Le Cap. The squadron anchors; the civil commission lands amid great solemnity.

The squadron crossed the sea without hindrance and arrived at Saint-Domingue on 12 May. The civil commissioners, under Article 156 of the Constitution, were to exercise the same functions as the Directory while remaining subordinate to it. “They were specially charged to destroy the prejudices of color, to realize in the equitable distribution of ranks and offices the great principle of political equity, and to purge the colony of the English and the émigrés.”

As soon as the Watigny anchored in the roadstead of Le Cap, Governor Laveaux went on board and had a long conference with Sonthonax. From that moment the deportation of General Villate was resolved upon.

It will be remembered that Sonthonax had left the colony in 1794 full of indignation against the former free, who in great numbers had embraced the cause of the English. He had come back with a fixed idea: to destroy completely the political preponderance of the men of color and to entrust all authority to those emancipated in 1794, judging them alone capable of sincere devotion to republican France.

He never thought of the independence of Saint-Domingue, as he was accused of doing by the colonists, by Rigaud, and by Toussaint himself, whose ambition he would thwart. He wanted the colony to have a special constitution, and in that constitution the liberty of the Black people to be so firmly consecrated that they would have nothing to fear from reactions of the metropole against general liberty. For he saw the colonial party already so powerful in France under the Directory that he dreaded what came to pass under the Consulate, when in May 1802 the legislative body restored slavery.(b)

He landed at Le Cap with his colleagues amid great solemnity. The Black people went out in crowds to meet him, waving palms and crying: Long live the Republic! Long live general liberty! Long live Sonthonax! The newly free in general adored him; evening and morning, in their families, they taught their children to pray to God for Sonthonax.