Peace in Europe had made Bonaparte turn his attention to another quarter of the world. In 1801, Spain, by treaty, had handed back to France the immense territory of Louisiana, which had been ceded to Spain by France in 1763. It stretched from the Rio del Norte on the south to the boundaries of Canada on the north. The great dictator now dreamed of restoring the old colonial power of France in America. What would be easier than to send an army by the Mississippi and Ohio to reach, by that route, Lake Erie and the Niagara peninsula, while a fleet might ascend the St. Lawrence, where he fondly imagined the French population would {39} easily be seduced from their allegiance to Great Britain? The first step he took in the scheme was to plan an expedition to occupy the island of St. Domingo, which he intended to make a rendezvous for the French navy. The story of this expedition is an interesting one, and as it has a bearing on the events that happened afterwards in Canada, it may be as well to glance at it. The eastern part of the island of St. Domingo belonged to France, the western to Spain. Before the French Revolution it contained a population of six hundred thousand, over half a million being black slaves, while French planters and officials, with their families, numbered about fifty thousand, and mulattoes made up the remainder. The trade with it was very extensive. Its combined exports and imports were valued at one hundred and forty million dollars, while seven hundred ocean vessels with eighty thousand seamen were employed in the coffee, sugar, and indigo trade between France and the West Indies. After the revolution the white population remained royalist, while the mulattoes were republican. This involved the island in civil war, which led to a general rising of the negroes and a massacre of the whites in 1791. Slavery was then abolished in the French part by order of the national assembly. Then Spain attempted the conquest of the whole of the island, but the Spaniards were defeated and driven out of the country. Toussaint L'Ouverture, the grandson of a negro chief, {40} joined the forces of the French republic, and obtained the rank of general in 1798. He was a man of the Napoleon type, never resting, of boundless ambition and energy, and possessing also the same love of display--"The gilded African," as the first consul called him, while others named him "The Bonaparte of the Antilles."