Toussaint Louverture

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Toussaint was black, as he would often remind the nouveaux libres, but he was also (unlike the majority of them) a Creole, born in the colony and adapted to its ways from birth, and furthermore (unlike all the nouveaux libres) he had been a prosperous land-and slave-holding freedman well before the revolution whose principal leader he was now becoming. Much as he labored to disguise them, those differences did create a fissure between Toussaint and the roughly half million people he was trying to mold into a new black citizenry, competent to defend its own freedom on both the political and the military fronts.

  The unrest in Port de Paix, settled in Toussaint's favor, is one example of this problem. In the Western Department, the uncertain loyalty of Dieudonne's force was another. This issue too was settled in Toussaint's favor by his letters and intermediaries, at roughly the same time that he himself was halfway across the colony managing the business of Datty. Toussaint wrote his crucial letter to Dieudonne on February 12, the day before he received the first news of the uprising at Port de Paix. Just ten days later, Toussaint was writing to Laveaux about similar trouble in La Souffriere “since Macaya went there with Chariot after having escaped from the prisons of Gona'ives.” Another tribal leader, Macaya had been a far more prominent figure than Toussaint when rebellion erupted in 1791, and with Pierrot had helped Sonthonax wrest control of Le Cap away from Galbaud in 1793. “I only had Macaya arrested because he was corrupting my troops and taking them to Jean-François,” Toussaint wrote to Laveaux.62 Perhaps it would be cynical to suppose that he also saw Macaya (like Blanc Cassenave, Dieudonne, and others) as a potential rival for advancement in the French military.

  Certainly Toussaint and Macaya were of different breeds. After Macaya's escape from Gona'ives, Toussaint complained to Laveaux, “Every day he holds dances and assemblies with the Africans of his nation,* to whom he gives bad advice. As long as these two men remain at La Souffriere, people of ill intention will find them easily disposed to help them to do evil … It would be most suitable to have Macaya and his cohort Chariot arrested, for they are staying too long in these neighborhoods … [Macaya] will now do all the harm he can so as to revenge himself on me. I pray you, my General, to pay careful attention to that, for if you don't cut the evil off at its root, it may grow very large.”63

  The episodes of Datty Dieudonne, and Macaya show that unrest among the enormous African-born contingent of the nouveaux libres was very widespread. At the same time a completely different sort of outbreak was brewing among the gens de couleur. Toussaint's letter about Macaya is sprinkled with equally urgent complaints about Joseph Flaville, the mulatto commander who had vexed him not long before by making certain posts which Toussaint considered to be part of his own command report instead to Villatte at Le Cap. Indeed, Villatte's power and influence there were not only becoming more and more vexatious to Toussaint, but also more and more dangerous to Laveaux and to all French authority in the colony.

  Toussaint's situation vis-a-vis these anciens libres was tricky. Like most in Villatte's colored contingent, he had been free well before 1791, and like them, he had prospered in the prerevolutionary plantation economy. His interest in political rights for freedmen was similar to that of the gens de couleur. Unlike them, however, he was black. It seems unlikely that the antipathy between Toussaint and men like Flaville and Villatte was altogether racially based, for Toussaint had mulattoes among his most trusted officers to the very end of his career (on terms like brothers born of the same mother, as Dattys men observed). However, it is likely enough that some colored officers were loath to accept a full-blood Negro as commander in chief, and certain that Villatte would have viewed the rapid growth of Toussaint's power in the Northern Department as a threat to his own position at Le Cap.

  Events of the last two years had been extraordinarily empowering to the race of gens de couleur and the class of anciens libres. The grands blancs had been swept out of the north of the colony by the aftermath of I'af-faire Galbaud. Since the ratification of the National Convention had confirmed the abolition of slavery and of all racial discrimination among French citizens, the gens de couleur of the north had reason to believe that they had finally inherited the kingdom of their fathers.

