Toussaint Louverture

by Madison Smartt Bell

  The Terror was bloody but relatively short-lived; on July 27, 1794, Robespierre himself fell victim to the death machine he had designed. The Committee of Public Safety collapsed, along with the rest of the Terror's apparatus. During this same period, Napoleon Bonaparte, just twenty-five years old in 1794, had advanced in rank from captain to brigadier general. The new constitution of September 1795 replaced the Committee of Public Safety—which had turned into the chief executive organ of government—with a five-member Executive Directory, complemented by the 750-member legislature. On October 3, General Danican attempted a military coup against this fragile new government. General Napoleon Bonaparte, who happened to be in Paris at the time, put himself at the head of troops loyal to the government and repelled the coup. From this event he emerged a hero and won command of the Army of the Interior.

  From 1795 to 1799 he led large-scale campaigns outside French borders, first in Italy, then in Egypt. In October 1799 he left his army in Egypt and returned to France. Fresh from a major victory at Aboukir, he was received with huge popular enthusiasm, but his reception by the increasingly shaky Directory was comparatively cool. The French economy was exhausted by a decade of war all over Europe, and the country was being strangled by a British naval blockade. A coalition of six nations threatened the French republic from without, and within there was a plot to overthrow the Directory and restore Louis XVIII to the throne.

  In 1791, war minister La Tour du Pin, alarmed by a series of mutinies in the army, had warned against the threat of “this military democracy, a type of political monster that has always devoured the empires that created it.” Eight years later, many had begun to believe that a military dictatorship offered the best chance of saving the repub-lie. Napoleon's brother Lucien was a player in the conspiracy that put one in place. On November 9, 1799, Napoleon commenced what turned out to be an essentially bloodless coup (despite a good deal of scuffling and shots fired in the air) by announcing the dissolution of the Directory. The next day, the legislature appointed him as first among a three-member consulate in charge of the provisional government. As first consul, Napoleon Bonaparte became for all practical purposes the military ruler of France.

  Napoleon was a self-invented and self-made man, in much the same style as the black general across the Atlantic Ocean in Saint Domingue, whom he was now obliged to study. Perhaps he was not flattered to see a version of himself in blackface there—though the oft-told tale that Toussaint provoked him with a letter addressed “To the First of the Whites from the First of the Blacks” appears to be false; no such document has ever been found. The view that Napoleon took of Toussaint in 1801 was in fact quite similar to the view that Toussaint was apt to take of the men against whom he had to measure himself: analytic, dispassionate, and often utterly ruthless.

  In deciding whether to consider Toussaint Louverture as ally or adversary, Napoleon had many reports and opinions to digest. The extremes of the case were represented on the one hand by the French general Kerverseau, one of Toussaint's most hostile critics, and on the other by Colonel Vincent, one of Toussaint's closest white friends and one of his greatest supporters in the French camp. Kerverseau had made his first tour of Saint Domingue in 1796, soon after Toussaint was named lieutenant governor of the colony by Governor General Laveaux. Suspicious of Toussaint's elevation (and perhaps jealous of his status as second in command), in 1799 Kerverseau filed a memo with the French minister of marine, denouncing “the tricky genius, the hypocritical moderation, the real and pretended fanaticism, and the delirious vanity of the general Toussaint.” Kerverseau went on to claim that Toussaint “loves mystery, requires a blind obedience, a devout submission to his will. He wants to govern the colony like a Capuchin convent … He loves to wrap himself in clouds; he only moves by night.”36

