Le Cap. Convoy of 14 ships from Livorno with 6,000 troops; l’Égyptienne, le Prudent and l’Aristide arrive

On 24 Fructidor (11 September) the harbor of the Cap had received a convoy of fourteen ships out of Livorno, carrying 6,000 troops. A few days later the frigate l’Égyptienne, with General Meyer and a host of officers on board, and the ship le Prudent, carrying one hundred and fifty artillerymen, also entered the harbor of the Cap. General Leclerc believed himself able to stifle the insurrection with these new troops, whom he had awaited with such impatience. But the insurgents were already in correspondence with the Black men and the men of color enrolled in the regiments. To spur the courage of the soldiers of the army of Saint-Domingue, and to prove to them the solicitude of France on their behalf, General Leclerc published a letter from the minister of the navy and the colonies, in answer to the one he had addressed to him concerning places to be granted at the Prytanée for the sons of soldiers who had died in the colony. The minister had informed him that fifty places had been granted. The sons of Commissary Watrin and of Generals Hardy and Ledoyen had been placed at the Prytanée. This news gladdened that unhappy army, whose fate would deserve pity had it not spent all its efforts on the restoration of slavery.

Citizen Daure was named colonial prefect in place of Citizen Lequoi Mongirault, carried off by yellow fever. At Les Cayes, Citizen Fréron, sub-prefect of the department of the South, had also just died, two months after his arrival in Saint-Domingue. He was replaced by Citizen Wante, secretary-general of the prefecture. This was the same Fréron who, in Paris during the Revolution, had been the editor of l’Orateur du Peuple, and who had been one of the most ardent members of the Convention in the party of the Mountain. In disgrace under the Consulate, he had accepted a sub-prefecture in Saint-Domingue. By the philanthropy he showed in our country he atoned for the blood he had shed in torrents at Marseille and Toulon under the Terror, as proconsul of the Convention. His death was a loss for the mother country. Had he lived, he would have checked the fury of the colonists who, by their barbarity, drove to revolt the populations of the South, so faithful to France. On the eve of his death he had attended a dinner at which most of the guests were colonists. The conversation turned on the fear felt by the Black men and the men of color of the restoration of servitude. Fréron rose and declared with energy that, if he had not full confidence in the philanthropic sentiments of the French government, he would himself rouse the indigènes to revolt and put himself at their head. These words terrified the colonists, who after the dinner represented him everywhere as a raving negrophile, a Jacobin, an enemy of Bonaparte. The next day Fréron was found dead in his bed. The Indigenous believed at the time that the whites had had him poisoned because he was devoted to general liberty.

The ship l’Aristide, coming from Rochefort, anchored in the roadstead of the Cap with three hundred artillerymen on board. She brought word that preparations for a strong expedition to Saint-Domingue were being made at Brest. This news, eagerly spread, did not discourage the insurgents, who were making immense efforts to occupy some points of the coast. They wished to open relations with English or American merchant ships in order to procure arms and munitions. Leclerc, learning of their excursions along the coasts, decreed that any coaster or other vessel whatever that touched at the points of the coast held by the rebels would be seized, its cargo confiscated and its captain hanged.