Toussaint Louverture

by Madison Smartt Bell

  For months, Toussaints tremendous black army had been halted outside the defenses of Jacmel. Beauvais, never wholly enthusiastic about war with the overwhelming black army, had finally decided to leave his post and the colony—only to be shipwrecked and drowned. In January 1800, the redoubtable mulatto officer Alexandre Petion—who had previously served in Toussaints command but now decided to switch sides—slipped through the lines around Jacmel and took over the defense. During the next few months, the tightening siege gradually reduced the inhabitants to a state of starvation.

  With such a huge numerical advantage, Toussaint's army could easily have surrounded Jacmel on land, but to seal off the town by sea was trickier. Though the British were supposed to allow Toussaint to operate in Saint Domingue's coastal waters, the four ships he sent to blockade Jacmel were captured and hauled off to Jamaica. This event, which coincided with Roume's expulsion of the English agent Douglas, put a strain on Toussaints arrangement with Maitland. Still worse, the French Jew Isaac Sasportas had just traveled from Saint Domingue to Jamaica to raise a slave rebellion there, and got himself arrested. If Toussaint had ever had anything to do with that conspiracy, he disavowed it now—by some accounts it was he who betrayed Sasportas in the first place. Agent Roume, however, would have been happy to disrupt Toussaint's coziness with the English, and may well have had a hand in Sasportas's doomed expedition. For whoever might have been concerned, the Jamaican authorities made a point of hanging Sasportas on a gallows high enough to be visible from the shores of Saint Domingue. Toussaint sent General Huin, who had handled much of the original Toussaint-Maitland dealings, to Jamaica to iron out these difficulties. In the end the British stood back and allowed the Americans to support Toussaint at Jacmel.

  When the USS General Greene joined the blockade, Jacmel's situation became truly desperate, and when the General Greene finally bombarded the harbor forts, the defenders held out for less than an hour. Petion managed to evacuate the women from the town, then led the male survivors on a sortie to rejoin Rigaud on the Grande Anse. Broken elsewhere in the colony, the Rigaud rebellion was now confined to the southwest peninsula. Dessalines soon followed up the Jacmel victory by taking the town of Miragoane, and from there he pursued Rigaud's remaining forces into the plain of Fond des Negres. Toussaint, meanwhile, made a triumphal visit to Jacmel, where he addressed the survivors in evangelical terms: “Consider the misfortunes which threaten you; I am good and humane; come and I will receive you all … If Rigaud presented himself in good faith, I would receive him still.”69

  New delegates from the French Consulate arrived in Hispaniola in June 1800: the experienced Julien Raimond, General Jean-Baptiste Michel, who had been part of the Hedouville mission, and Toussaint's friend and partisan Colonel Vincent. The armed force meant to accompany them proved unavailable at the last minute, so these three took the precaution of landing on the Spanish side of the island (as Hedouville had done). Vincent traveled separately from the other two, accompanied by false rumors that he had orders from the home government for Toussaint's arrest. He was supposed to have been halted by an insurrection in Arcahaie, but the riot was forestalled when a local commander who either had been left out of the loop or pretended to be arrested the officer in charge of stirring up the rising before he could trigger it. Vincent continued north along the coast, passing unmolested through Toussaint's stronghold at Gona'ives, but at Limbe he was seized by an angry mob of nouveaux libres, beaten, and stripped of the papers he carried. The crowd took his epaulettes from him too, and dragged him several miles over the mountains on foot. During one halt he was blindfolded and led to believe he was about to be shot. “I will never forget,” Vincent wrote later, “another black man named Jean Jacques, commander of the northern plain; he had never seen me before, but seeing me mistreated by these Revolting Negroes who seemed very much decided to take my life, he covered me with his own body, in the desert to which I had been taken.”70

  Michel, who took a different route to Cap Francais, suffered similar treatment. In both cases the apparent object was to confiscate the envoys' papers and make sure they had no secret mission. Meanwhile (as Dessaliness army smashed into the Grande Anse in pursuit of Rigaud), Toussaint was making a triumphal progress north from Jacmel. When the people of the towns along his way came out to honor him as Saint Domingue's sole ruler, he seemed much less shy of accepting such accolades than when he had first taken over Port-au-Prince from the British.

