Cultivators treated surrender as a cease-fire pending the deadly disease season
Evidence
According to Lacroix, the “spirit” among the cultivators was also still rebellious, and they said that their “submission” was in fact only a cease-fire until the month of August, when many had predicted that the onset of disease would lead to the “annihilation of the entire European army sent to Saint-Domingue.” Leclerc would later write that Louverture had surrendered only because Christophe and Dessalines told him that they were no longer willing to fight the French, and in the meantime he was “trying to organize an insurrection among the cultivators in order to make them rise up as a mass.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 978
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The prediction of August disease annihilation ties the narrative arc to the environmental/disease factor that will later break Leclerc’s army.