  So Laveaux's return to Cap Francais was resented by many in the colored community there, which had restored and occupied many of the white-owned houses in the fire-ruined town, and had occupied the municipal offices. Toussaint foresaw trouble; on February 19 (in the midst of all the other turmoil) he wrote what for him was a frantic letter, advising Laveaux to stay clear of it: “Get yourself to Port de Paix if you can. Follow the advice of a son who loves his father, and don't leave there without letting me know … As soon as I have put my cordon in order I will write you everything I am thinking.”64 Either Toussaint never had a chance to write the follow-up letter, or Laveaux did not receive it, or he decided not to take it seriously.

  Though never so fiery a Jacobin as Sonthonax, Laveaux did irk some sympathizers of the ancien regime in Le Cap by continuing Sonthonax's policies there: one inflamed observer accused him of setting up a “tribunal of blood.”65 Thus there was some hostility on the part of the remaining whites in the north, on which Laveaux's colored enemies could capitalize. It's also possible that the English invaders at Port-au-Prince, using the royalist Colonel Cambefort as their conduit, encouraged Villatte to depose Laveaux from his governorship. Still more probable was some degree of collusion with the mulatto commanders Rigaud and Beauvais, who between them controlled most of the Southern Department. The idea of mulatto rule of the whole colony was constantly sponsored by Pinchinat, an homme de couleur who despite his advanced age was a fierce personality: in 1791 he had calmly suggested, “Let us plunge our bloody arms into the Hearts of these monsters of Europe.”66 Pinchinat was a wily politician and skilled propagandist; Lapointe, commander at Arcahaie, declared that he feared the writings of Pinchinat more than an army. Certainly Pinchinat played some part in instigating what become known as I'af-faire de 30 ventose.

  On that date (March 20, 1796), the colored officials of Cap Francais imprisoned Laveaux and announced that he had been replaced in his governorship by Villatte. With his accountant, Perroud, Laveaux languished in jail for two days. Then, on March 22, Pierre Michel, a black officer acting on Toussaint's orders, entered Le Cap in sufficient force to rout Villatte and his followers, who fled into the countryside. Laveaux and Perroud were freed and restored to their offices, as a proclamation sent by Toussaint rebuked the population of the town for colluding with the coup attempt. On March 28, Toussaint himself appeared at the head of his army and received a hero's welcome.

  In addition to disposing of another of Toussaint's rivals, this episode cemented the quite genuine friendship—and strategic partnership—between Toussaint and Laveaux. On April 1, Laveaux called an assembly on the Place d'Armes of Cap Francais, where he proclaimed Toussaint to be not only “the savior of the constituted authorities,” but also “a black Spartacus, the negro Raynal predicted would avenge the outrages done to his race.”67

  Toussaint had taken the coup attempt quite seriously as a threat to the stability of the whole colony, or more precisely as a threat to the administration he was building with Laveaux. He knew that the Villatte insurrection might well have gone colony-wide—Villatte had gone so far as to send notice to military officers all over the colony that he was now their commander in chief, and had also set about organizing a new colonial assembly. When Toussaint got the news at Gonai'ves, he immediately sent two battalions, commanded by Charles Belair and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, to reinforce Pierre Michel at Le Cap, while he himself remained where he was, poised to strike in any direction, sending a stream of dispatches and messengers to other towns warning them not to rebel, as well as a report to the French consul in Philadelphia. When he marched north toward Cap Francais he routed Villatte from a fort he'd occupied near Petite Anse; Villatte departed, snarling that he hoped “Laveaux would have his throat slit by the blacks he was caress
ing.”68 In fact, Villatte's party had managed to start a rumor that Laveaux and Perroud had imported two shiploads of chains for the restoration of slavery, and the two Frenchmen were threatened by a black mob until Toussaint opened the general warehouse to let the crowd see that no such chains were there.

  In gratitude, and also to secure himself and his government against further suspicion from the nouveaux libres, Laveaux proclaimed Toussaint lieutenant governor that April I on the Place d'Armes, and announced that henceforward he would do nothing without Toussaint's approval. Toussaint, exhilarated, shouted to the crowd: “After God, Laveaux!”69 —an exclamation he had recently heard addressed to himself by Datty's men around Port de Paix. On the same day, Dieudonne died in his southern prison, suffocated not by a “bilious choler” but by the weight of his chains.

