Toussaint Louverture

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Toussaint consoled himself for the failure at Saint Marc by whip-ping around 180 degrees to attack the Spanish and Jean-François. By October 21 Toussaint could send the much more cheerful report that he had driven the Spanish out of Saint Michel and Saint Raphael, capturing two officers and about fifty soldiers in the process. The towns were surrounded by horse and cattle ranches; Toussaint sent all the livestock into French Saint Domingue. “That operation accomplished,” he wrote, “I razed the two towns, so that the enemy could not make any attempt on them and so he will keep his distance from us.” In a very casual postscript he adds, “With the sabers of my cavalry I slew about ninety Spaniards—all those who in the end didn't want to surrender.”35

  This victory was a huge one, and hugely increased Toussaint's status with the French republicans. A white French general, Desfourneaux, had earlier failed in a campaign for the same objective. If there had been any lingering doubt, Toussaint's success decisively proved his value. As a Spanish officer, he had worn a crest of white feathers in his bicorne hat—an indication of royalist leanings. After this victory, Laveaux gave him a red plume, which Toussaint wore above the white ones ever after; his crest thus took on the colors of the revolution.

  Now it was safe for Laveaux to leave Port de Paix and tour the Cordon de l'Ouest; he and Toussaint met face-to-face at Dondon. En route the French general was deeply impressed by what Toussaint had done to restore security and even tranquillity to the region: “Many whites had returned to their plantations … Many white women, whose properties had been invaded by the English, expressed to us how much attention and help they had received from this astonishing man … The parish of Petite Riviere offers the satisfying picture of more than fifteen thousand cultivators returned, full of gratitude, to the Republic: whites, blacks, mulattoes, soldiers, field hands, landowners—all blessing the virtuous chief whose cares maintain order and peace among them.”36 Following this encounter, Laveaux installed his headquarters at Le Cap; Toussaint returned to the campaign against the British.

  Saint Marc remained a difficult thorn to pull from French republican flesh, and Brisbane was still a serious threat. Though his troops by now had more than a little training in the European style of warfare, Toussaint was too wary to risk them against the redcoats in the open country of the Artibonite plain. He returned to a guerrilla program of ambush and temporary retreat. Brisbane's offensive, according to the British observer Brian Edwards, was “like a vessel traversing the ocean—the waves yielded indeed for the moment but united again as the vessel passed.'37 Toussaint's various European opponents would make the same complaint through the end of the decade. In February 1795, Brisbane himself was slain in one of these ambushes.

  The fight for control of the posts on the south bank of the Artibonite gave Toussaint opportunity for some satisfying victories over grand blanc commanders in league with the British. He must have been practically cackling when, on August 31,1795, he reported the humiliating defeat of one of these, Dessources, who “jumped down from his horse and, with the debris of his army, buried himself in the brush, shouting ‘Sauve qui peut!’ … I scattered bodies over the road for a distance of more than a mile; my victory was most complete, and if the famous Dessources has the luck to make it back to Saint Marc it will be without cannon, without baggage, and finally as they say with neither drum nor trumpet.”38

  As these tactics rendered the British at Saint Marc more or less ineffectual, Toussaint was content to forgo another wholesale assault on the town. During this same period he flushed the remainder of Jean-François's men out of the valley of Grande Riviere and established control of Mirebalais, an important town in a fertile valley near the Spanish border, at the opposite end of the Cahos mountain range from Saint Marc. Mirebalais was an area where French planters, both white and colored, had managed to remain on their lands and sustain a defense, and because of its remoteness the town's allegiance seemed to depend on the sentiments of these inhabitants more than anything else. Toussaint's attack which razed Saint Raphael and Saint Michel had carried south toward Mirebalais, but local planters Despinville and Dubignuies encouraged the Spanish troops there to hold out; soon after the Spanish used Mirebalais as a platform for a counterattack on Toussaint's post at Verrettes, to the west along the Artibonite River. But then the locals decided to declare Mirebalais in favor of the French republic (at least temporarily). Toussaint undertook to secure these areas with a network of small camps like those with which he had created his first power base along the Cordon de l'Ouest; a letter of February 6 lists thirty-two of these.

