Toussaint Louverture

by Madison Smartt Bell

  From August 1793 onward, it was clear that he would be fighting to establish permanent liberty for all the former slaves of Saint Domingue. Who would be his allies in the struggle was a much more ambiguous question.

  The survivors among the insurrection's first leaders, Jean-François and Biassou, had adorned themselves with extravagant titles (“grand admiral” or “generalissimo”), while Toussaint veiled himself with the description “general doctor.” The Spanish colonial military installed Jean-François and Biassou as generals, while Toussaint became a com-paratively humble marechal du camp. At war with France in Europe, Spain hoped to reconquer French Saint Domingue with its newly engaged black auxiliaries: there were nowhere near enough white troops in Spanish Santo Domingo for any such undertaking. But Generals Jean-François and Biassou preferred to relax on what laurels they had been able to win earlier. Practically all the active campaigning was done by Toussaint, whose successes on the battlefield began to make a real impression.

  Toussaint was angling for control of the Cordon de l'Ouest—the string of posts through the mountain range from Dondon in the interior to the western seaport of Gonaives which divided Saint Domingue's Northern Department from the rest of the colony. He had a personal interest in the region, for he and his wife owned large plantations in the canton of Ennery, an area sheltered by the mountains just northeast of Gonaives. These were important establishments from the military point of view as well, since Ennery offered the first line of retreat if Gonaives, exposed on the coast, should prove untenable.

  Toussaint also established a headquarters at Marmelade, a village centrally located between Ennery and Dondon. In the early summer of 1793, he took Marmelade from Colonel Vernet, a mulatto who commanded for the French republicans there. Vernet retreated to Pilboreau Plantation on the heights above Ennery, a major crossroads, where he had the ill luck to encounter Commissioner Polverel, who was hastening back to Le Cap from Port-au-Prince. Trouble with Galbaud was in the wind, so maybe Polverel was suffering from stress when he asked Vernet how many men he had brought back from his defeat; when Vernet told him two hundred, Polverel snapped, “Let's say two hundred cowards.”4 At that, Vernet took his two hundred men to join Toussaint, who eventually made him one of his most important commanders, and also adopted him as a nephew.

  Toussaints hard-fought engagements with Laveaux in the summer of 1793 were meant to protect the approaches from the Northern Plain to Dondon, at Morne Pelee and LaTannerie. Laveaux had won those battles, and his men occupied both La Tannerie and Dondon. Toward the end of June, a member of the French republican garrison at Dondon reported hearing two days' worth of lively cannon fire from the direction of Le Cap; he could also see the “inflamed air” from the burning of the colony's most beautiful city. He was witnessing from afar the outcome of I'ajfaire Galbaud, as Le Cap was sacked and burned by rebel slaves on June 22,1793. At the same time, the Dondon garrison received an order from Galbaud to arrest Sonthonax and Polverel if they should pass through Dondon, but by then it was not the commissioners but Galbaud himself who was on the run, and the French soldiers at Dondon were in no position to do anything but try to get themselves out of what had suddenly become a frightening predicament.

  They knew that the camp at La Tannerie had recently (and in their view treacherously) been surrendered to Toussaint. This development cut off their direct line of retreat to Le Cap, and also severed their lines of supply. Anticipating that the rebel slaves would soon make an attempt on Dondon, now that La Tannerie was in their hands, the French decided to try to escape by another route. Furnished with three and a half pounds of bread and a bottle of raw cane alcohol for each man, they set out in the direction of Marmelade, unaware that it too was occupied byToussaint. Perhaps the ratio of alcohol to food in their supplies was poorly calculated, j udging by how they fared along the way.

  The way from Dondon to Marmelade goes over dizzying mountain peaks which in those days were covered with jungle. Toussaint, well aware of his enemy's movement, occupied Dondon as soon as the French had left it and laid an ambush for the French troops between Dondon and Camp Perly. Soon the French column encountered another group of rebel blacks ahead and was forced to a halt. The French commander, Monsieur de Brandicourt, ordered a cannon brought to the fore and was making ready to fire on the enemy when several voices cried out from the bush, urging him to come and parley with General Toussaint, to assure proper treatment for several sick men which the French soldiers, in the haste of their retreat, had left behind in Dondon.