  *This summary of Toussaint's tactics in taking over the Cordon de l'Ouest has a certain ring of plausibility.

  †The Spanish governor, presumably.

  *These reasons may have included black mistrust for anciens libres Igens de couleur.

  *For Toussaint's horses.

  *Guybre, a white Frenchman.

  *Macaya was a Congolese, an important tribal affiliation.

  FOUR

  Closing the Circle

  Trained as a lawyer and skilled as a diplomat, Leger Felicite Sonthonax was, above all, a survivor. The order for his and Polverel's arrest in Saint Domingue was signed by Robespierre, but by the time the two recalled commissioners arrived in France, Robespierre had fallen and the Terror was over. Sonthonax and Polverel were tried before a more moderate National Convention, by a committee predisposed in favor of abolition, though their accusers and prosecutors were a group of colonists who had lost their property. The various phases of the proceedings went on for over a year, from September 1794 to October 1795, and generated the first in-depth and reasonably objective report on events in French Saint Domingue since 1791, authored by Garran de Coulon, who presided over the commissioners' trial. Polverel died before it was over, but on October 25,1795, Sonthonax won complete vindication, emerging from the cloud of his disgrace as a kind of hero. Three months later, he was appointed head of the Third Civil Commission to Saint Domingue, a body which also included Julien Raimond, an homme de couleur who had tirelessly lobbied for the rights of his class since the 1780s, and Philippe Roume de Saint Laurent, an experienced colonial hand who had been a member of the First Civil Commission. Marc Antoine Giraud and Pierre Leblanc brought the number of commissioners to five. Citizen Pascal, a white Frenchman who would marry one of Julien Raimond's daughters, was appointed as the commission's secretary general.

  The ship bearing the Third Commission sailed into Cap Francais on May n, 1796; Sonthonax especially was received as a great emancipator. The French government had directed him to proclaim the abolition of slavery all over again, which he did with great enthusiasm; his popularity was also enhanced by his consort, Marie Eugenie Bleigeat, a femme de couleur attached to him since his first tour of the colony, who had borne him a son in Paris. During this honeymoon period of 1796, the head commissioner was so beloved by the nouveaux libres that they were supposed to have taught their children to pray especially for Sonthonax in their daily devotions.

  But Sonthonax was the target of vicious rumors as well as blessings and bouquets. From the moment of his return, some began to spread the completely false tale that he had escaped execution in France on the condition that he would restore slavery in Saint Domingue. In July 1796, Toussaint Louverture wrote in a report to Laveaux: “The wicked are conspiring more than ever … I write to Commissioner Sonthonax by this same mail to let him know how the wicked ones are reducing his credit, so as to lead the gullible field hands, among others, astray. They are making them believe, among other absurdities, that he has returned from France to put them back into slavery. Several soldiers and field hands from the Artibonite have come to warn me about what is going on. I have dissuaded them from what the wicked have told them, and sent them back home reassured.”1

  For his part, Sonthonax noted (despite the euphoria surrounding his return) that “the regime established in Saint Domingue at our arrival was perfectly similar to the eighth-century feudal regime.”2 Considerable arrondissements had been carved out by various black and mulatto military leaders, who could as reasonably be compared to twenty-first-century warlords as to medieval barons, and the tension between nouveaux and anciens libres was palpable. One of Sonthonax's first acts was to deport Villatte and his chief supporters to France—an endorsement of the steps recently taken by both Laveaux and Toussaint Louverture. To underline that endorsement, Sonthonax also promoted Toussaint to general of division, advancing him a rank ahead of any other non-French officer in the colony.

