Toussaint Louverture
Page 13
Toussaint's letter of August 25 seems designed to preempt Sonthonax's abolition of slavery, proclaimed four days later. On August 29, when Sonthonax issued his edict in a page of dense prose (written in the phonetic Creole of the period, a language spoken by most of the slaves but read by practically no one), Toussaint was ready with his own proclamation from Camp Turel, which in a succinct five sentences boiled his August 25 letter down to its essentials: / am Toussaint Louverture; perhaps my name has made itself known to you. I have undertaken vengeance. I want Liberty and Equality to reign in Saint Domingue. I am working to make that happen. Unite yourselves to us, brothers, and fight with us for the same cause.
Toussaint was no longer addressing the gens de couleur as a separate group; he was speaking to anyone and everyone in the colony. Let all who heard choose between Toussaint Louverture and the French commissioners who were trying to hypnotize them. For the moment the rift seemed absolute. But Toussaint must have kept a back door open toward Laveaux during the following months, for in the spring of 1794 it seemed that these two had a relationship to resume.
The when of Toussaint's change of allegiance is as mysterious as the why. In a report written well after the fact, Laveaux states that Toussaint had stopped fighting the republican French by April 6,1794. Elsewhere he says that the black leader “placed himself under the banner of the Republic on May 6th.”19 The apparent inconsistency is not so difficult to resolve. It is logical that Toussaint should have ceased hostilities against the French and opened a line of communication with Laveaux soon after the ambush on his party at Camp Barade in late March and his subsequent retaliation on Biassou's camp at Maronniere Plantation, and just as logical that he should have delayed any further attacks on the Spanish until he was completely ready to commit to Laveaux and the republic. White Spanish troops, after all, seldom ventured west of Saint Raphael, and Biassou, after the whipping he had just taken, had reason to keep his distance from Toussaint, who probably spent most of April between Marmelade and Ennery where neither the Spanish nor the other black leaders could learn much about what he was up to.
The determinedly hostile Kerverseau described Toussaint's shift to the republic this way:
It was then that he put into practice all the tactics of slander and intrigue to corrupt the troops, create an independent force for himself, drive the former chiefs from the quarters they occupied and form from their debris a considerable arrondissement for himself* It was then that he opened negotiations with the French and the English, and that he redoubled his devotional practices, assurances of loyalty and demonstrations of zeal to deceive the Spanish government, evading the orders that were contrary to his projects by stories of imaginary combats in which he had received dangerous wounds, and never ceasing to extract gold and arms for pretended expeditions which he never actually undertook, until finally, after a year of ruses and detours, unhappy with the English who did not put a high enough price on his betrayal, and aware that the president,† informed of his perfidy, was only waiting for the right moment to punish him, he commit-ted himself made a surprise attack on San Raphael, whence that same morning they had sent him, at his own request, provisions and ammunition, then marched on Gona'ives which he seized after slitting the throats of all the Whites who had come before him to implore his protection—and declared himself commander under the orders of the General Laveaux. Such were the exploits with which he signaled his entry under the flags of the Republic.20
Kerverseau never misses a chance to denigrate Toussaint, and this narrative should be discounted accordingly, but the events of this day (whatever its date) do reveal a man capable of absolute treachery, absolute ruthlessness, and absolute hypocrisy—all qualities Toussaint Louverture could claim, along with his more conventionally admirable ones. His requisition of supplies from the very people he meant to attack is classic.
