“You remember that Macaulay says, comparing Cromwell with Napoleon, that Cromwell showed the greater military genius, if we consider that he never saw an army till he was forty; while Napoleon was educated from a boy in the best military schools in Europe.  Cromwell manufactured his own army; Napoleon at the age of twenty-seven was placed at the head of the best troops Europe ever saw.  They were both successful; but, says Macaulay, with such disadvantages, the Englishman showed the greater genius.  Whether you allow the inference or not, you will at least grant that it is a fair mode of measurement.

“Apply it to Toussaint.  Cromwell never saw an army until he was forty; this man never saw a soldier till he was fifty.  Cromwell manufactured his own army—­out of what?  Englishmen—­the best blood in Europe.  Out of the middle class of Englishmen, the best blood of the island.  And with it he conquered what?  Englishmen—­their equals.  This man manufactured his army out of what?  Out of what you call the despicable race of Negroes, debased, demoralized by two hundred years of slavery, 100,000 of them imported into the island within four years, unable to speak a dialect intelligible even to each other.  Yet out of this mixed, and, as you say, despicable mass, he forged a thunderbolt, and hurled it at what?  At the proudest blood in Europe, the Spaniard, and sent him home conquered; at the most warlike blood in Europe, the French, and put them under his feet; at the pluckiest blood in Europe, the English, and they skulked home to Jamaica.”

The world is acquainted with the treacherous infamy inspired by the great Napoleon, that inveigled the Black Chieftain and liberator of his people on shipboard, the voyage to France, and his subsequent death—­starved!—­in the dungeon of the prison castle of St. Joux.

Whittier, the poet evangelist, whose inspired verse contributed much to the crystallization of the sentiment and spirit that finally doomed African slavery in America, thus referred to the heartless tragedy and the splendid Black who was its victim: 

     “Sleep calmy in thy dungeon-tomb,
       Beneath Besancon’s alien sky,
     Dark Haytien!—­for the time shall come,
       Yea, even now is nigh—­
     When, everywhere, thy name shall be
     Redeemed from color’s infamy;
     And men shall learn to speak of thee,
     As one of earth’s great spirits, born
     In servitude, and nursed in scorn,
     Casting aside the weary weight
     And fetters of its low estate,
     In that strong majesty of soul,
       Which knows no color, tongue or clime,
     Which still hath spurned the base control
       Of tyrants through all time!”

CHAPTER XI.

Hour of his nation’s peril.