  By the time the Third Commission reached Saint Domingue, Toussaint Louverture was plainly the most powerful commander in the colony (though Andre Rigaud, in the south, was a close second) and also the most useful to France. With the exception of Mole Saint-Nicolas, where the English still held the forts and the harbor, he had secured all of the Northern Department for the French republic. His campaigns in the interior during the summer and fall of 1795 had won the regions of Mirebalais and of Grande Riviere for France. Fort Liberte, once the stronghold of the Spanish black auxiliaries under Jean-François, was now garrisoned by Toussaint's troops, commanded by Pierre Michel. Following the Treaty of Basel and the departure of Jean-François and Biassou from Saint Domingue, most of the men those two had commanded in the name of Spain had fallen into Toussaint's ranks.

  For Toussaint, as for Sonthonax, the two matters of chief concern in the summer of 1796 were the potential for another mulatto rebellion in the style of I'affaire Villatte, and the English invasion, which still had a lease on life. In the Cordon de l'Ouest, Toussaint had made his posts impregnable, but he was still disputing the south bank of the Artibonite River with the redcoats, and in September 1795, the English had recaptured Mirebalais from Toussaint's brother Paul, thus opening an important supply line to the livestock herds on the grassy Central Plateau. Throughout 1796, Toussaint harassed the English at Mirebalais guerrilla style, making use of an alliance with a local maroon community known as the Dokos, but he could not commit the forces to dislodge them altogether.

  Toussaint's military management of the north was developing a certain authoritarian quality which some among the nouveaux libres were inclined to resent. Toussaint had thought it best to undermine and eliminate many of the more traditional African chieftains who, like Biassou, doubled as houngans, or Vodou priests. The complaint he wrote to Laveaux about Macaya in February 1796 was one example of this program; his overthrow of Dieudonne was another.

  Vodou was, and remains to this day, fundamentally unresponsive to command and control from the top. Each of the myriad temples scattered over the colony was a sort of cell that could network with others by many different horizontal routes. Toussaint, who like many of his people found it comfortable to combine a private practice of Vodou with a public and equally sincere profession of Catholicism, understood the revolutionary potential of the Vodou networks and used them to his own advantage when he could. He also understood that Vodou would always be resistant to any centralized authority, including the authority he was trying to build.

  A related issue was Toussaint's determination to restore the plantation economy, which his enemies could turn into an accusation that he meant to restore slavery. This claim had been a feature of Blanc Cassenave's abortive rebellion in 1795. In June of that year, “a citizen named Thomas” spread a rumor among plantation hands at Marmelade that Toussaint was “making them work,” so as to “return them to the slavery of the whites.” “I went there myself to preach to them and make them hear reason,” Toussaint reported to Laveaux; “they armed themselves against me and as thanks for my efforts I received a bullet in the leg, which still gives me quite vivid pain.”3

  In April 1796, not long before the arrival of the Third Commission, Toussaint had to su
bdue a similar revolt in the parish of Saint Louis du Nord. His proclamation to the inhabitants there strikes the tone of a disappointed but affectionate father: “Oh you Africans, my brothers, you who have cost me so much weariness, sweat, work and suffering! You, whose liberty is sealed by the purest half of your own blood, how long will I have the grief of seeing my stray children flee the advice of a father who idolizes them! … Have you forgotten that it is I who first raised the standard of insurrection against tyranny, against the despotism that held us in chains? … You have liberty, what more do you want? What will the French people say … when they learn that after the gift they have just given you, you have taken your ingratitude to the point of drenching your hands in the blood of their children … Do you not know what France has sacrificed for general liberty?”4

  As fervently as Toussaint claimed brotherhood with the mass of the nouveaux libres, he also addressed them as “Africans”—not as Creoles like himself. The two cultures had real and large differences between them, and the “Africans” were perennially resistant to the work ethic Toussaint was trying so urgently to get them to adopt. Any ruler who wanted productivity for the colony faced the same obstacle, which was described with a certain loftiness by a French commentator in Port-au-Prince: “Work, which produces wealth and nourishes commerce, is the child of our artificial needs; needs which the Negro ignores, just as the philosopher disdains them.”5 Toussaint's task was to dissuade the nouveaux libres from this disdainful attitude (philosophical or not) and to convince them that work was essential to the defense of their freedom. At the same time the African-Creole cultural gap must be bridged by a universal black solidarity.