to establish the new regime.
The administration of the colony by these functionaries was a travesty.
Most of the surviving whites emigrated to Cuba and the American continent,
carrying such of their slaves as they could command. The free colored
people, who at first welcomed the commissioners, unexpectedly turned
against them because of a decree of August 29, 1793, abolishing slavery.

At this juncture Great Britain, then at war with the French Republic,
intervened by sending an army to capture the colony. Most of the colored
freemen and the remaining whites rallied to the flag of these invaders; but
the slaves, now commanded by the famous Toussaint L'Ouverture, resisted
them effectually, while yellow fever decimated their ranks and paralyzed
their energies. By 1795 the two colored elements, the mulattoes who had
improvised a government on a slaveholding basis in the south, and the
negroes who dominated the north, each had the other alone as an active
enemy; and by the close of the century the mulattoes were either destroyed
or driven into exile; and Toussaint, while still acknowledging a nominal
allegiance to France, was virtual monarch of San Domingo. The peace of
Amiens at length permitted Bonaparte to send an army against the "Black
Napoleon." Toussaint soon capitulated, and in violation of the amnesty
granted him was sent to his death in a French dungeon. But pestilence again
aided the blacks, and the war was still raging when the breach of the peace
in Europe brought a British squadron to blockade and capture the remnant
of the French army. The new black leader, Dessalines, now proclaimed the
colony's independence, renaming it Hayti, and in 1804 he crowned himself
emperor. In the following year any further conflict with the local whites
was obviated by the systematic massacre of their small residue. In the
other French islands the developments, while on a much smaller scale, were
analogous.[46]

[Footnote 46: T. Lothrop Stoddard, _The French Revolution in San Domingo_
(Boston, 1914).]

In the Northern colonies the only signal disturbances were those of 1712
and 1741 at New York, both of which were more notable for the frenzy of
the public than for the formidableness of the menace. Anxiety had been
recurrent among the whites, particularly since the founding of a mission
school by Elias Neau in 1704 as an agent of the Society for the Propagation
of the Gospel. The plot was brewed by some Coromantee and Paw Paw negr