Le Cap. Kerverseau and Leborgne arrive.

General Rigaud, as soon as he had received the delegates’ dispatches, left Tiburon with 400 men and reached Les Cayes on 30 August after forty-eight hours of forced marches. Instead of going to the delegation, he went to Fort L’Îlet on the very night of his arrival. The massacre of the whites was continuing in the countryside. Rigaud, who could have stopped the fury of the Black people, could not contain his own. He was indignant against the delegates who had tried to take his political preponderance from him, and his heart still bled from the personal affront he had received. He calmed the fury of the Black people only after he had received from Kerverseau and Leborgne the powers necessary to restore order and save the commonwealth. * He took the delegates under his protection and gave a battalion the guard of their residence. A few days later Rey and Leborgne de Boigne received a letter from Sonthonax telling them that the arrest of Lefranc was more indispensable than ever.

Rigaud gave the civil commission an account of the events at Les Cayes and asked it to send other delegates into the South. Pinchinat, having learned what had happened, left his retreat and came back to Les Cayes, where he was carried in triumph by the people (5 September).

Sonthonax, not wishing to exasperate Rigaud, who had shown how far his power could reach, sent into the South as representatives of the civil commission two men of color, the brigadier generals Martial Besse and A. Chanlatte. But he represented Rigaud to the French government as a traitor working to make himself independent of the metropole. General Bauvais was charged with gathering serious information on the events at Les Cayes and reporting on them to the civil commission. The generals of color Martial Besse and Chanlatte went into the South bearing a decree recalling the members of the delegation. Kerverseau and Leborgne left Les Cayes carrying with them the curses of the population. On the delegates’ reports, the civil commission wrote to the Directory “that Pinchinat and Augustin Rigaud insinuated to the Black people that the whites newly arrived from Europe had come back only to put them in irons again, and that it was time to exterminate them so as to have nothing more to fear from them; that the whites had never sincerely wanted the liberty of the Black people or of the men of color; that the men of color and the Black people were the true inhabitants, the real proprietors of the colonies; that everything belonged to them, and that the whites must be exterminated or driven out.”

Kerverseau and Leborgne reached Le Cap on 6 November. Sonthonax, before acting against Rigaud by official acts, waited for the Executive Directory, to which he had painted him as an independent, to send him instructions concerning him. Rigaud, however, went on reporting his operations to the civil commission, although it had ceased to answer his dispatches. He studied by his conduct to prove to the metropole how little the sentiment of independence was in his heart. He gave himself with fresh ardor to administration. The inhabitants of the department of the South, abandoned by the civil commission, placed themselves of their own will under his protection. Of a peremptory character, he made his energetic hand felt everywhere in the administration. He entrusted almost all offices to the newly free, and the cultivators, who loved him, submitted to a severe discipline, worked with ardor and furnished enough produce for all the expenses of the department to be met from the export duties. The public treasury, which had been emptied by the depredations of the delegates, began to fill again. During the short time they had remained at Les Cayes, they had taken about four hundred thousand gourdes from the treasury.