  In 1801, as Napoleon contemplated how best to deal with Toussaint's ascendancy in Saint Domingue, Kerverseau filed a longer report, claiming that under the old colonial regime Toussaint had been regarded by Africans as a sort of magical being, but by most whites as an “energetic, industrious and honest person”—until the revolution “transported him into another sphere, giving wings to passions thus far enchained, and creating in him a new man.” He belittled Toussaint's military ability, claiming that he “prays on the mountain while his soldiers fight on the plain.”37 More damningly, Kerverseau accused Toussaint of disregarding or subverting the authority of representatives of the French government to whom he should have been subordinate, and of making arrangements with the Americans and the British which might have been considered treasonable from the point of view of France. He singled out the better-known compliments of Toussaint's admirers, like Laveaux's hailing him as a “black Spartacus,” for a contemptuous debunking. At the same time, Kerverseau could not always restrain himself from a grudging admiration: “in the particular relations I then had with him, I had often occasion to admire the justice of his judgment, the finesse of his repartee, and a combination of ideas truly astonishing to find in a man born and grown old in slavery, whose principal occupation for forty years had been the care of mules and horses, and the whole of whose studies had been limited to learning to read and to sign, but poorly, his name.” But a few lines later he reminds himself and his readers that “we cannot forget that he was one of the principal authors of the disasters of the colony and one of the most notable chiefs of those bands of rebel Blacks who, dagger and torch in hand, made of the most opulent country in the universe a wasteland of desolation and grief.”38

  Colonel Vincent had served in Saint Domingue for ten years longer than Kerverseau, arriving as a brigadier general in 1786. Trained as an engineer, he was mainly responsible for the building of fortifications; his marriage to a Creole landowner rooted him in the colony. At an early date he became one of Toussaint's closest white confidants and advisers, and remained so to the bitter end. In 1799 he too had filed a memorandum with the French minister of marine: “The true leader of the colony, divisionary general and chief of all the armed forces, whom I should call to begin with truly illustrious, is Toussaint Louverture, by all measures a truly astonishing man, an unshakeable friend of France … the protector of Europeans and of all good men … Effectively, all must yield before the rare and healthy intelligence, the indefatigable zeal and the amazing level-headedness of this extraordinary man.'39 By 1801 his opinion of Toussaint had become somewhat more ambivalent, thanks to the arguments he and Toussaint had had over the constitution, but still he did his utmost to dissuade Napoleon from opposing Toussaint by force.

  In his final exile on Saint Helena, Napoleon analyzed the matter thus:

  The prosperous situation in which the Republic found itself in the present of 1801, after the Peace of Luneville, made already foreseeable the moment when England would be obliged to lay down her arms, and when we would be empowered to adopt a definitive policy on Saint Domingue. Two such presented themselves to the meditations of the First Consul: the first to clothe General Toussaint Louverture with civilian and military authority and with the title of Governor-General; to entrust command to the black generals; to consolidate and legalize the work discipline established by Toussaint, which had already been crowned by happy success; to require the black leaseholders* to pay a tax or a rent to the former French proprietors, to conserve for the metropole the exclusive right to trade with the whole colony, by having the coasts patrolled by numerous cruisers. The other policy consisted of reconquering the colony by force of arms, bringing back to France all the blacks who had occupied ranks superior to that of battalion chief, disarming the blacks while assuring them of their civil liberty, and restoring property to the [white] colonists. These projects each had advantages and inconveniences. The advantages of the first were palpable: the Republic would have an army of twenty-five to thirty thou-sand blacks, sufficient to make all America tremble; that would be a new element of power and one that would cost no sacrifice, either in men or in money. The former landowners would doubtless lose three quarters
of their fortune; but French commerce would lose nothing there, since it always enjoyed the exclusive trade privilege. The second project was more advantageous to the colonial landowners, it was more in line with justice; but it required a war which would bring about the loss of many men and much money, the conflicting pretensions of the blacks, the colored men, and the white landowners would always be an object of discord and an embarrassment to the metropole; Saint Domingue would always rest on a volcano: thus the First Consul was inclined toward the first policy, because that was the one that sound politics seemed to recommend to him—the one that would give more influence to his flag in America. What might he not undertake, with an army of the twenty-five to thirty thousand blacks, in Jamaica, the Antilles, Canada, the United States even, and the Spanish colonies?40