  Toussaint's successes in the interior had deeply damaged the Spanish-sponsored black auxiliaries there. By the Treaty of Basel, signed on July 22, 1795, Spain and France had ended their conflict, and Spain had agreed to cede its colony in the eastern half of Hispaniola to France. However, the French in Saint Domingue were spread too thin to occupy the new territory, and most of the Spanish colonists stayed on because they had nowhere to go. Flouting the treaty, Jean-François continued to harass Toussaint in the region along the border where the two black leaders had once queasily shared power. Not until November could Toussaint write to Laveaux, with enormous relief, “Thanks be to God: Jean-François is going to leave.'39 Rumors that Jean-François might shift his allegiance to the British invaders had caused the French republican camp some anxiety, but instead he retired to Spain with full military honors, while Biassou went to Spanish Florida with a few hundred of his men. What was left of his and Jean-François's followers then joined forces with Toussaint. Curiously, many members of Jean-François's family declined to accompany him into retirement, but stayed in Saint Domingue once Toussaint assured them of “liberty and tranquility.” According toToussaint's account of the episode to Laveaux, these relatives of Jean-François “had a horror of his principles, which generally tended to harm his brothers, and to perpetuate slavery.”40

  Between 1794 and 1796, Toussaint began to display unmistakably the same acumen (and sometimes the same ruthlessness) in politics as on the field of battle. His admirers as well as his detractors cannot help but notice that his potential competitors tended to come to harm during these years—not only enemy warriors like Brisbane but also several of his republican brothers in arms. Since the summer of 1793, the mulatto commander Blanc Cassenave had voluntarily reported to Toussaint; popular with his mostly black troops, Cassenave had been successful in engagements with the British outside Saint Marc and had been an important partner in Toussaint's assaults on the town. He had captured the half-built British fort at La Crete a Pierrot above Petite Riviere— a point of importance to Toussaint's strategy in the region—and armed it with a couple of pieces of cannon. But relations between him and Toussaint broke down to the point that Toussaint had Cassenave arrested in January 1795. A long letter to Laveaux describes Blanc Cassenave as “an extremely abandoned, violent man,” accuses him of plotting against both Toussaint and Laveaux, and of stealing eighty pounds of ever-scarce gunpowder.

  Toussaint went on to accuse Blanc Cassenave of plotting to set up his own “arrondissement” in the Cahos mountains (where Toussaint had just recently extended his own reach), of keeping spoils captured from the enemy for himself instead of using them for the benefit of the troops, and of generally fomenting discord and rebellion, not only among the field workers of the area but also among the officer corps. (Cassenave briefly won over a couple of officers important to Toussaint: Guy and Christophe Mornet.) One of the differences between Cassenave and Louverture had to do with plantation work in the area: Toussaint had ordered that ground be prepared for planting; Cassenave persuaded the field hands that this labor was tantamount to the restoration of slavery.

  Cassenave was imprisoned at Gonai'ves. Before any trial could take place, Toussaint informed Laveaux, most silkily: “During his detention Blanc Cassenave was struck with a bilious choler which had all appearance of an unrestrainable rage; he was suffocated by it. Requiescat in pace. He is out of this world, we owe our th
anksgiving to God on his behalf. As for myself, General, in having him arrested I did nothing but my duty; zealously I always seize the occasion to serve the fatherland. I will fight ceaselessly against enemies within and without. This death of Blanc Cassenave demolishes all procedures against him, as his crime had no accomplices.”41

  With a similarly honeyed tongue, Toussaint addressed himself to Dieudonne, leader of what had been Halaou's band of maroons and nouveaux libres outside Leogane, who was suspected by both Toussaint and General Andre Rigaud of contemplating a shift of loyalty to the English in that region. Although Sonthonax had invested Dieudonne with his commissioner's medal and, in theory, his commissioner's powers as well, apparently the impression this gesture had made was fading. Rigaud, ‘who commanded for the French republic in the southern peninsula, ‘was trying diplomatic means to win the maroon leader to his side ‘when Toussaint's missive reached Dieudonne's camp.

