Le Cap. Rochambeau arrested and put aboard the Berceau.

A few days later the civil commission resolved to send General Rochambeau, at the head of some forces, to take possession of Santo Domingo. He had been named, as we have seen, commander in chief of the Spanish part by the Executive Directory on 12 February 1796. Sonthonax wrote to General Bauvais at Jacmel to hold 200 infantrymen of the Legion of the West at Rochambeau’s orders, and to Rigaud in the South to send to Le Cap 800 grenadiers of the Legion of the South, who were to go and garrison Santo Domingo. These two generals showed little inclination to carry out the orders of the civil commissioner, who, they thought, wished to weaken them the better to crush them; they had even made representations to him about these dispatches of troops when a serious disagreement broke out between Rochambeau and the civil commission. Rochambeau did not wish, on entering the Spanish part, to offend populations already hostile by implanting there the laws and customs of the Republic. Sonthonax wanted the aristocrats of that colony to be treated like those of every other part of the Republic, and authority there to be handed over to the enslaved, whose liberty would be proclaimed. In vain did Rochambeau point out to him that policy required a less violent course. In the end he refused to accept the plan of conduct the civil commission had laid down for him. He roused General Toussaint against himself by calling him ambitious and an enemy of the whites; he complained of the depredations of the Black and colored chiefs who, he said, disposed of men and things in all the districts where they were veritable caciques; and he accused Sonthonax of favoring the newly free to the detriment of the whites. On 21 July the civil commission decreed that Donatien Rochambeau, general of division, should at once be arrested and taken on board the corvette Berceau, to be held there at the disposal of the commission until it was otherwise ordered, on the personal responsibility of the captain of that corvette. Rochambeau embarked and left for France on 26 July. When he arrived at Bordeaux he was imprisoned in the Château du Hâ. He was set free after staying there only twelve days. Sonthonax wrote to the civil commissioner Roume at Santo Domingo that he would send Laveaux to take possession of that city.