Toussaint Louverture

by Madison Smartt Bell

  In this crackling atmosphere, it was Toussaint who seemed to dictate terms to Leclerc. The black generals still in rebellion—Vernet, Charles Belair, and Dessalines—would be retained in their ranks in the French army, despite the fact that, when reproached by Leclerc for the massacres in which some three thousand civilians had died, Toussaint replied flatly, “It was Dessalines.” When Leclerc insisted that Toussaint himself continue service as his “lieutenant,” Toussaint demurred: “My general, I am too old and too ill; I need rest and to live in the country. I can no longer serve the Republic. I want to go with my children to my plantation at Ennery.”95 Undoubtedly he strongly suspected that Leclerc meant to have him arrested and did not mean to give him the least opportunity.

  The tension was diffused, somewhat, by a banquet, but Toussaint was not in a festive mood. “He said he was sick,” Norvins reports, “and did not even eat any soup; no more did he want to drink any wine. Only, at dessert, I offered him some Gruyere cheese; he took the plate and cut out a square piece, from which he removed a big enough thickness from all four sides, took in his fingers what remained from this singular operation, ate it without bread, and drank a glass of water from a carafe broached since the dinner began; it was thus that he did honor to the General in Chief's table.”96

  Following this austere celebration, Toussaint rode out, still surrounded by the men of his guard (which, two thousand strong, would “retire” with him at Ennery). On the public square at Marmelade he bade farewell to his assembled troops, then continued toward his Ennery plantations. En route, legend has it, he was hailed by someone who asked, “General, have you abandoned us?” and Toussaint replied, “No, my children, all your brothers are under arms, and all the officers conserve their ranks.”97

  It was not only in the ranks of the French army that the blacks of Saint Domingue remained under arms. Even after Toussaint's surrender, resistance never completely stopped—nor did Toussaint stop tacitly encouraging it. A general effort to disarm the population soon proved almost completely futile. Sans-Souci, who was even more enraged than Toussaint at the way Christophe's surrender had cut him off at the knees, began organizing for a fresh rebellion almost immediately. The guerrilla leader Sylla was actively resisting at Mapou, a point between Ennery and Plaisance, at the time of Toussaint's retirement to Ennery, and Sylla's presence helped secure Toussaint there. It took a major assault to dislodge Sylla from that position, and even then neither he nor his men could be captured.

  Suspicion of Toussaint's secret involvement in such eruptions was constant. Makajoux, a commander in the neighboring town of Pilate, wrote to his French superior, “Toussaint and the other chiefs have surrendered only in appearance, and have only sought to give their troops an entry among you in order to surprise you at the first possible moment.”98 Leclerc himself had the same attitude: “That ambitious man, from the moment that I pardoned him, has not ceased to secretly conspire … He has tried to organize an insurrection among the cultivators to make them rise en masse. The reports that have come to me from all the generals, even General Dessalines, on the conduct he has maintained since his submission leave me in no doubt in that regard. I have intercepted letters which he wrote to a so-called Fontaine who is his agent in Le Cap. These letters prove that he has been conspiring and desiring to regain his old influence in the colony. He has been waiting for the effects of diseases on the army.'99

  Those effects were already rampant. In a separate letter of the same date, Leclerc put it bluntly: “If the First Consul wants to have an army in Saint Domingue in the month of October, he will need to send it from the ports of France, for the ravages of disease here are beyond all description.”100 And yet, reinforcements were practically useless; so severe was the fever season of 1802 that troops were said to march from the ships directly into the grave.

  It was not yet known in the early 1800s that malaria and yellow fever were mosquito-borne illnesses, but the military did understand that the mountains were healthier than the ports—which may have provided a pretext for sending large numbers of troops into the region of Plaisance and Ennery during the first week of June 1802. “Toussaint is of bad faith,” Leclerc wrote on June 6, “as I very well expected of him, but I have gained from his submission the goal which I hoped, which was to detach Dessalines and Christophe from him, with their troops. I will order his arrest, and I believe I can count on Dessalines, whose spirit I have mastered, enough to charge him to go arrest Toussaint.”101 Events would soon prove that Leclerc had not mastered Dessalines's spirit in the slightest, but probably he would not have dared arrest Toussaint without some assurance from the black generals that the move would not provoke a revolt on their part.

