Toussaint Louverture

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Though Napoleon declined to render any judgment of the case that Toussaint was trying to construct between himself and Leclerc, he did finally admit, in the memoir written at Saint Helena after his definitive fall from power, that he had been wrong to oppose the revolution in Saint Domingue: “I have to reproach myself for the attempt at the colony during the Consulate; it was a great mistake to have wanted to subdue it by force; I should have contented myself to govern it through the intermediary of Toussaint.'7 And he went on to say that he had all the more reason to regret the error because he saw it even at the time, and acted “against his own inclination.” He “did nothing but yield to the opinions of his State council and his ministers, dragged along by the howling of the colonists, who formed a large party in Paris and who moreover were almost all royalists and sold out to the English faction.”8 The extent of his error may have begun to dawn on him in the summer and fall of 1802, but that did not influence him to show mercy to his prisoner, Toussaint Louverture.

  If Napoleon's descriptions of his judgments and misjudgments regarding Toussaint and Saint Domingue come across as a little queasy, Toussaint confronted an even trickier task as he set about constructing his Fort de Joux memoir as a brief for the military trial he hoped would be held. Somehow he had to make it plausible that a war which had devastated the colony from one end to the other and already caused some twenty thousand deaths had all been brought about by errors of protocol on the part of Captain General Leclerc. A big challenge certainly, but he gave it his best shot.

  “It is my duty,” he began, “to render to the French government an exact account of my conduct; I will recount the facts with all the innocence and frankness of an old soldier, adding such reflections as naturally present themselves. Finally, I will tell the truth, if it be against myself”9

  This opening sally is rhetorically impressive without being especially credible; Toussaint, far from being a simple old soldier, possessed such sharp political acumen that he might well have given lessons to Machiavelli.

  “The colony of Saint-Domingue, of which I was commander, enjoyed the greatest possible tranquility; agriculture and commerce were flourishing there. The island had reached a degree of splendor never before seen. And all that—I dare to say it—was my doing.”10

  This paragraph is really the cornerstone of Toussaint's whole defense. He could claim with perfect justice that he had restored the colony from the ruins of the early 1790s to something approaching, if not actually exceeding, its magnificent prosperity before war and revolution ravaged it. Moreover, he had reason to believe that Napoleon was aware and at least to some extent appreciative of this achievement. The difficulty lay in finessing the fact that everything Toussaint rebuilt he later, and just as deliberately, tore down.

  “However, since we were on a war footing, the commission had rendered a decree which ordered me to take all necessary measures to prevent the enemies of the Republic from penetrating into the island. In consequence, I had given the order to all the commanders of the seaports not to allow any warships to enter any harbor if they were not recognized by me and had not obtained my permission. Be it a fleet of whatever nation, it was absolutely forbidden to enter the port or even the anchorage, unless I had recognized for myself where it came from and what port it had sailed from.”11

  Regarding this “decree,” it should be noted that the remnants of the civil commission in question were completely under Toussaint's thumb at this time. Roume, the last French representative still on the island, had been released from his Dondon chicken house just shortly before the decree was issued. Toussaint's strategy, however, is to argue that his resistance to the landing of Captain General Leclerc and his army derived from orders he had received from the French government itself.

  The French fleet made its first landfall off Point Samana, at the easternmost extremity of the island. It is likely that Toussaint got his first glimpse of the warships there, though in his memoir he does not admit it. Instead he claims that he was on an agricultural tour in the interior of what had been until quite recently the Spanish region of the island—Toussaint had occupied it for France just a year before—and that the first news he had of the fleet's arrival was the dispatch from General Henry Christophe at Cap Francais.

  Toussaint's movements during the next couple of days are open to question; no one can prove with certainty just where he was. In the memoir he claims that “I hastened to render myself to Cap, in spite of the flooding of the river at Hinche, hoping to have pleasure of embracing my brothers in arms from Europe, and at the same time to receive orders from the French government.”12 En route he encountered General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who told him that more ships had appeared before the port of Saint Marc. These had been detached from the French fleet, but in the memoir Toussaint pretends to believe that they might have constituted some foreign invasion force. He continued on his way toward Cap Francais, until from an observation post on the height of a mountain called Grand Boucan he saw—to his shock and horror!—that the city had been set on fire.