Documents show that black auxiliaries attacked Gonai'ves on April 29, but it is unclear whether this is the moment when Toussaint took control of the port—other accounts give the date of his action as May 4 or May 6. The last date is implausible, as Laveaux's May 5 letter says that Toussaint has already raised the republican flag at Gonai'ves. A contemporary observer, Pelage-Marie Duboys, claims that Laveaux had discussed Toussaint's capture of Gona'ives in advance (with an eye toward using Toussaint's presence there to counterbalance the influence of Villatte, the mulatto commander at Le Cap). By this account, Toussaint permitted the Spanish garrison led by Villanova to depart “with the honors of war,” while the civilian population suffered “the terrible fate of a place taken by force” once the garrison had withdrawn.21
Toussaint wrote a couple of letters of his own from Gona'ives on May 5. One was to the town's vicar (“I am most sincerely affected by the harsh necessity that compelled you to leave the House of our adorable creator. Having been unable to foresee such a disastrous event fills my soul with despair”). The other, addressed to “Messieurs the refugee inhabitants of Gonai'ves,” noted: “It is without a doubt painful for me to have been unable to foresee the unhappy events that have just transpired and have obliged you to leave your properties. Such regret can be felt by me alone. Be assured, Sirs, that I did not at all participate and that everything was done without my knowledge and consequently against my wishes. God, who knows our most secret thoughts and who sees all, is witness to the purity of my principles. They are not founded on barbarous ferocity that takes pleasure in shedding human blood. Come back, Sirs, come back to your homes. I swear before our divine Creator that I will do everything to keep you safe.”22
If there is any truth at all in Kerverseau's report of Toussaints involvement, it is fair to say thatToussaint did sometimes take a certain pleasure in shedding crocodile tears. Those “magnificent festivals” he had lately enjoyed at Gona'ives had evidently slipped his mind. The capture of Gonai'ves was a bloody affair: 500 fled to Saint Marc by boat, and 150 were reported slain. Kerverseau alleges a surprise attack on Saint Raphael, and oral tradition describes a massacre at Marmelade that took place either May 4 or May 6. Toussaints May 5 letter to the Gona'ives refugees ends with a cautionary postscript: “On second thought, I request that you do not return until after I have come back from Marmelade, for I am going up there today.”23 By one account of events at Marmelade, Toussaint attended mass with his Spanish superiors, taking the sacraments with his usual piety, then opened fire on them as soon as they had left the church.
Exactly what happened when can't be known for certain, but what had to happen to fulfill Toussaints program is plain. He needed to secure the whole Cordon de l'Ouest from Gona'ives all the way to Dondon, meaning that he had to purge all Spaniards and Spanish sympathizers from every post along that line. There's no doubt that he did just that, and did it thoroughly. White Spanish troops found at Dondon, Gros Morne, and Petite Riviere were slain on the spot. Toussaints reply to Laveaux on May 18 states calmly and confidently that “Gona'ives, Gros-Morne, the canton of Ennery, Marmelade, Plaisance, Dondon, l'Acul and all its dependencies including Limbe are under my orders, and I count four thousand men under arms in all these places.”24 Thanks to the drastic action he had just taken, Toussaint now had this “considerable arrondissement,” and a considerable army occupying it, to offer to the French republic—on a platter.
Sonthonax and Polverel wrote to Toussaint to congratulate him on joining their cause. ButToussaint had switched sides too late to bail them out of their immediate predicament. On May 19, the British, encouraged by a reinforcement of nearly two thousand fresh troops, launched a full-scale assault on Port-au-Prince, supported by bombardment from ships on the bay, and forced the commissioners to abandon the town. Sonthonax and Polverel made their way to Jacmel on the southern coast, where on June 8, they hailed L'Esperance, the French ship which, with a weirdly bittersweet irony, brought not only the official news of the National Convention's abolition of slavery but also orders that he and Polverel return to France forthwith, to face charges of misconduct and misgovernance of the c
olony. As the Terror still ruled in France, such accusations strongly implied a swift trip to the guillotine.
The two commissioners wrote a batch of letters to their subordinates, including Generals Laveaux and Rigaud, then embarked on LEsperance as deportees. No replacements for the commission had been sent from France. Before departing, Sonthonax gave the symbols of his authority—a medal and ceremonial sash—to Dieudonne, a black who had taken over Halaou's band after the latter was killed in a contretemps with a mulatto faction. Though his authority to do so was doubtful at this point, Sonthonax formally invested Dieudonne with all the powers he was surrendering as representative of France.
Upon the departure of the commissioners, General Laveaux became the senior French official in the colony. Perhaps Toussaint preferred it that way—he had early marked Sonthonax as a rival. His relationship with Laveaux waxed from the guarded respect of their first correspondence to a genuinely affectionate friendship and partnership. Between 1794 and 1798 Toussaint sent a ream of letters to Laveaux. He spoke standard French as well as Creole, but his spelling was purely phonetic, so he dictated his correspondence to several different secretaries, always reviewing the drafts with great care to make sure that his thoughts were exactly expressed. The letters to Laveaux amount to the largest body of Toussaint's writing that survives.