  The wistful strains of hindsight suffuse these lines. If Napoleon had foreseen just how destructive the policy of retaking Saint Domingue by force of arms would turn out to be, he almost certainly would have adopted the option of conciliating the black leadership. He was too politically astute not to have seen, even as he made the decision to commit himself to the opposite course, what an extraordinary opportunity for expansion was the path of cooperating with Toussaint Louverture and his generals. Though in 1801 Napoleon had not yet crowned himself emperor, he already had an imperial bent, and the possibility of an imposing French empire in the New World was real. The army which Toussaint had forged was certainly the most formidable fighting force in the Caribbean, if not in the whole Western Hemisphere. That army might well have spread the abolition of slavery, under the flag and the liberating rhetoric of the French Revolution, all across the Spanish and French colonies of the Greater and Lesser Antilles and even into Louisiana, which was then still a French possession. If it had done so, we would be living in a very different world today.

  So very delicately balanced, Napoleon's decision finally tipped the wrong way. Many details of Toussaints conduct in 1801 helped to turn the first consul against him, not to mention the pressure which the vociferous colonial lobby could bring to bear in Paris. Since in hindsight Napoleon saw plainly enough that the colonists were “almost all royalists and sold out to the English,” it is something of a mystery how they were able to capture his attention at the time. Though the French Revolution had put him on the road to power, it was power pure and simple that interested Napoleon most of all.

  In public he maintained an antislavery position, against the colonial lobby which clamored for the restoration of slavery in the colonies. But his private opinions were probably more ambivalent. Real racial egalitarians like the Abbe Raynal, the Abbe Gregoire, Brissot, and Son-thonax were comparatively rare even in the most left-leaning phases of the French Revolution; Napoleon likely shared the well-established European view of black Africans as something just a little less than human. He was recently married to Josephine Beauharnais, a Creole from Martinique, who had lost her family properties (at least for the moment) to the slave insurrection there. A famous courtesan long before she drew Napoleon into her sphere, Josephine undoubtedly had an unusual degree of influence on the first consul, and her sentiments were naturally in favor of the other dispossessed colonists of the French Caribbean islands.

  By the fall of 1801, Napoleon had already been seriously provoked by the leak of Toussaint's treaties with the British and by his taking possession of the Spanish side of the island. In treating with the British Toussaint had usurped French national authority, and in occupying the former Spanish colony he had flouted direct orders from the home government. Napoleon quietly annulled the black occupation of Spanish Santo Domingo almost as soon as he learned of it, and in March 1801, Toussaint Louverture was secretly expunged from the rolls of the French army.

  But Vincent's arrival in Paris was the last straw—as Vincent himself had predicted. “He was bearer,” Napoleon recalled at Saint Helena, “of the Constitution which Toussaint had adopted on his sole authority, which he had had printed and put into execution and of which he now notified France. Not only the authority, but even the honor and dignity of the Republic were outraged: of all the ways of proclaiming his independence and raising the flag of rebellion, Toussaint L'Ouverture had chosen the most outrageous, the one which the metropole could least tolerate. From that moment on there was nothing more to deliberate; the chiefs of the blacks were ungrateful rebellious Africans, with whom it was impossible to establish a system. The honor, along with the interest of France, required that we make them go back into nothingness.”41

  That, however, was easier said than done.

  Toussaint's motives during this period are somewhat obscure, but it seems plain enough that he did not really want to make Saint Domingue independent, for if he had he could well have done so. President John Adams of the United States supported the idea of independence. England, whose unease at the idea of a nation of free Africans so near to Jamaica was overbalanced by the tremendous damage to France that the loss of the colony would entail, would also have supported the move; there were even rumors that England secretly offered to endorse Toussaint's crowning himself king. Toussaint had told Vincent in their last interview, “I know that the English government is the most dangerous to me and the most perfidious to France” but “I need it.”42

  What Toussaint really hoped to achieve was a sort of commonwealth status for Saint Domingue: complete local autonomy combined with the protection of France in foreign affairs. By some analyses the fatal flaw of this conception was simply that it was too far ahead of its time. Toussaint's nearly successful effort to bring it about involved a judicious deployment of carrot and stick. The fat juicy carrot was the prospect he had persuasively demonstrated of restoring the vast prosperity of Saint Domingue for the benefit of France. Toussaint augmented that prospect by taking special pains to create a safe haven in his new society for the white planter class, even at the risk of alienating his black power base. The idea of equalized cooperation among the races, coupled with the prohibition of all racial discrimination in his constitution of 1801, was a good two hundred years ahead of its time.