  Toussaint's behavior during this fatal period has puzzled most observers, who find it difficult to understand why he walked into the fairly obvious trap which Leclerc had prepared for him. The bait was a pair of letters, one from the regional commander, General Brunet, the other from Leclerc himself: “Since you persist in thinking that the large number of troops found at Plaisance frightens the cultivators there, I charge General Brunet to concert himself with you concerning the placement of a part of these troops.” Brunet followed up in silkier tones: “We have, my dear general, some arrangements to make together which it is impossible to discuss by letter, but which a conference of one hour would settle.”102

  Toussaint clung to these two letters till his last days as a prisoner in France. It seems almost impossible that he did not see through them, though Pamphile de Lacroix argues that he was simply duped. “He cried out when he received General Brunet's letter, ‘You see these Whites, they don't suspect anything, they know everything—and still they have to come consult old Toussaint.'103 “ In this version, vanity, and a susceptibility to flattery which nothing else in his whole career suggests, were the weaknesses whereby Toussaint let himself be lured out of his stronghold at Ennery where it would have been much more difficult if not impossible to capture him, to a meeting with Brunet at Georges Plantation. There the small escort which Toussaint had brought with him was overpowered, and Toussaint was seized, rushed the short distance to Gona'ives, and hustled aboard La Creole, which sailed to the harbor of Le Cap, where he was transferred to L'Heros for deportation to France.

  But never in his whole life had Toussaint shown himself to be so gullible. More plausible is the idea that his last moves were forced—or that, through the same sort of small miscalculations that had moved him to surrender a month before, he believed they were forced. In fact, the displacement of Sylla from Mapou had seriously weakened his position in Ennery. French troops were moving in force into Ennery as well as Plaisance and getting into contentions with the local “cultivators,” many of whom were actually members of Toussaints honor guard. If he did nothing to stop this buildup, he would soon be outnumbered and overpowered at his last retreat. Therefore, in hope of a diplomatic solution, he took the calculated risk of going to meet Brunet, after Brunet, pleading his own ill health, had declined to come to meet him at Ennery. Events proved his calculation to be mistaken.

  It is argued by some, most notably the Caribbean commentator Aime Cesaire, that Toussaint's apparently blind cooperation in his own arrest was an intentional sacrifice, meant to separate the momentum of the Haitian Revolution from depending on himself as an individual, or on any other particular person. In this interpretation, Toussaint's decision to accept Brunet's invitation to Georges Plantation amounts to a deliberate choice of martyrdom. The last letters Toussaint wrote from prison do suggest that some such idea may have entered his mind, but however fervent his Catholicism, it seems doubtful that he would have wanted to push the imitation of Christ quite so far. And although he was certainly able to put the welfare of his people ahead of his own, it was rare for him to lose sight of his personal interests so completely. It's more likely that, under the extreme pressure of his situation, he gambled and lost.

  And yet his arrest did prove that the Haitian Revolution could now get along very
well without him. At the moment of his deportation, Toussaint understood that perfectly. “In overthrowing me,” he said as he boarded L'Heros, “you have only cut down the trunk of the tree of liberty of the Blacks in Saint Domingue: it will spring back from the roots, for they are numerous and deep.”104

  Not very long afterward, Leclerc was forced to agree, writing first, “It is not everything to have removed Toussaint, there are two thousand other chiefs here to have taken away,” and then, still more hopelessly, “Here is my opinion of this country. It is necessary to destroy all the negroes of the mountains, men and women, sparing only children under the age of twelve, and destroy half of those of the plain, without leaving a single colored man in the colony who has ever worn an epaulette. Without that, the colony will never be at peace.”105 As much as to admit outright that by Toussaint's agency the spirit of revolution had been so thoroughly diffused among the blacks of Saint Domingue that his own or anyone's personal leadership no longer mattered.