  In his memoir, Toussaint argues that Christophe was forced to resist the French landing and burn down the town because “if the commander of the fleet had really had peaceful intentions, he would have waited for me.”13 Now that the French had landed in force, Toussaint, according to his memoir, approached their line with the idea “to have a conference” but “they fired on us at twenty-five paces from the gate. My horse was pierced with a ball; another bullet tore off the hat of one of my officers. This unforeseen circumstance forced me to abandon the high road, to cross the savannah and the forests in order to reach Hericourt plantation, where I waited three days for news from the commander of the fleet, but always uselessly.”14

  In fact, Toussaint's army was by then resisting Leclerc's multi-pronged invasion with all its power. Full-scale war had broken out, and Toussaint in his memoir does his very best to blame Leclerc for all the hostilities: “if the intentions of the government had been good and peaceful with respect to me and with respect to all those who had contributed to the happiness which the colony then enjoyed, General Leclerc would surely not have followed or executed the orders he had received, for he debarked in the island as an enemy, doing evil for the pleasure of doing it, without addressing himself to the commander [Toussaint himself] and without communicating his powers to him.”15

  Toussaint's interview with Leclerc's envoy the Abbe Coisnon should have resolved the question of Leclerc's authority, but Toussaint's description of their conversation explains why it didn't:

  After the conduct of this general, I could have no confidence in him, that he had landed as an enemy, that in spite of that I had believed that it was my duty to go before him in order to hinder the progress of evil, but that then he had caused me to be fired on, that I had run the greatest dangers, that finally, if his intentions were as pure as those of the government that sent him, he would have taken the trouble to write me to inform me of his mission; that he should have sent me a fast boat ahead of the fleet, with you, sir [Coisnon], and my children, as it is ordinarily done, to announce his arrival to me and make me party to his powers, that since he had not fulfilled any of these formalities, the evil was done and that thus I definitively refused to seek him out; that however, to prove my attachment and my submission to the French government, I consented to write a letter to the General Leclerc.16

  Toussaint also wrote a reply directly to Napoleon, requesting that Leclerc be recalled and reprimanded—a futile effort since there was no one but Leclerc himself to forward this message to the first consul. Diplomacy failed and the war went on. With three French columns advancing on him from different directions, Toussaint could easily recognize a plan to encircle him on his plantations at Ennery and, if he could not be trapped and captured there, force him down to the coast at Gonai'ves.

  “These new hostilities brought me new reflections,” he wrote from the Fort de Joux. “I thought that the conduct of General Leclerc was very much contrary
to the intentions of the government, since the First Consul, in his letter, promised peace, while he, Leclerc, made war. I saw that instead of trying to stop the evil, he did nothing but augment it. ‘Does he not fear,’ I said to myself, ‘in persisting in such conduct, to be blamed by his government? Can he possibly hope to win the approval of the First Consul, of that great man whose equity and impartiality are so well known, while I myself shall be condemned?’ So I took the course of defending myself in case of attack, and in spite of the fact that I had few troops, I made my dispositions accordingly.”17

  Toussaint next mentions, rather casually, “I ordered the town of Gona'ives to be burned, and marched at the head of the column directed toward Pont-de-1'Ester.”18 What follows is a brief but essentially accurate report of what had turned into an all-out war which lasted three months and which ended only when both sides were depleted and exhausted, whereupon negotiations were opened by Leclercs and Toussaint's subordinates.

  “General Christophe, upon his return, brought me back a letter from General Leclerc, which said that it would be a beautiful day for him if he could convince me to cooperate with him and to submit myself to the orders of the Republic. I replied right away that I had always been obedient to the French government, since I had constantly borne arms for it; that if, according to principle, they had comported themselves with me as they should have done, there would never have been a single shot fired; that peace would never even have been troubled in the island, and that the intentions of the government would have been fulfilled.”19 This passage is the closing argument of the least plausible phase of Toussaint's defense: the idea that in battling the French expedition tooth and nail, until he had exhausted every resource in his reach, he actually believed himself to be enacting the intentions of the French government.

