Le Cap. Municipal address of congratulation to Toussaint.

The town of Le Cap, although it did not have him within its walls, celebrated the conquest of the department of the South with a brilliant festival. On the eve of the ceremony, at sunset, a salute of artillery announced the festival. The next day at daybreak the cannon was heard; the general call was beaten; the national guard and the troops of the line took up arms, and all the civil and military authorities went to the town hall. At six o’clock they were assembled at the national palace; the troops were drawn up on the parade ground. General Moyse, who commanded in the North, came out of the national palace preceded by a numerous staff and went to the Champ de Mars. On his arrival on the parade ground the cannon thundered and the band played the martial airs of France. All the authorities took their places. Father Brelle, parish priest of the town of Le Cap, mounted the altar of the fatherland, which was covered with flowers and crowned with garlands, and delivered a long discourse. “After congratulating the whole colony on the important event that was the subject of universal joy, after speaking with warmth of feeling of the happy effects this event was about to produce,” he made a digression, carrying his hearers into the midst of the French armies. There it was Bonaparte who overthrew everything before him; here it was Toussaint Louverture who mastered fortune. He came down from the altar amid rounds of applause, and mass was sung with pomp in the center of the Champ de Mars. After the ceremony the crowd dispersed crying: Long live Toussaint Louverture. During the rest of the day there were splendid banquets at which the citizens fraternized; in the evening the town was illuminated. Some weeks later, on 29 August (11 Fructidor), the municipal administration of Le Cap sent the general-in-chief an address of congratulation. It announced as well to the citizens of the North the end of the civil war and the flight of Rigaud, a brigand notorious for his crimes; it extolled Toussaint’s generosity and ended its address thus: “Let the restless and turbulent spirits who preach a false doctrine, and who by seditious speeches seek to disturb the harmony that must reign among citizens, be denounced by good citizens to the civil and military authorities; let the wicked not be spared, and let society be purged of them.” Then all the vices born of baseness and adulation showed themselves; to please Toussaint, who had become the dispenser of posts and honors, men were not afraid to preach informing in official documents. Through Toussaint’s energetic care, prosperity was reviving everywhere in the countryside. The district of the Artibonite above all was beginning to recover its former splendor; but the agricultural development of that district was for a moment halted by a frightful flood. In the last days of Vendémiaire, Year 9 (from 2 to 8 October 1800), heavy rains fell night and day on the plain of the Artibonite; and in the night of 11 to 12 October (19 to 20 Vendémiaire) the river burst its banks with horrible violence. Most of the establishments, sugar works and the like, were carried away by the waters; many cultivators perished. Toussaint hastened to the aid of the inhabitants; he made his way, not without danger, into the still flooded plain and lavished consolation on all the families that had been ruined. But at Saint-Marc he was so beset with requests of every kind by the victims of the flood that he issued a regulation laying down a general measure for the indemnities to be granted to those who had suffered from the river’s overflowing. He returned to Port-Républicain, from which he issued an ordinance calling on the managers and drivers of plantations to perform their duties with zeal, on the men and women cultivators to return to their respective plantations, and on fathers and mothers of families to bring up their children in the fear of God. He declared that those who harbored cultivators would be condemned to a fine of 200, 400 or 800 livres, and, if they could not pay the fine, imprisoned for one month, and for three months in case of a second offense; that cultivators who refused to go to work would be compelled to it; that if negligence arose in the administration of the countryside, the generals commanding the arrondissements would be held responsible; that soldiers might not keep women in the barracks; and that commandants of towns who suffered cultivators to be in the towns and villages on the days of the décade would be punished with arrest or dismissed.