At this point, the horizon in St. Domingo is clear and serene; no man can see signs of a coming tornado. Only in the heart of Toussaint Louverture does the mercury tremble, indicating “change.” The convulsions which had shaken Europe are spent. Napoleon is the master of France, and the treaty of Amiens (1801) has secured a treacherous peace. Toussaint watched, with feverish solicitude, the movements of Napoleon. Dull flashes streaked the eastern horizon, and muttered threats hardly moved the air. Repeatedly he wrote to Napoleon, once addressing him as “The first of the blacks to the first of the whites”—repeatedly he urged his own loyalty, and that of his race, to France. Napoleon’s vanity was touched—Toussaint was talked about in Europe—in Paris.[54] He was another star—a black Napoleon! The Corsican stomach was quick. What cared Napoleon, for France? What cared he for a St. Domingo negro? Napoleon Buonaparte was Napoleon’s god, and him he worshiped. He received Toussaint’s suggestions and requests with contempt. This neglect moved Toussaint more than all other things; for, in the distance, Napoleon seemed to him a magnanimous and god-descended hero, a lover of liberty—as, indeed, at that time he did to many men in France—as he does to one Abbott at the present time. If we look for weakness in Louverture, we shall find it here; he trusted France, he trusted Napoleon, and he trusted the planters of St. Domingo. He believed that, by his justice and magnanimity to them, he could move them from their insane purpose of reënslaving the blacks. If he had brayed them in mortars he could not have got it out of them. Knowing the experience, education, resources, and power of the whites, and the ignorance and weakness of the blacks, he sought support in his work from the whites. He, in a degree, dimmed the prestige of his greatness, in the eyes of the blacks, by concessions made to the whites. So desirous was he of the confidence of the whites, and of a character for strict impartiality, that when the blacks in General Moyse’s district, in their sensitive fears of reënslavement, rose and murdered some of the whites, and were not hindered by General Moyse, he had him court-martialled, and allowed him to be shot, and he a superb officer and his own nephew. He disarmed his troops and sent them back to the labors of agriculture. But all these availed nothing.