From the moment that he announced his shift to the republican side, Toussaint was exposed to attack on two fronts—or at least from two directions, as coherent fronts were hard to identify on Saint Domingue's difficult, mountainous terrain—from the English to the west at Saint Marc and from the Spanish and their remaining auxiliaries in the eastern mountains and the valley of Grande Riviere. By some accounts (unlikely as it sounds), Toussaint kept up some sort of diplomatic contact with the Spanish command for about a month after declaring his allegiance to Laveaux and the republic—the Spanish may have hoped he'd have another change of heart and mind—but that did not prevent hostilities from Jean-François and Biassou. On June 15 Toussaint reported to Laveaux an attack by Jean-François which actually succeeded in taking Dondon, an attack on La Tannerie by Biassou the next day, followed on June 11 by a British assault on his post at Pont d'Ester, the next town north of Saint Marc and at that moment the southern frontier of Toussaint's “considerable arrondissement.”
“You see, Citizen General, how I am surrounded by enemies,” he wrote, “on all sides, the right and the left.”25 In the same letter, Toussaint nevertheless proposes an attack on the Spanish force at Borgne, albeit in very coy terms: “I pray you, should it be an effect of your goodness to send out your army around Thursday or Friday, to appear before Borgne to threaten it as if you would attack it, I am sure that, by God's permission, we will have Borgne and Camp Bertin both together, by the maneuvers I will be there to combine.”26 This first joint operation between Toussaint and Laveaux, supported by a movement of Villatte's men from Le Cap, was a smashing success, and had the strategic importance of reestablishing republican control between Le Cap and Port de Paix, and further securing the Northern Plain.
On July 7, Toussaint reports his recapture of Dondon and decisive routing of Jean-François: “he owed his salvation only to the thickness of the brush into which he desperately hurled his body, abandoning all his effects … He saved nothing but his shirt and his britches.”27 Retreating to Fort Dauphin, Jean-François exercised his rage and disap-pointment by slaughtering the eight hundred unarmed refugee grand blancs planters who had been waiting there for a chance to fight for the Spanish royalists and the recovery of their lands. The Spanish garrison colluded in the atrocity, or perhaps felt it was too weak to prevent it; whatever their motive, the Spanish troops shut themselves into the fort during the massacre and refused entry to the helpless French victims, practically all of whom were slain, along with their families. This horrendous and almost inexplicable event, together with Toussaint's reoc-cupation of Dondon, crippled the Spanish project in French Saint Domingue, though Toussaint waited several weeks to deliver the coup de grace.
In the same letter, Toussaint told Laveaux that he had just received word of Sonthonax and Polverel's departure and of the convention's abolition of slavery: “It is very consoling news to all friends of humanity,” he wrote, “and I hope that in the future all will find themselves the better for it.”28 The definitive news of abolition inspired him to take much more vigorous action against the Spanish than he had done previously. The routing of Jean-François from Dondon meant that Toussaint was no longer hedging his bets: all pretense that he might still serve Spain was abandoned. Concerning the massacre at Fort Dauphin, Toussaint wrote to Laveaux on July 19 with an elegant simplicity: “General, you may count on my humane sentiments; I have always had a horror of those chiefs who love to spill blood; my religion forbids me to do it, and I follow its principles.”29 This line has a much stronger ring of sincerity than the rococo phrasing of the letters Toussaint sent to the survivors of his attack on Gonai'ves.
Both Laveaux and Toussaint wanted very much to capture the town of Saint Marc, the strategic key to control of the Artibonite Plain, immediately south of Toussaint's forward post at Pont d'Ester. Since his days in the Spanish service, Toussaint had recognized the British commander there, Lieutenant Colonel Brisbane, as an extremely dangerous adversary. To dispose of him, he tried a combination of force and guile. Brisbane, who had observed Toussaint's activities with the same acute interest with which Toussaint watched his, believed that the black leader was mainly out for himself and perhaps could be purchased for the British cause. Toussaint, hoping to lure Brisbane to Gonai'ves where he could be captured, showed himself receptive to these overtures. The negotiations also gave him a chance to secretly court the mulattoes of Saint Marc and surrounding areas, who since the National Convention's abolition of slavery were cultivating a greater sympathy for the republic.
