Amer Rev and Rochambeau

As we all know the French sent and army and navy to the colonies in support of our revolution; their biggest contribution has always been seen as the victory at Yorktown. A French general Rochambeau was with GW at Yorktown in 1781. No other mention is made of him after this date. In 1802 a French general Rochambeau was in Haiti attempting to defeat Toussaint L'Overture-Breda was his original last name-in the slave uprising that occurred there. This source has very negative things to say about Rochambeau. Like, "sadistic" and he "drowned so many people in the Bay of LeCap that for many a long day the people of the district would not eat fish", or "he brought 1500 dogs to hunt down the Blacks", or he held a special festival where the audience "watched dogs rip apart a Black man tied to a stake". It is also noted that the French in general "burned alive, hanged, drowned, tortured and started their old habit of burying Blacks up to their necks near nests of insects", and all this was "policy". The source also says that the ex-slaves were not nearly as destructive as the French before them. (This source is very left-wing and the Rochambeau at issue may be two different people, however, the article about the Haitian revolution was very informative. The author of the article is using as his source a 1938 book by C.L.R. James entitled The Black Jacobins and is under the magazine section "classics of Marxism")

(Source: "The Black Jacobins by Ashley Smith in the International Socialist Review from Jan/Feb of 2009).