him at Santo Domingo. By seizing the eastern part Toussaint Louverture meant to increase his forces and his resources, which the civil war had greatly weakened, and to forestall General Rigaud, who might have sent deputies there with the aim of taking possession of it himself.
Moreover, by having his authority recognized there he took from the general of color the means of taking refuge there, should he be obliged to abandon Les Cayes, and of organizing a new party in the center of the island. His perspicacity made him foresee what Rigaud had never thought of. Antoine Chanlatte, however, was a political friend of Rigaud’s, his former comrade in arms, and shared all his hatred of Toussaint Louverture.
Before Toussaint Louverture, the civil commissioners Polvérel and Sonthonax had understood in 1793 the necessity of conquering the Spanish part; for the liberty of the Blacks, proclaimed by France in the western part of the island, might succumb under the blows of powerful neighbors whose every effort tended toward the restoration of slavery. We have already seen that Jean-François and Biassou, in the pay of His Catholic Majesty, never ceased to traffic in captives during the war between France and Spain. “If we yield to the Spaniards and to the brigands,” Sonthonax had said, “or if we go soft before them, or better said, if we do not conquer the Spanish part, the Spaniards and the brigands will invade, burn, pillage and lay waste to everything.”
Under Louis XIV, in 1698, France, thinking to place the whole island under its dominion, had offered the Spanish government an equivalent for its possession of Santo Domingo. In 1640 the island of Corsica had been proposed to the cabinet of Madrid, and in 1783 Guadeloupe.
At length it was under the influence of such precedents that the Executive Directory proposed to Spain that she give up her colony of Santo Domingo, and obtained the eastern part from her by the treaty of Basel (22 July 1795), restoring to her the places France had taken.(b)