Les Cayes. Its port opened to foreign trade

The news arriving from the mother country announced an impending rupture between France and England; commerce was sending few ships to the colony; General Rochambeau was forced to open the port of Les Cayes to foreign trade (21 May 1803). On the 28th of the same month he published in the colony the laws of the Civil Code, which had by that date been officially received there. From 1790 a great disturbance had begun to enter colonial legislation. Amid the struggles of the parties, the laws were put into practice only according to the interests of those parties. At the beginning of the revolution, when the white pompons, or royalists, dominated in a district, they trampled underfoot the laws promulgated by the Constituent and the Legislative Assemblies and invoked the royal ordinances of the old regime. When the petits blancs, or republicans, dominated, they put the laws of the revolution into force, while rejecting their provisions favorable to the men of color and the Black people. When the Black people and the men of color prevailed over the colonial party and the petits blancs, they restored the revolutionary laws. Later, under the Convention, the civil commissioners Polvérel and Sonthonax governed the colony by decrees that circumstances dictated. Rigaud in the South, and Toussaint in the North and the Artibonite, then governed by ordinances dictated by the interests of caste. Only after the fall of Rigaud, and after the submission of the eastern part, did the central assembly convoked by Toussaint endow the colony with a uniform code. After Toussaint’s fall, Leclerc kept in force all those of the former governor’s laws that were not contrary to the ordinances issuing from the new circumstances. The laws of the Civil Code that Rochambeau was now having published abrogated all earlier laws of the same nature.