Toussaint Louverture

by Madison Smartt Bell

  A couple of miles outside of the town, Toussaint paused to send out a few advance messengers, Jean Pierre Dumesny among them, to try to coax Etienne Datty to meet him for an interview. Then he rode a little further, halting at Ravine Pourrie, where he “had the horses unbridled so they might graze on a little grass.” It would have been full daylight by then; dawn comes quickly so near the equator. After an hour's wait, a couple of horsemen of Datty's troop appeared, then ten armed men on foot. Toussaint notes that while he reproached them vigorously for the riots and killings that had been going on, “they all seemed very satisfied to see me.”47 Having sent these people away with new messages urging Datty to present himself, Toussaint rode on, stopping at two in the afternoon at the river of Passe Seguier for long enough to compose a letter to the recalcitrant and thus far invisible Datty. This time Toussaint ordered Datty to meet him at the nearby Andro Plantation.

  “I got back on the road; at three o'clock I arrived at Habitation Andro, where I found a black citizen named Baptiste who told me that he served as a herdsman for Citizen Andro, the owner,&also Two black women citizens and an old mulatress, of whom I asked, Why all these disorders?—they replied that they did not Know the cause. As soon as I arrived I wrote to Pageot, Commandant of the Northern Province, to inform him of my arrival, and I sent the said Baptiste, with Two of my dragoons, to carry this letter. At the same moment there came to see me a large number of men and women fieldworkers, who brought me provisions, some fowls and some eggs, and testified to the pleasure they had in seeing me, and that they Hoped that I would settle all these Disorders. I Gave them the order to go find me some forage,* which they did on the spot and seemed to do with pleasure. That seemed to me to be a Good omen and made me believe that settling these things would not be difficult.”48

  In all these maneuvers one begins to sense the delicate balance with which Toussaint walked the line between French military commander and African chieftain. He had arrived in the unstable region with just a few cavalrymen at his back; if Datty's rebellion were determined, his forces would hugely outnumber Toussaint's, though probably they would be far less well trained and disciplined. In his daylong meander through the area, Toussaint was spreading the news of his presence as broadly as he could, while being careful never to remain in one spot for more than an hour: he had no intention of making himself a stationary target until he had a better sense of the local mood. His letters to Datty were written in French military style, from commander to subordinate—but the verbal messages he sent, parallel to his written communications, must have been more like invitations to a sort of clan meeting. Toussaint drew his confidence from subtle harbingers in the locals' response to him that would likely have passed unnoticed by a European officer. When the field hands brought him offerings of food and willingly followed his directions to find hay for his horses, he was reassured that they accepted the style of patriarchal authority he was trying to assert. Secure in their support, he was encouraged to remain at Andro Plantation till Etienne Datty should come; without that support he might well have been as shy of Datty as Datty was of him.

  “At seven o'clock in the evening, Etienne presented himself in conformity to the order which I had Sent him, with about five hundred men of whom a great Part were armed. I had my horse saddled and Gave the order to Etienne To have all the citizens who had come with him form a circle, as well as those who had just come in with the forage.” With these directions, Toussaint managed to mingle Datty's men, whose intentions and loyalties were uncertain, with the field hands who had turned up earlier and had demonstrated their loyalty to Toussaint.

  “I mounted my horse&entered into the Circle.” To address the throng from horseback increased Toussaint's air of authority; he was also ready for a swift departure if anything should go wrong.

  After having Preached to them the morals of reason and having reproached them for the assassinations which they had committed, I told them that if they wanted to save their liberty, they must submit to the laws of the Republic&be docile—that it was not by such [violent] conduct that they would enjoy their freedom, that if they had some claim or complaint this was no way to get it recognized, and that Jesus had said, ‘Ask and you shall receive, knock at my door and it shall be opened to you,’ but he did not tell you to commit crimes to demand what you Need.