  With two companions, Brandicourt set out for the meeting, guided by “an officer of the brigands,” and leaving the column in charge of a subordinate, Pacot. One of the men with Brandicourt grew mistrustful, and said that Toussaint ought to meet them halfway. But their guide pointed to a large gathering of blacks not far ahead, saying, “It's there that Toussaint is waiting for you.”

  “That's no more than a step away,” Brandicourt said, shrugging off the warning. A misstep as it proved: when the three men reached the appointed spot they were seized, bound, and mocked by members of their own camp who had deserted to join Toussaint the previous night. Presently Toussaint himself appeared and asked that Brandicourt write an order for Pacot to surrender his surrounded troops. Brandicourt, seething with indignation, wrote that Pacot should follow “the most prudent course.” At that, Toussaint grew annoyed and insisted that Brandicourt write a direct order for surrender. As one of his two fellow prisoners reported, Brandicourt, “believing that Pacot would take no step on an order dictated by violence, had the pusillanimity to do it.”5

  So runs the eyewitness account set down by the soldier captured with Brandicourt. Isaac Louvertures version (written many years later and at second hand) casts Toussaint in a more heroic light: rather than being taken by deceit, Brandicourt is captured fair and square by Toussaint's lieutenant and adopted nephew Charles Belair. Toussaint addresses Brandicourt in almost lyrical terms: “I admire your courage all too much … but I admire your humanity still more; as all retreat for your troops is cut off, you will give the order to avoid the effusion of blood.”6

  Regardless of their difference in flavor, the two accounts agree on the result. Pacot surrendered without a shot. When Toussaint marched the French column into his camp, his own six hundred men had to steel themselves to stand their ground, for the captured force was more than twice the size of theirs: some fifteen hundred strong.

  This bloodless victory put Toussaint back in control of the eastern end of the Cordon de l'Ouest, restoring the line from Marmelade to Dondon and isolating the Northern Plain from the rest of the colony. It increased Toussaint's value in the eyes of his Spanish superior, Mafias, Marquis d'Hermona, who well appreciated both the strategic value and the efficiency of the coup. And it vastly improved the morale of Toussaint's men. At the time he captured Brandicourt, Toussaint had six hundred well-equipped and well-trained troops in his personal force (along with about the same number of poorly armed and untrained men from the area of Dondon and Grande Riviere), but more were joining daily.

  The maneuver also gained him a few more French officers. Those of royalist leanings, especially, could make themselves more comfortable in Toussaint's command than in the republican camp of Laveaux, and Toussaint found them very useful for shaping the growing number of his followers into an organized and disciplined army. In the end, Brandicourt himself went over to the Spanish side. Commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel interpreted his forced surrender as an act of premeditated treachery. There had been other events of that kind; Brandicourt's predecessor at Dondon, Monsieur de Nully, had willingly gone over to the Spanish not long before, and Captain de La Feuillee had done the same at Ouanaminthe.

  The Cordon de l'Ouest protected the Spanish Central Plateau in the interior, including the towns of Saint Raphael and Saint Michel. In the fall of 1791, Toussaint had sent his wife and sons into this area, where they would be safe from the anarchy spreading all over the Northern Plain. Probably it was du
ring this period that he acquired the livestock ranchland he later told the interrogator Caffarelli that he owned. In the same 1793 campaign which captured Marmelade and Dondon, Toussaint also secured the region of Ennery and made a triumphal entry into GonaiVes, where the inhabitants treated him to “magnificent festivals,” though a Spanish colonel remained at least nominally in command there.7 In response to all these piercing advances, Commissioner Polverel is supposed to have exclaimed, “What! This man makes an Opening everywhere”8 —one of the origins proposed for the name Louverture.