  *Meaning those who were operating the plantations of French colonists who had fled Saint Domingue.

  *These numbers were probably exaggerated for effect. Much of Leclerc's army had not yet completed the Atlantic crossing. Rochambeau's force at Fort Liberte, for example, was probably nearer two thousand than four thousand.

  *”The government sends you the Captain General Leclerc; he brings with him great forces to protect you against your enemies and the enemies of the Republic. If anyone tells you: these forces are destined to ravish away your liberty reply the Republic will not suffer that it should be taken from us, etc.” (Madiou II, p. 173).

  *In the Fort de Joux memoir Toussaint claims to have made this march with just three hundred grenadiers and sixty cavalrymen, and to have learned from prisoners that Rochambeau's force was four thousand strong. Both sides, however, were inclined to exaggerate enemy strength and minimize their own in their reporting.

  SIX

  Toussaint in Chains

  During the ten years of his ascendancy, Toussaint preserved Breda Plantation and its white managers from the bloody slave rebellion that broke out all over the Northern Plain in the summer of 1791, then joined the rebel slaves in the fall of that year. Next, along with many of the rebel slaves of the region, he became part of the Spanish colonial army and began to do battle with French Revolutionary forces in Saint Domingue on behalf of pan-European royalism. In 1794 he changed his name from Toussaint Breda to Toussaint Louverture and flabbergasted all observers by suddenly switching the four thousand men he now commanded from the Spanish to the French Revolutionary side of the conflict. France abolished slavery in 1794, and Toussaint permanently cast his lot with the French. As a brigadier general, fighting on several fronts at once, he expelled the Spanish and the British from Saint Domingue. As governor general of the colony, he won an ugly civil war with the mulatto faction, then took over the Spanish side of Hispaniola in the name of France. By 1801 he had emerged as the de facto ruler of the entire island. He had either militarily defeated or politically outma-neuvered all the great powers of Europe that meant to claim this rich prize for themselves. In the first months of 1802 he had fought an invasion force sent from France to a draw, and then retired with full honors from the army and the government. In the summer of that year he was arrested by the French and shipped to a prison in the heart of France, from which he would never return.

  Only one other man of that time could rival Toussaint's meteoric trajectory, with its dizzying climb and precipitous fall: Napoleon Bonaparte, who in so many ways resembled the black leader whose nemesis he became.

  “If I wanted to count all the services of all kinds that I have rendered to the government,” Toussaint Louverture dictated in his prison cell at the Fort de Joux, “I would need several volumes, and still I wouldn't finish it all. And to compensate me for all these services, they arrested me arbitrarily in Saint Domingue; they choked me and dragged me on board like a criminal, without any decorum and without regard for my rank. Is that the recompense due to my work? Should my conduct make me expect such treatment?”1

  These lines are drawn from a seventy-five-page memoir which Toussaint composed, with the help of a French secretary, in the prison cell where he was doomed eventually to die without ever hearing any reply to any of his arguments. The Fort de Joux was a dismal place, at least from the point of view of the black general. High in the Jura mountains, in the region of Franche-Comte, near the French town of Pontarlier in one direction and the Swiss frontier in another, the ninth-century chateau is about as remote as one can get from ports and the ocean while remaining on French territory—a feature of real importance to Toussaint's captors. The man who had ordered his deportation from Saint Domingue, Bonaparte's brother-in-law Captain General Emmanuel Leclerc, wrote to the home government not long after: “You cannot possibly keep Toussaint at too great a distance from the sea, nor put him in a prison too sure; that man has fanaticized this country to such a point that his presence here would set it on fire all over again.”2

  The mountains surrounding the Fort de Joux are capped with snow eight months out of twelve. The fortress has a well over five hundred feet deep, intended for use during sieges; most of the serfs who were forced to cut the shaft through the solid rock died somewhere down in those depths, never allowed to return to the surface. One of the chateau's medieval masters returned from a Crusade to find his seventeen-year-old wife, Berthe de Joux, engaged in a love affair. He locked her into a three-by-three-by-four-foot cavity, where somehow she survived for ten years. She did not have space to stand erect but she could look out through two sets of bars to see the corpse, then the skeleton of her lover, hanging from a gallows on the opposite cliff.