  I asked them if they knew me and if they were happy to see me; they replied, yes, they knew I was the father of all the blacks, that they also knew that I had never ceased laboring for their Happiness and for their freedom, but that they prayed me to Listen to them and Perhaps I would see that they were not so far in the wrong as I said that they were.49

  At this point the encounter (as steered by Toussaint) had become a sort of court proceeding, African style, where grievances could be aired before the assembled community and resolved by the judgment of the patriarch. “I was silent,” Toussaint wrote to Laveaux,

  and listened to them. One Among them said, “My General, we all regard you as our father, you are the most precious to us after God, and in you we have the greatest confidence.” I hushed him&told him that if they had considered me so, they would not have behaved as they did; that if they were afraid to address themselves to the Governor-General [Laveaux], whom we must all regard as our father and defender of our liberty, they should have addressed themselves to me&and that I would have worked to obtain satisfaction from the Governor-General of whatever claims of theirs I found to be just&that I would have Avoided their plunging into Crime.50

  Here Toussaint is reinforcing a chain of command running down from Laveaux through himself to his subordinate officers and thence to individual soldiers and citizens. Though the hierarchy is orthodox, his style of asserting it is not. For the abstraction of European military organization, where all individuals can be replaced in their ranks, is substituted an alternative where the whole apparatus is held together by Toussaint's personal, paternal relationship with all the people under his authority—though he wields his authority in the name of Laveaux and the French republic.

  “They replied that all loved the Governor-General, but that it was unfortunate that everyone was not like him.” And then they got down to the real complaint:

  Since the beginning of the revolution Etienne has always been our Chief; it is he who has always commanded us; he has eaten all our misery with us to win our liberty—Why did they take the command away from Etienne to give it to someone else against our wishes&why do they treat him as nothing? To ask that question, my General, we took up arms; it is unfortunate for us that we have some bad men among us who have committed crimes, but few of us are implicated in all that. Alas! My General, they want to make us Slaves again; Equality is nowhere here—nothing Like it seems to be on your side. See how the Whites and the hommes de couleur who are with you are good, and are friends with the blacks till one would say they are all brothers born of the same mother— That, my General, is what we call Equality.51

  This language, too, springs from the core rhetoric of the French Revolution, but here it has taken a peculiarly familial twist. Moreover, while these nouveau libre citizens of the Port de Paix region recognize Toussaint as “father of all the blacks,” they also recognize two sides, it seems: theirs and his.

  “They trouble us too much,” the spokesman continued. “They don't pay us well for the harvests we make, and they force us to give our Chickens and pigs for nothing when we go to sell them in the town, and if we want to Complain they have us arrested By the police and they put us in prison without giving us anything to eat&we have to pay still more to get out again.—you can plainly see, my General, that to be dragged around like that is not to be free—but we are very sure that you are not at all like that, from the way that we see that everyone with you is happy and loves you.'52

  Once assured that the assembly had completely stated its case, Toussaint commenced his reply: “My friends—I ought not call you so, for the shame you have brought to me and all men of our color makes me see all too
clearly that you are not my friends—all the reasons you give me strike me as Most Just, but although you do have a very strong case—”

  But here, in the midst of reporting his own oration, Toussaint turned directly to Laveaux (whom he himself often addressed as “father”) to explain, “I used that expression To make them understand that though they might have all the good reasons that One could possibly have, that they were still wrong and that they had rendered themselves guilty in the eyes of God, of the Law, and of men.”53 It was a ticklish matter for Toussaint to convince this audience, whose members were accustomed to resort to arms to settle injustices which looked obvious to them, that in the French republic, to which Toussaint insisted they belong, Law might trump Justice, at least from time to time.