  In fact, though the new emissaries brought news that Napoleon had confirmed Toussaint in his position as general in chief (which, given the Hedouville controversy, should have greatly relieved the black leader), and a reassuring proclamation from Bonaparte to all the nou-veaux libres (“Brave blacks, remember that only the French people recognize your liberty and the equality of your rights”),71 they were also under orders to forbid Toussaint to occupy Spanish Santo Domingo. Furthermore, the new emissaries were supposed to bring the civil war to an end, but Toussaint, who was not immediately to be found in either Port-au-Prince or Le Cap, was intent on taking care of that matter himself. When he finally met Vincent and Michel, on June 25, he did not seem overjoyed by the confirmation of his rank, and he declined to have the sentence (“Brave blacks, etc.”) embroidered in gold on the battalion flags as Napoleon had ordered.

  On July 7, Dessalines handed Rigaud a crushing defeat on the plain of Aquin. In light of this event, it meant little for Toussaint to permit Vincent to carry the “olive branch of peace” into Rigaud's last redoubt in Les Cayes. Indeed, when Rigaud learned that Napoleon and the Consulate had confirmed Toussaint in his military functions, he tried to stab himself with his own dagger.

  On August 5, Toussaint himself entered Les Cayes, and Rigaud took flight, first to Guadeloupe and then to France. Toussaint announced an amnesty for his erstwhile mulatto opponents but left General Dessalines to administer it in the south. Dessalines exercised very little restraint in his reprisals. The French general Pamphile de Lacroix described the result as a “human hecatomb,” with some ten thousand colored persons of all ages and both sexes left dead, often by mass drownings, “if one can believe the public voice,”72 though biographer (and staunch Toussaint defender) Victor Schoelcher objects that if all the alleged slayings had really occurred, the known mulatto population would have been exterminated three times over. But it is clear the amnestywas something of a sham. Toussaint had once mocked Rigaud because “he groans to see the fury of the people he has excited,”73 but now, when he saw what Dessalines had done, he groaned on quite a similar note: “I said to trim the tree, not uproot it.”74

  The instigation of “spontaneous” riots by the sector of the citizenry sometimes called the “Paris mob” had become a tried-and-true strategy for French revolutionaries during the late 1780s. According to some theories, the royalist conspirators in Saint Domingue were following that model when, with the help of trusted commandeurs like the Toussaint who had not yet become Louverture, they planned the first slave insurrection on the Northern Plain in 1791. The gens de couleur understood this method: Villatte's brief overthrow of Laveaux was marked by a riot in the town, and Rigaud planned one in the Southern Department to give himself an emergency exit from his first meeting with Hedouville. Toussaint, always a savvy observer of such events, almost certainly adapted the strategy for his own use—using popular uprisings to restore Laveaux to his governorship, to drive out both Sonthonax and Hedouville, and to intimidate Roume, Michel, and even his good friend Vincent. He was more careful than most not to let his own hand show in the instigation—instead he entered those anarchic scenes (even those of his own devising) to rescue the victims and restore order. “I won't tolerate the fury,” he said. “When I appear, everything has to calm down.”75

  Vincent, who had opportunity to observe this “great art of the chief” from several angles, described it with a grudging admiration: ‘with an incredible address he uses every possible means to stir up, from afar, misfortunes which only his presence ca
n make stop, because, I think, for the most part it is he alone who has engineered them.”76 For better or worse, the same strategy has been used in Haitian politics from Toussaint's time to ours.

