General André Rigaud

Rigaud was born on 17 January 1761 in Les Cayes, Saint-Domingue, to André Rigaud, a wealthy French planter, and Rose Bossy Depa, a slave woman. His father acknowledged the mixed-race (mulatto) boy as his at a young age and sent him to Bordeaux, where he was trained as a goldsmith.

Rigaud was known to wear a brown-haired wig with straight hair to resemble a white man as closely as possible.

After returning to Saint-Domingue from France, Rigaud became active in politics. He was a successor to Vincent Ogé and Julien Raimond as a champion of the interests of free people of color in Saint-Domingue, as colonial Haïti was known.

Rigaud's soldiers included blacks and whites.[6]

In the South and the West, from 1793 to 1798, Rigaud aided in Toussaint Louverture's decision to re-establish the plantation economy (albeit with paid labor as opposed to slave labor).Although Rigaud respected Louverture, the leading general of the former black slaves of the North and his superior rank in the French Revolutionary Army, he did not want to concede power in the South to him.

Rigaud continued to believe in Saint-Domingue's race-based caste system, which put mulattoes just below whites and left blacks at the bottom, a belief that put him at odds with Toussaint. That led to the bitter "War of Knives" (La Guerre des Couteaux) in June 1799, when Toussaint's army invaded Rigaud's territory.

In 1800, Rigaud left Saint-Domingue for France after his defeat by Toussaint.

Rigaud returned to Saint-Domingue in 1802 with the expedition of General Charles Leclerc, Napoleon Bonaparte's brother-in-law, who was sent to unseat Toussaint and re-establish French colonial rule and slavery in Saint-Domingue.