  How is it possible, I said to them, that I who have just sent deputies to thank the national convention in the name of all the blacks for the Beneficent Decree which gives them all liberty,&and to assure the convention that they will do their best to deserve it, and will Prove to France and all the Nations by their obedience to the laws, their labor and their Docility, that they are worthy of it,—and that I answered for all and that Soon with the help of France we would prove to the entire universe that Saint Domingue would recover all its riches with the work of free hands—how shall I answer when the national convention demands that I account for what you have just done? Tell me—my shame makes me see that I have betrayed the national convention, that [what you have done] will prove to the national convention everything that the Enemies of our freedom have been trying to make it believe: that the blacks are in no way constituted to be free, that if they become free they won't want to work anymore and won't do anything but commit robbery and murder.54

  Here for the first time in public (and to the sort of audience he most needed to convince), Toussaint announced his ambition for the colony: he would manage Saint Domingue so as to prove to the whole European world that slavery was not necessary to the success of the plantation economy, that sugar and coffee production could be revived, and the Jewel of the Antilles restored to its former luster—with free labor. But for that project to succeed there was a surprisingly vast cultural rift to be bridged, and almost as soon as Toussaint had finished speaking, that rift began to widen once more.

  The people whom he had addressed swore up and down to sin no more, to be good and obedient and peaceful, that they desired nothing more than to have Toussaint restore order among them. Toussaint exhorted them to prove these good intentions by returning to their plantations—and to work. Once they were gone he turned to Datty and pointed out that by no means all the inhabitants of the region had been present for this talking-to. Datty admitted that there were still three camps of rebels on the mountain above Port de Paix. Toussaint loaned Datty a secretary to draft a letter ordering those camps to report to Toussaint at Andro Plantation. That letter sent, Toussaint and Datty shared a supper. At ten thirty that night, Datty took his leave, promising to appear with the remaining rebels the next day. “I had the ration given to my dragoons,” Toussaint wrote, “who had eaten nothing all day but a few bananas which the field hands had brought me, as I said before. I told them to pay good attention to their horses, and passed that night without anything new happening.”55

  By the next morning, however, it became clear that Etienne Datty had again slipped his leash. He sent emissaries but avoided appearing in person before Toussaint as he had promised, and the rest of the rebels remained where they were. Toussaint began sending letters once more.

  Headquarters, Habitation Andro,

  29 Pluviose, year 4 of the French Republic, one and

  indivisible.

  Toussaint Louverture, Brigadier General, Commander in Chief of the Cordon of the West, to Etienne Datty, Commander of the Africans

  Immediately upon the reception of my letter, I order you to present yourself before me at Habitation Andro with all the citizens of the mountain and all those that I saw yesterday. My dear Etienne, I believe you to be too reasonable, not to Know what obedience is; I believe that you will present yourself right away, and spare me the pain of repeating this order.

  Salut

  (Signed)

  Toussaint Louverture56

  But Toussaint's belief was disappointed: Datty did not reappear, nor did he send a direct reply. Instead Toussaint received a letter from “the Citizens in arms at Lagon,” explaining that since Datty had so often been entrapped in the past by “Beautiful Propositions” they themselves had restrained him from returning to Toussaint.

  This cat-and-mouse game went on all day, with numerous exchanges of letters and circuits of messengers. By this time, Datty's insubordination was unmistakable, and the use of force seemed the inevitable next step. A white French officer might have taken it, but Toussaint had a different turn of mind. “Etienne's refusal made me spend the whole night considering what line I ought to Take. I reflected that if I used force, that might occasion Much more evil than there had so far been. At six in the morning, I decided; I left to go Find Etienne. I took with me Jean Pierre Dumesny, my Secretary,* and four of my dragoons.'57

  No wonder it took all night to calculate the risk of entering a rebellious encampment with this merely symbolic escort: in very similar circumstances, Toussaint had taken Brandicourt prisoner. But this gamble paid off: “I arrived at Camp Lagon at six-thirty; seeing me arrive, Etienne came before me; I scolded him and asked him Why he had Disobeyed, and what he could have been thinking of. He apologized and said that it was his troops who had kept him from coming. When I got down from my horse, all the Citizens, armed or not, came to tell me Good Day and to tell me how glad they were to see me.”58 The peaceful approach, however risky, allowed Toussaint to reoccupy his patriarchal role. The men of Datty's command were ready to recognize him as head of a household that included them all.