  But if Napoleon chose to decline the carrot, the stick was ready and waiting: an army over twenty thousand strong, backed by a population well armed and thoroughly determined to fight to the death for freedom.

  In 1801 the dominoes began to fall in a direction unfavorable to the realization of Toussaint's hopes and dreams. In March of that year, Thomas Jefferson succeeded John Adams as U.S. president. A southern slaveholder, Jefferson was a solid supporter of the U.S. version of the ancien regime. From the very beginning, the liberation of the slaves of Saint Domingue had been a matter of tremendous anxiety for the southern states, whose political interest Jefferson was committed to defend. He must have viewed the meteoric rise of Saint Domingue's blacks to equality with some personal discomfort also. His own colored mistress, Sally Hemings, could obtain freedom only at the pleasure of her master, and under the American system both she and their children together were legally defined as Negroes, since no category for persons of mixed African and European blood officially existed.

  In July 1801, President Jefferson let the French know that the United States was opposed to an independent black state in Saint Domingue and that it preferred the restoration of French authority there. Still more critically, peace negotiations that began in October led to an agreement that the British navy would not interfere with a French expedition to Saint Domingue.

  Napoleon appointed Emmanuel Leclerc, his sister Pauline's husband, as captain general of the force sent to ensure respect for French authority—21,175 crack veterans from Napoleon's European campaigns. Fascinated by tales of Saint Domingue's wealth, the soldiers whiled away their passage by fashioning money belts to hide all the gold they expected to loot. Some cynics have reasoned that the first consul (who had won power through a military coup) wanted to get rid of these men, or at least prevent them from hanging idly around the capital; in the end most would die in the war against the blacks. Certainly Napole
on did want to remove his sister Pauline—a famous beauty, adventuress, and all-around troublemaker—as far from Paris as possible. Initially reluctant, Pauline was coaxed with descriptions of how charming and seductive she could make herself appear in the tropical deshabille popular in the colony; she embarked with her toddler son, Dermide, and a considerable entourage of servants and courtiers in a flagship specially refitted for her comfort. The fleet also carried Toussaint Louvertures elder sons, Placide and Isaac, with their tutor (a priest named Coisnon), and a boatload of Toussaint's mulatto adversaries who were returning from exile, including Rigaud, Petion, and Villatte.

  Colonel Vincent did not accompany the expedition. His defense of Toussaint's constitution had put him under a cloud, and he may have worsened his situation by filing a memorandum which argued that to regain control of Saint Domingue would be impossible, or, if by some remote chance it did succeed, not worth the terrible cost. He had no better luck persuading Napoleon to abandon the expedition than he'd had convincing Toussaint to abandon his constitution—though his warnings proved correct in both cases. However, Napoleon did recall Vincent from exile to make use of his very privileged knowledge of the situation in Saint Domingue, where he had for sixteen years been director of fortifications. And his confidential relationship with Toussaint meant that he had all sorts of valuable information about Toussaint's measures for defense.

  Once he saw the expedition was inevitable, Vincent did all he could to ensure its success; it's clear that he hoped to regain the favor of the government in the process. He produced a checklist of dozens of men he knew in civil and military posts all over the country, with notes on their rank, their race, their character, and their most likely reaction to the appearance of this large French force. He furnished Captain General Leclerc with annotated maps and copious, detailed advice for his plan of attack. He sent a bundle of letters to men of all stations that he knew in the colony, in hopes of bringing about a peaceful reception for the French.