Epilogue

Abstract

As the South Province fought the British and adjusted to its new Revolutionary situation, in 1797 Toussaint Louverture emerged as the single most powerful figure in Saint-Domingue. Rejecting the authority of France’s Third Civil Commission, the South maintained its autonomy even after the British evacuated in 1798. But as the external threat faded, the rivalry between Toussaint and André Rigaud produced the War of the South. Led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the far larger northern army defeated Rigaud in 1800, driving him and hundreds of other mixed-race officers into exile. The war was brutal, and Haitian tradition holds that Dessalines’s troops executed thousands of Southerners in reprisals after the fighting stopped.¹