  Toussaint then took Datty aside for another long session of remonstrance and coaxing, and finally “succeeded in making him hear reason.” Then he inquired about Datty's secretary, one Maguenot (most likely a white Frenchman, one of several who served the black officers as scribes), and learned that he was lurking in another of the three rebel camps on the mountain. Maguenot was the probable author of the letter from “the Citizens in arms at Lagon” that Toussaint had received the day before. Between the lines of Toussaint's report to Laveaux, it appears that at this point Toussaint saw a possibility for laying the blame for Datty's insubordination on this Maguenot.

  “ ‘You have a Secretary there who is a cunning, wicked man,’ “ Toussaint suggested to Datty. “ ‘He is deceiving you, I am sure of it,’ and I asked him if he had seen a postscript he had put in the margin of the Letter that he wrote to me and sent by the citizen Gramont [i.e., the first news Toussaint had of the insurrection at Port de Paix, delivered to him at Verrettes], in these terms: The bearer of the Letter is the citizen Gramont, I am in No Way guilty, I am forced to live with wolves.”59 Etienne Datty declared that he had not seen this bit of marginalia, which suggests that perhaps he could not read: many of the black officer corps were illiterate and thus at the mercy of their secretaries. With the scales thus fallen from his eyes, Datty told Toussaint “no doubt he [Maguenot] could have put other bad things into the letters which I had him Write to the Governor General and the Commandant of the province, Without my knowing anything of it.”60

  It may well have been true that Maguenot helped stir up the trouble; it was certainly true that arresting him made it easier for Toussaint to reinstate Datty in his command without any punishment or reprimand—which, given the mood of Datty's men, was clearly the prudent thing to do. Maguenot was sent away under armed guard, while Toussaint and Datty dined together. After the repast, these two returned together to Andro Plantation.

  “I arrived at Habitation Andro at four o'clock and found that everyone was there; I ordered Etienne to have them fall into line in front of the house. That being done I made them all Swear to put everything back into good order, to submit to the law
s of the Republic, and I Gave them Etienne Datty To Command them.” Whereupon Datty's men cried, “Vive la Republique! Vive la Liberte et l'figalite! Vive le General Laveaux! Vive le General Toussaint!”61 Then they all began to dance, while Toussaint retired to his room for a long-overdue rest; in the previous seventy-two hours he had taken scarcely more than a catnap. The next day he had to gallop back to Verrettes, for the English had taken advantage of his absence to attack his post there. In partnership with Laveaux, Toussaint had done a great deal to restore stability to much of the colony, but what he'd achieved was still constantly threatened, from both within and without.

  Resolving the Datty affair had taken six rather hectic days, and Toussaint had needed to walk delicately over a long line of eggshells to avoid coming to blows with his own people—to the extent that Datty's people were his. Even the style of address of their letters underlines the gap between them: Toussaint is brigadier general in the French army, while Datty (in his own signatures as well as in Toussaint's salutations) is “Commander of the Africans.” One is a French military officer who happens to be wearing a black skin; the other is a tribal leader. It is likely that all or most of Etienne's men really were “Africans” in the sense that, like the majority of the nouveaux libres, they had been born in Africa. The first instinct of these men was to trust the chiefs of their own group ahead of any Creole commander like Toussaint, though Toussaint, who knew how to operate both as a tribal leader and as a member of the French military hierarchy, was able to win Datty's men over, and without any serious show of force. His situation required him to shuttle constantly between these two roles, and he had a remarkable facility for doing just that, as his long report to Laveaux on the Datty affair is intended to demonstrate. A European officer in his place ‘would have been far less likely to grasp, for example, that the willingness of the locals to find hay for his horses meant that they were likely to stand by him in the controversy, but it was through such subtle gestures that Toussaint maintained his connection to his popular base.