  By 1793, the Saint Michel region was also hosting numerous French emigres whom the Spanish authorities were encouraging to return there. It was one of these, a Monsieur Laplace, who wrote the letter complaining about Toussaint's “useless little posts” along the Cordon de l'Ouest and also accused him of plotting to “assassinate the whites.” In fact, Toussaint preferred, during this period as throughout his whole career, to win whenever possible through diplomacy rather than force of arms. Although many of his positions in the Cordon de l'Ouest were challenged by Chanlatte, among others, Toussaint proved more capable than anyone else of providing real security to inhabitants of the region. His claim to “receive everyone with humanity” and to work with “gentleness” rather than violence is couched, interestingly, in terms like those of charismatic Christianity—and is also justified by his actions. In less than a year Toussaint expanded his personal command from a few hundred to several thousand increasingly well disciplined troops, and he continued to pick up stray French officers who helped him train his force of nouveaux libres. His men were better and better equipped, mainly thanks to Toussaints successes in capturing arms and ammunition from the enemy. Both white and free colored landowners in the region found a genuinely humane reception if they were willing to offer genuine loyalty to him.

  Still, Toussaint was not universally popular. Laplace, who styled himself “the deputy of the French emigres residing at Saint Michel, all planters and land-owners of the parishes of Gona'ives, of Ennery, Plaisance, Marmelade and Dondon,” complained to the Spanish governor that Toussaint “preaches disobedience” and “kidnaps and arms all the slaves from their plantations, telling these wretches that they will be free if they want to assassinate the whites.” In his conclusion, Laplace declaims “we demand that the head of the guilty party fall.”9 This letter is dated April 4, 1794—a moment when as hindsight shows, Toussaints loyalty to his Spanish commanders really had become rather questionable.

  Though the Spanish commanders thought well of Toussaints character and of his abilities in the field, his route to higher rank in their service was blocked by the presence of Biassou and Jean-François. Biassou, who had nominally been Toussaints direct superior in 1791, and who still outranked him in the Spanish service, camped on La Riviere Plantation in the canton of Ennery and began to lay claim to positions Toussaint had taken in that area of the Cordon de l'Ouest— which Toussaint certainly meant to retain as part of his own strategic power base. Quarreling between the black leaders broke down into skirmishing.

  Meanwhile, it was becoming reasonably clear from the actions of the Spanish, as opposed to lukewarm declarations they had made to the contrary, that they meant to reestablish slavery in French Saint Domingue, in concert with the French emigres they had invited to return. Most of the latter (whom Laplace represented) were holed up in Fort Dauphin, the nearest port to the Spanish border on the north Atlantic coast. Their properties were peppered all over the interior, as Laplace described them, but for the moment the Spanish military would not support their return to their lands. About eight hundred of these French colonists eventually accumulated at Fort Dauphin, many of them returning from their flight to the United States with Galbaud's fleet. They were both useless and virtually helpless there, as the black leaders would not allow their former masters to be armed.

  However, both Jean-François and Biassou had begun actively engaging in the slave trade themselves. They were rounding up women and children, as well as some insubordinate men—mauvais sujets— from their own ranks and selling them off to Spanish slave traders. A letter from Jean-François to a Spanish agent named Tabert craves permission to sell off some “very bad characters” in these terms: “not having the heart to destroy them, we have recourse to your good heart to ask you to transport them out of the country. We prefer to sell them for the profit of the king.”10 As Toussaint's own fighting force grew from hundreds into thousands, threatening the status of Jean-François and Biassou more and more, these two began kidnapping the families of men who joined Toussaint to sell them as slaves, and Toussaint's men themselves if they could catch them. No doubt this practice influenced Toussaint in proclaiming his own commitment to general liberty and in actually fighting for it more vigorously than before.

  Toussaint's immediate Spanish superior, the Marquis d'Hermona, admired him to the point of declaring, “If God were to descend to earth, he could inhabit no purer heart than that of Toussaint Louverture.”11 D'Hermona was undoubtedly taken with the apparent fervor of Toussaint's Catholic devotions (though some more cynical observers claimed that Toussaint was actually plotting and scheming when he appeared to be praying). Jean-François and Biassou, as well as the French colonists represented by Laplace, were constantly trying to damage Toussaint's reputation with the Spanish governor, Don Garcia y Moreno. When d'Hermona was replaced by Juan de Lleonhart, Toussaint's fortunes among the Spanish took a turn for the worse. Moyse, his adoptive nephew and already one of his most important lieutenants, was arrested. His wife and three sons were briefly held as hostages—Toussaint could no longer be confident that they would be safe in the Spanish camp.