  In October 1800, Toussaint gave thanks for the victory over Rigaud and his faction before the altar of the principal Port-au-Prince church. Among other things this orison shows how well he had mastered the priestly language of his time—and how smoothly he could blend it with his own political messages:

  What prayers of thanksgiving, O my God, could be equal to the favor which your divine bounty has just spread out over us? Not content to love us, to die for us, to pour out your blood on the cross to buy us out of slavery, you have come once again to overwhelm us with your blessings, and to save us another time. They have been useful to me, your celestial bounties, in giving me a little judgment to direct my operations against the enemies of the public peace who still wanted to spoil your creation: thus my gratitude is without limit, and my life would not be enough to thank you for it…

  Make me to know, O my God, the way that I must follow to serve you according to your wishes. It's for that that I lift up my soul toward you. Deliver me, Lord, from the hands of my enemies and teach me to do nothing but your supreme will, for you are my God. Give us constantly your holy blessings, and guide us in the path of virtue and of your holy religion; make us always to know a God in three persons, the father, the son, and the holy spirit, so let it be.77

  Toussaint would stop at practically nothing to secure himself—and the principle of general liberty for all the former slaves—from present or potential enemies, within and without. As important as eliminating any possibility for further rebellion on the part of the mulatto caste was the extension of his authority over the entire island. The last two delegations from the French government had penetrated Toussaint's realm via Spanish Santo Domingo, and with next to no military force at their disposal. Observing the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte had caused Toussaint to begin considering the possibility of a serious armed incursion by the same route.

  Vincent, Michel, and Raimond had arrived with an order forbidding Toussaint to take possession of the Spanish side of the island. In this first week of November, Minister of Marine Forfait reiterated this order. In a separate letter to Roume he requested that the latter remain in his role as agent of France in Saint Domingue and give Toussaint the benefit of his counsel—pending Napoleons planned reorganization of the colony's administration which (Forfait assured Toussaint) “will convince you of the special esteem he has for you and for your brave Blacks.”78

  Given the earlier promise, or menace, of “special laws” being once more applied to French colonies, Toussaint was not much comforted by Forfait's dispatches, except in that they confirmed the authority of Roume. Not long before, a French fleet carrying reinforcements to an army in Egypt had published a false destination: Saint Domingue. Toussaint had been spooked by this carefully deployed rumor and moved to believe that the next expedition supposedly bound his way might actually arrive where it was advertised.

  Roume had always been a reluctant partner inToussaint's project to take over Spanish Santo Domingo. Toward the end of November 1800, Toussaint accused him of sabotaging that plan. On this and other less specific charges (like Sonthonax and Hedouville before him, Roume was said to have “sowed discord among us and fomented trouble”), Toussaint had Roume arrested. Instead of deporting him to France, he had Moyse escort him to Dondon, to remain with his family, guarded by twenty men, in a mountaintop shack sometimes described as a chicken house, “where he will stay until the French government recalls him to make an account of himself.”79 Nine months later, Toussaint sent Roume to the United States, where he lingered a while in Philadelphia before finally returning to France.

  Roume had come to Saint Domingue with the First Commission in the early 1790s, which gave him much longer experience than most of his French counterparts there; moreover, the family relationships he described in his admonitory letter to Rigaud gave him special insight into the culture of the colony's blacks and gens de couleur. To Kerver-seau, Roume praised Toussaint as fervently as he did to Rigaud, writing in January 1799, “Whatever high opinion I had of his heart and his spirit, I was still a long way from the reality. He is a philosopher, a legislator, a general and a good citizen. The merit of Toussaint Louverture is so transcendent that I have a lot of trouble understanding why so many intelligent people don't see it, and only try to mock and slander him. If, after the justice I have just rendered to this astonishing man, I was not afraid of seeming too vain, I would add that since we have been together, two things are one: either he tells me just what I was about to tell him, or it's I who advances just what he wanted to propose to me. The same zeal for the Republic, the same love for Saint Domingue, the same urgency for the reestablishment of order and agriculture, and for the constitutional organization of the country.”80 A few months later, the symbiosis between Roume and Toussaint had very much decayed, and even at this writing Roume may have suspected that the letter to Kerverseau might end up in Toussaint's hands, for Toussaint certainly did try to intercept Roume's correspondence later on, when the trust between them was broken.