  “Is it possible, my dear friend,” wrote Toussaint on February 12, 1796, “that at the moment ‘when France has triumphed over all the royalists and has recognized us as her children, by her beneficent decree of 9 Thermidor, that she accords us all our rights for ‘which we are fighting, that you would let yourself be deceived by our former tyrants, ‘who only use some of our unfortunate brothers to charge the rest of them with chains? For a time, the Spaniards hypnotized me in the same way, but I was not slow to recognize their rascality; I abandoned them and beat them well; I returned to my country ‘which received me ‘with open arms and was very ‘willing to recompense my services. I urge you, my dear brother, to follow my example. If some particular reasons* should hinder you from trusting the brigadier generals Rigaud and Beauvais, Governor Laveaux, who is the good father of us all, and in ‘whom our mother country has placed her confidence, should also deserve yours. I think that you ‘will not deny your confidence to me, ‘who am black like you, and ‘who assure you that I desire nothing more in the world than to see you happy, you and all your brothers.”42

  The letter goes on in this vein for quite some time; meanwhile, as Toussaint advised Laveaux soon after, the net effect of “your dispatches and mine” 43 was that a mutiny led by Dieudonne's lieutenant Laplume took Dieudonne prisoner and turned him over to Rigaud. However, instead of bringing Dieudonne's band of three thousand to Rigaud as expected, Laplume put it under the orders of Toussaint. With this more or less bloodless coup, Toussaint was able to extend the range of his command much further south than he had ever done before.

  Toussaint's reference to the “beneficent decree of 9 Thermidor” may have been a slip of his pen. In the context of his letter to Dieudonne the date of 16 Pluviose, when the French National Convention had abolished slavery, would have made much more sense. There was no special decree promulgated on 9 Thermidor, the date when Robespierre and his faction fell from power and the Terror in France was brought to an end. Within forty-eight hours Robespierre and his closest allies had followed the Terror's hundreds of victims to the guillotine, and a reconstituted National Convention reclaimed the executive functions previously carried out by the dread Committee of Public Safety. France's situation began to stabilize.

  In August 1795, the Constitution of the Year III was ratified, reaffirming the rights and obligations of man and of citizen—a category in which the blacks of Saint Domingue were still legally included. In October, Napoleon Bonaparte was named commander in chief of all armies within France, thanks to his role in scotching a royalist insurrection in Paris, and a five-member directory elected by the legislature took over all executive powers. These developments overseas were likely to have been on Toussaint's mind in February 1796, though he had more than enough to think about at home in Saint Domingue.

  Toussaint's letter to Dieudonne evokes the themes of black-mulatto racial tension most adroitly, as well as the stresses between the anciens and nouveaux libres: though technically a member of the former group, Toussaint was determined to position himself at the head of the latter. Indeed, conflict had been brewing between the mostly colored anciens libres and the mostly black nouveaux libres almost from the day Toussaint had decided to reposition himself beneath the French republican flag.

  Sonthonax had empowered the mulattoes, but just before his recall to France he had begun to shift his weight toward the black nouveaux libres. Perhaps it was in the context of mulatto support of the grands blancs and the British that Sonthonax had remarked to Dieudonne, “You are the representative of France; do not forget that so long as you see colored men among your own, you will not be free.”44 Toussaint, though never a strong supporter of Sonthonax, probably agreed with this statement—privately. Up until 1796 he did not show it. In the south, victories by the colored commander Rigaud had been almost as important to the republic as what Toussaint had accomplished in the north and was beginning to accomplish in the Artibonite Valley. But so far, Toussaint's and Rigaud's spheres of influence had not come close to a collision.