  By the time Toussaint arrived there, the defenses of the Fort de Joux had been evolving for nearly eight centuries. The fortress was ringed by five concentric walls and three moats, each with its own drawbridge. Toussaint was imprisoned in the oldest and innermost enclosure, behind five heavy double doors at the end of a long vaulted corridor. His cell was also a low barrel vault, built with colossal blocks of Jura limestone. The floor measured twenty feet by twelve. The window embrasure, at the opposite end of the cell from the door, had been bricked in for greater security; a narrow space at the top of the brickwork admitted a little daylight through a grille beyond. Toussaint, who had been carried across France in a closed coach with a large military escort from the ship that had taken him from Saint Domingue, was brought to a prison in nearby Besancon sometime during the night of August 22,1802, then transferred to the Fort de Joux dungeon at two in the morning of August 23. He would never leave his cell.

  “When I got down from the ship,” he wrote, “they made me climb into a coach. I hoped then that they would bring me before a tribunal, there to make an account of my conduct, and there to be judged. But far from that; without giving me an instant of repose, they took me, to a fort on the frontiers of the Republic, where they have shut me into a terrible cell.'3 At times, Toussaint's plaints in his memoir strike a tragic note: “They have sent me to France naked as a worm; they have seized my property and my papers; they have spread the most atrocious calumnies on my account. Is this not to cut off someone's legs and order him to walk? Is it not to cut out his tongue and tell him to talk? Is it not to bury a man alive?”4

  First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte made no direct reply to any of these messages. At the same time he was receiving frequent letters, with a weirdly similar tone, from Captain General Leclerc, whose ostensible mission had been to relieve Toussaint Louverture of his post as gover-nor general of Saint Domingue, and who had done so at the cost of most of the men in his very large command, not to mention the ruin of his own health. “As for myself,” wrote Leclerc,

  I have always served you with devotion; I will continue, I will execute all your orders to the letter. I will justify the good opinion that you have of me, but I cannot resign myself to stay on here next summer. Since I have been here I have had nothing but the spectacle of fires, in
surrections, assassinations, the dead and the dying. My soul is shriveled, no mirthful idea can make me forget these hideous scenes. I struggle here against the blacks, against the whites, against poverty and penuriousness in money, against my discouraged army. When I have spent another six months in this style, I will have the right to claim repose. As for Madame Leclerc, she is ill, and a model of courage; she is very much worthy to be your sister.

  Let me know, I beg you, what measures you have taken to come to my rescue; but do not send me my army in pieces; send me some good corps and no more debris like the greater part of the battalions I have so far received.5

  Dated October 7, 1802, this letter was Leclerc's last. By the time it reached France, he was already dead—along with some fifty thousand of the eighty thousand troops who had been sent to subdue the Negro rebellion in Saint Domingue. Though outmaneuvered by his enemy, Toussaint Louverture managed to outlive him, hanging on in his frigid cell till April 1803.

  What Toussaint wanted and, in his prison, did his best to lobby for, was Napoleon's judgment of the case between himself and Leclerc. Sometimes he put the request with a naive simplicity that may have been feigned: “If two children fight each other, shouldn't their father or mother stop them from doing so, find out which is the aggressor, punish that one or punish them both, in the case that both of them are wrong? By the same token, General Leclerc had no right to have me arrested. The government alone could have had us both arrested, could have heard and judged us. Meanwhile General Leclerc enjoys liberty, while here I am at the bottom of this cell!”6