  Once Roume was out of Toussaint's keeping, he wrote from Philadelphia, perhaps with a freer hand, frankly accusing him of a “project to make Saint Domingue rebellious against France and to usurp for himself the supreme power in the island.” Everything he had won up to now, “so far from slaking the insatiable Toussaint, has only increased his avarice, his pride, and his passion for conquest.”81 The latter passion, Roume suggested, might move Toussaint to launch his armies on Jamaica or Cuba or both. In a subsequent letter, Roume (who himself could never begin to control Toussaint) portrays him as the pawn of his white advisers: “In spite of the fanatical ambition and profound rascality of Toussaint, I affirm one more time that he is less guilty than those vile white flatterers, Age, Idlinger, Collet and the others. The most terrible of his passions, the desire to rule, had made this old negro, barely escaped from the chains of slavery, mad and enraged.”82 In a letter to the Spanish ambassador to the United States, Roume mentioned his feeling that Toussaint might soon be betrayed and overthrown by certain officers in the black army, and explored the notion of having him kidnapped for trial and imprisonment somewhere outside Saint Domingue.

  The extreme contradictions in Roume's view of his subject over the years make one wonder if the Frenchman had himself been deranged by his experience with Toussaint—sometimes his picture of Toussaint's “Machiavellianism” seems downright paranoid—or if all his opposite statements were somehow necessary to cover the contradictory quality of Toussaint's actual character. Even in his most hostile letters, Roume remained fascinated. Toussaint is “an extraordinary being,” he wrote, and “he alone holds the thread through the labyrinth”83 of Saint Domingue's peculiarly complex story.

  With Roume under wraps in his Dondon chicken house, Toussaint was not immediately concerned with what the French agent might think of him. He notified Governor Don Garcia that he meant to carry out Roume's order of April 27 by sending Moyse with a sufficient force to take control of the eastern portion of the island for France, ignoring not only the more recent orders of Forfait to the contrary, but also the fact that Roume himself had rescinded the April 27 order on June 16. Accounts of the progress of the black army across the formerly Spanish territory differ. Though Toussaint had promised that private property would be respected (a usual feature of his rhetoric which was usually supported by his actions), one Spanish observer claimed: “The flight of the Spaniards who abandoned their lands was found justified by the abominations committed by this army and especially by the General Maurepas, that execrable tiger, who, with impunity, behaved himself just like his bandits who went to the last excesses against people of both sexes and their property.”84 Moyse and Toussaint himself were accused of appropriating rich Spanish plantations for themselves and of looting livestock and other goods while leaving the rightful owners d
estitute.

  By other accounts, the French administration and the fresh energy which Toussaint imported into the region were a shot in the arm for the former Spanish colony, which had languished for a long time in the doldrums. The French general Pamphile de Lacroix claimed that the union of the two territories was of mutual benefit, that it created a commerce in livestock badly needed on the French side which was very profitable to the livestock owners on the Spanish side; moreover, “the black soldiers, subject to an austere discipline, had done only a little damage; and there remained in the country no more than the troops needed to hold garrisons, and these garrisons also helped circulate money.”85 Once in control of Santo Domingo, Toussaint quickly suspended the clear-cutting of the forests, where the Spanish had been frantically harvesting mahogany and other valuable hardwoods as their best way of getting money out of the colony they were about to lose. He began an important road-building program, and according to Lacroix, he trained the Spanish horses to faster gaits than those known to the Spanish horse trainers. “In the final analysis, this invasion of the blacks, though so much feared, right away became a benefit for the nomadic people of the Spanish part.”86

  The benefit was not accepted without some resistance. Don Garcia received Toussaint's ultimatum on January 6, and was able to mobilize some fifteen hundred men toward the border (one of their commanders was Toussaint's old adversary Antoine Chanlatte). Meanwhile, Toussaint had sent two columns into Spanish territory. Three thousand men commanded by Moyse crossed at Ouanaminthe, while forty-five hundred led by Toussaint and Paul Louverture came via Mirebalais. The Spanish defense soon crumpled; Chanlatte was defeated by Paul Louverture at the Nisao River; and Toussaint received a delegation letting him know that since both Chanlatte and the French general Kerverseau had abruptly fled on a boat bound for Venezuela, there would be no further opposition to a peaceful takeover. By that time, Moyse's force was two days' march from Ciudad Santo Domingo, where civilians feared a repetition of Jean-François's massacre at Fort Liberte.