Brisbane would not put his head in the trap, but in the first week of September Toussaint did manage to lure him in the direction of Petite Riviere, with a feigned offer by the chiefs of that town to turn it over to the British. One purpose of this ruse was to facilitate the defection of Morin, Brisbane's colored aide-de-camp, who led three hundred men out of Saint Marc to join Toussaint's subordinate Christophe Mornet on September 3. The next day, with Brisbane still absent, Toussaint launched a lightning strike on Saint Marc, which then was not well fortified. He overran an exterior camp, whose officer, mysteriously, believed that Toussaint had come to negotiate a switch to the British side. Morin had conspired with colored men still inside Saint Marc to open the gates to Toussaint's army, which briefly took control of the town. But a British frigate sailed down from Mole to bombard Toussaint's men from the harbor, and Brisbane rushed back in the nick of time to recapture the place by land.
Toussaint eluded Brisbane's column and with forty dragoons rode full-tilt up the Artibonite River to capture Verrettes, a key post in the region whence Brisbane had just been hastily recalled. In this maneuver he was aided by Blanc Cassenave, mulatto commander of a unit in the Artibonite area called the Bare-Naked Congos, who had offered his allegiance to Toussaint at Gonai'ves in 1793. With camps at Verrettes, and north of the Artibonite River at Marchand and Petite Riviere (where the British had begun building a fort on a hill called La Crete a Pierrot), Toussaint could control the passes into the Cahos mountains, an area as important to his strategy as the Cordon de l'Ouest. He could also threaten to isolate Saint Marc, where Brisbane was now hastily erecting more serious fortifications and launching an abortive sea attack on Gonai'ves.
Laveaux believed Saint Marc was tottering and might easily fall. Before he sent Toussaint to attack the town again, he tried to soften the target by sending a proclamation to Saint Marc's citizens on Septem-ber 12, 1794, urging upon the gens de couleur this point: “If you have had the courage to fight for those rights which alone distinguish man from the animals, then do have the generosity to recognize the beneficent decree which delivers your brothers from the irons that held them in slavery
'30 Although there was at this time a significant movement of anciens libres away from their alliances with the grands blancs and the British, Laveaux's missive had no apparent effect in Saint Marc. Toussaint proceeded to attack, deprived of any advantage of surprise, since Laveaux's proclamation had announced the planned assault—but he did succeed in capturing two forts on the heights above the town. Brisbane was shaken, but held out until he received reinforcements from Lapointe, a mulatto who commanded Arcahaye for the British, on September 18. Three days later, Toussaint gave up his attack on Saint Marc, after fifteen days of continuous fighting.
At the same time, Jean-François was gathering men for a fresh attempt on the eastern end of the Cordon de l'Ouest. On October 4 Toussaint reported his loss of several posts along the Artibonite River east of Saint Marc, which he attributed to “the perfidy of the colored men of that area.'31 “Saint Marc would now be ours,” he went on, “if I had not had the misfortune to hurt my hand while mounting a cannon on a carriage. If I had been able to fight at the head of my troops according to my custom, Saint Marc would not have held out an hour, or I would have fallen, one or the other.'32 Instead Toussaint, nursing a painfully crushed hand, had to send his lieutenants Morin, Guy, and Blanc Cassenave into the fray in his place. The failure of the attack was assured by “the terrible treachery of the hommes de couleur who abandoned me to join our enemies.'33 In fact, three hundred mulattoes had been executed by the British in the wake of Toussaint's September 4 attack, and the survivors were doubtless discouraged from further collaboration with the French republic, at least for the time being. On top of that, Toussaint had run out of ammunition; such shortages would become one of his most chronic complaints to Laveaux. “The first time I attacked Saint Marc it was scarcely fortified at all,” he concluded, somewhat bitterly. “At present it is very well bulwarked; its own ruins serve as its ramparts.34