  In late March 1794, an ambush organized by either Jean-François or Biassou or both of them took the life of Toussaint's younger brother, Pierre, who was shot from his horse at Camp Barade, at the head of the Ravine a Couleuvre a few miles southeast of Gonai'ves. Toussaint, who was present, had a narrow escape. According to Isaac's memoir, Toussaint immediately pressed on from Barade to Saint Raphael, arriving there with four hundred horsemen and in such a thunder that Don Lleonhart thought the town was being taken by the enemy. However, Toussaint did no more that day than register a bitter complaint about the attempts of the other black leaders against him. Returning along the Cordon de l'Ouest toward Marmelade, he raided Biassou's camp at La Maronniere Plantation, with such success that Biassou had to flee into the bush bare-legged, abandoning his horses, carriage, and a jeweled watch and snuffbox. Later Toussaint returned these personal effects to him with his (presumably sardonic) compliments.

  Laplace, who apparently sometimes operated as Biassou's secretary as well as spokesman of the French emigres, includes Toussaint's attack on Biassou into the complaint to Don Garcia dated April 4. As of this date, Toussaint's situation vis-a-vis both his former black colleagues and the Spanish command would seem to have become intolerable, but he remained in Spanish service, at least technically, for another month.

  By then the Spanish advance into French Saint Domingue had more or less stalled, thanks in part to dissension among the black auxiliaries. The Spanish did control Mirebalais in the interior and Fort Dauphin on the north coast. On the other side of Le Cap from Fort Dauphin, the Spanish held a pocket of territory around Borgne, where (coincidentally or not) Toussaint had been involved in various land transactions before the 1791 rising. The port of Gonai'ves at the western extremity of the Cordon de l'Ouest was occupied by a small garrison of white Spanish troops, but Toussaint's lengthening shadow lay over that town. Given the chilled relations between Toussaint and the Spanish command, by April 1794 the whole length of the Cordon de l'Ouest had begun to look less like Spanish territory and more like Toussaint's personal fief.

  Le Cap itself and its surrounding area were held for the French republic by the hommes de couleur whom Sonthonax had installed in the government and military, chief among them the mulatto General Villatte. But Toussaint almost certainly had a line of communication open to Borgne, via L
imbe and Port Margot, and both Toussaint and Biassou were sometimes reported to have camped at Port Francais (near today's cruise ship destination Labadie Beach), just over the mountain from the town of Le Cap, which was thus quite tightly encircled.

  A narrow road running from Labadie through the pass over Morne du Cap to the area of the Providence Hospital and the uppermost military parade ground of Le Cap allowed the black rebels to threaten the town from that direction, as well as from the southern approach, where Biassou had carried out his successful raid on l'Hopital des Peres in January 1792. If they entered from the pass over Morne du Cap, the rebels would have had access to the ravine which runs from the rear of the Providence Hospital all the way down the slope to the waterfront barracks and battery, through which they could have infiltrated the whole town. Toussaint, however, seemed not to want Le Cap to be overrun by rebels at this time, for he sometimes secretly warned Villatte of planned assaults.

  A year before, in April 1793, the royalist colonists of Saint Domingue's Western Department had hoped for an English invasion to save them from the Jacobin commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel. On September 19, less than a month after Sonthonax's unilateral abolition of slavery, a British force landed at Jeremie on the southwest peninsula and was welcomed by French royalist colonists organized as the Confederation of the Grande Anse. Three days later, Major O'Farrel of the French army's Dillon Regiment surrendered Mole Saint-Nicolas, a key port at the end of the northwest peninsula, to a single British ship. The Dillon Regiment, mostly composed of Irishmen, had been alienated by Sonthonax's promotion of mulattoes in the colonial military and warmly welcomed a change of allegiance. This event left the French republican general Laveaux more or less trapped at Port de Paix, on the north coast between the English at Mole and the Spanish auxiliaries at Borgne.