  With Villatte, the mulatto commander who'd been the supreme authority at Le Cap until Laveaux moved there from Port de Paix, friction came sooner. As early as September 1794 Toussaint began bickering with Villatte over control of posts in the area of Limbe. Toussaint insisted to Laveaux that these must remain under his authority—he felt that his natural cordon extended not only from Dondon through Ennery to Gona'ives but also from Ennery through Limbe, Gros Morne, and Port Margot to Borgne. An unspoken part of Toussaint's grievance against Blanc Cassenave was that the latter was more loyal to Villatte than to himself. Since both Toussaint and Villatte claimed authority around the edges of the Northern Plain, some contention between them was perhaps inevitable. Not long after the death of Blanc Cassenave, another mulatto commander, Joseph Flaville, rebelled against Toussaint's authority. Luckier than his predecessor, Flaville tucked himself under Villatte's wing at Cap Francais long enough for Laveaux to broker a truce between him and Toussaint.

  On July 23, 1795, the French National Convention had recognized the services of Toussaint Louverture by promoting him from colonel to brigadier general. Villatte, Rigaud, and Louis-Jacques Beauvais (a third colored officer who was based in the southern coastal town of Jacmel) received the same rank on the same day. Because of the distinction Sonthonax had conferred on him, Toussaint might have seen Dieudonne as just as serious a potential rival as the three mulatto generals. With the maneuver that disposed of Dieudonne, Toussaint also stole a march on Rigaud: Laplume was promoted to colonel by Laveaux on Toussaint's recommendation; thereafter Laplume and the force of three thousand he had wrested from Dieudonne reported to Toussaint.

  Although Toussaint had done much to consolidate his personal power and to place it at the disposal of Laveaux and thus of France, the stability he was trying to bring to the colony was not as solid as it might have seemed. A lengthy report he made to Laveaux on February 19, 1796, reveals much about the problems of local dissension which Toussaint confronted, and also about his methods of solving them.

  On February 13, while camped at his Artibonite outpost, Verrettes, Toussaint received two letters delivered by a white messenger, Gramont L'Hopital, informing him that the soldiers and field hands had revolted in the mountains above Port de Paix, the town so recently vacated by Laveaux. One of those letters had been dictated by the black commander of the region, Etienne Datty who claimed that he had no idea of the cause of the rebellion. Toussaint wrote back to Datty at once, exhorting him to restore order. But soon after, “two citizens of the mountain of Port de Paix, more clear-eyed and more reasonable than the others,”45 approached Toussaint at Verrettes and let him know that “many assassinations had been committed” in the region they had come from.

  “Believing that all this might spread into neighboring parishes,” Toussaint reported to General Laveaux, “I decided to leave myself to go to that area and try to remedy, if it should be possible, all the disorders.” He put the fort he had just constructed at Verrettes into a “state of defense” and rode north to Grande Riviere, where he met a third d
eputation come to let him know that “the Disorder at Port de Paix was at its height,” and that many had been killed. Toussaint had left Verrettes at eight in the evening; after circling through Grande Riviere, he rode southwest to Petite Riviere and halted at his headquarters on Benoit Plantation, where he arrived at eleven at night—in three hours he had covered an astonishing distance, given the difficulty of the terrain.

  At six a.m. he rode on to Gona'ives, and stopped at his headquarters there to write letters and to ready a small detachment of dragoons for his expedition to Port de Paix. With this light reinforcement, he rode north from Gona'ives at four in afternoon, and reached the town of Gros Morne (about halfway to Port de Paix) at midnight. There he learned that an officer named Jean Pierre Dumesny had gone in search of Etienne Datty but had been unable to find him.

  During Toussaint's halt at Gros Morne a large number of “citizens of all colors who had the Happiness to escape the assassinations which were being committed came to see me and gave me a recital which filled me with horror. As my Horses as well as my dragoons were tired I Gave the order to unsaddle, and to hold themselves ready, I had them given their rations … At three in the morning Jean Pierre Dumesny, having learned that I had arrived in the village of Gros Morne, came to join me and reported that he had not yet been able to find Etienne, that he had presented himself at the appointed rendezvous but had found no trace of him … At four o'clock in the morning I gave the order to the Dragoons to Saddle, and got on the road to Port de Paix by five.”46 On such maneuvers is founded Toussaint's reputation for rapid, unpredictable movement and for indefatigability