Le Cap. Leclerc died there

At the same time Generals Clervaux, Christophe and Pétion, who had withdrawn to Morne-Rouge, learning that the captain-general was gravely ill and that Le Cap was in consternation, resolved to attack the town. General Clausel had drawn all the outposts of the French army back onto the heights of the place. As soon as he learned of the enemy’s approach, he gathered the European troops and the national guard around Fort Bélair and Fort Bréda. On 6 Brumaire (28 October), in the morning, the Indigenous attacked the French with such impetuosity that they overthrew them and held their ground at the Haut-du-Cap, in spite of the heaviest fire from the artillery of the forts. General Clausel went back into Le Cap after ordering d’Henin to charge the enemy at the head of the cavalry of the line. D’Henin hurled himself with his usual intrepidity upon the 6th, which received him on its bayonets and drove him back with heavy musketry. Twice the French returned to the charge. At last d’Henin, grievously wounded, went back into Le Cap in the greatest disorder. Leclerc, dying, crushed under the weight of every kind of sorrow, still thought of the safety of the French. He sent Clausel the order to keep to a close defensive: the troops held only the perimeter of Le Cap. The Indigenous were camped less than a league from the gates of the place. The news of Dessalines’s insurrection had dealt the captain-general the final blow. He was heard to cry out: Can I have been so deceived by a barbarian!

On the night of 31 October to 1 November the rooms of the government palace were filled with notable citizens. The captain-general’s family was in tears. Generals Clausel and Claparède were at the bedside of Leclerc, who was nearing his end. Feeling himself dying, the captain-general designated Rochambeau to succeed him. He then blamed his government for having given him cruel instructions; he condemned the colonists who had led him astray; he pitied the Indigenous, who had been marked out for extermination. “Men so brave,” he said in a dying voice, “who have rendered France so many services, and could have rendered her so many more, deserved a better fate.” He asked heaven to pardon him the crimes that colonial perfidy had made him commit against liberty, and he died in the arms of Colonel Bachelu, chief engineer of the army, and of Doctor Peyre, at one o’clock in the morning of 1 November 1802.(a)