  Thereafter he is on much firmer ground, for the peace settlement he reached with Leclerc included a complete amnesty for all events of the bloody conflict that had just ended. In his Fort de Joux cell, Toussaint quotes Leclercs proffer from memory, which proves that his memory was a good one, for though he does not recall the original document verbatim, all the essential points are preserved: “Never fear, you nor the generals under your orders, and the inhabitants who are with you, that I will pursue anyone for his past conduct; I shall draw the veil of oblivion over the events which have taken place in Saint Domingue. In that I imi-tate the example ‘which the First Consul gave to France on 18 Brumaire.* In the future, I desire to see nothing but good citizens on this island. You ask for repose; ‘when one has commanded as you have, and supported for so long the burden of government, repose is your due. But I hope that during your retirement, you will, in your moments of leisure, share your enlightenment with me, for the prosperity of Saint Domingue.”20

  By the terms of this arrangement, all hostilities officially ceased. Toussaint retired to his plantations at Ennery; his officers retained their rank and were incorporated, along ‘with their men, into Leclerc's force. Leclerc needed them desperately by then, for more than half the soldiers he'd brought from France were dead, and his officer corps had been decimated. There was more fighting to be done, for all hostilities had not in fact ceased. Guerrilla bands ‘who'd never been ‘wholly under Toussaint's control were still resisting in the mountains, and the French suspected that Toussaint might secretly be controlling some of them.

  However, there was no proof at all of those suspicions, and so the complaints in Toussaint's memoir about the manner of his arrest seem extremely well justified. The fact of the matter is that, from the start, Leclerc carried secret orders from Napoleon to arrest all the senior black officers and deport them to France. These were difficult to carry out, however, even after the war had supposedly ended. Once Leclerc had merged the black army with his own drastically weakened force, he didn't dare arrest any black general. Toussaint had been allowed to take some two thousand men of his honor guard into retirement with him; these men had supposedly laid down their swords and taken up implements of agriculture, but an attempt on Toussaint in his stronghold at Ennery seemed a poor risk.

  So Toussaint was invited to “share his enlightenment” ‘with General Brunet on a nearby plantation. Just ‘why he chose to stick his head into this trap has mystified most students of his story, but whatever his motives, he was easily made prisoner there, ‘while a simultaneous raid on Ennery captured his family. The arrest really was a treacherous ploy, as well as a clear violation of the terms for peace that had been agreed, and Toussaint's exclamations of shock and dismay have a more sincere ring than many other protestations in his memoir. He was especially offended at being treated as a common criminal and denied the respect to which, as a general in the French army, he clearly was entitled.

  If you had no more need of my services and if you wanted to replace me, shouldn't you have behaved with me as you always behave with regard to white French generals? You warn them before divesting them of their authority; you send a person charged with making them aware of the order to turn over command to this one or that; in the case that they refuse to obey, then you take extreme measures against them, then you can justly treat them as rebels and ship them to France … Shouldn't General Leclerc have sent for me and warned me himself that people had made this or that report to him, true or not, against me? Shouldn't he have said to me:? have given you my word and promised you the protection of the government; today, since you have made yourself culpable, I am going to send you before that government, to make an account of your conduct.' Or else: ‘The government orders you to place yourself before it; I transmit that order to you.’ But nothing of the sort; on the contrary he acted toward me with means one has never employed even with respect to the worst criminals. No doubt I owe this treatment to my color; but my color … has my color ever hindered me from serving my country with fidelity and zeal? Does the color of my body tarnish my honor and my courage?21

  With that, Toussaint had struck into the heart of the matter.

  Well before the Leclerc expedition, proofs of the honor and courage of his service to France were written all over his body: “I have spilled my blood for my country; I took a bullet in the right hip, which I have still in my body, I had a violent contusion to the head, occasioned by a can-nonball; it rattled my jaw so severely that the greater part of my teeth fell out and those that are left to me are still very loose. Finally, I have received on different occasions seventeen wounds whose honorable scars remain to me.”22 Toussaint's self-description as a naively frank old soldier may have been difficult to take at face value, but the service record his scars could show was much, much more convincing.

  On September 15, 1802, one General Caffarelli appeared at the Fort de Joux. Napoleon considered Caffarelli to be one of his very most skillful interrogators, a man from whom nothing could finally be withheld. Caffarelli grilled Toussaint for twelve days and learned practically nothing at all.

  “I committed myself to fulfill this mission,” Caffarelli wrote to Napoleon,

  in such a manner as to attain the goal that you desire, and if I have not arrived at that goal, it is because this profoundly double-dealing and deceptive man, master of himself, precise and adroit, had his theme well prepared in advance and said nothing except what he wanted to say.

  From the first day he broached a conversation during which he treated me to a very long narrative about what had happened in Saint Domingue. This conversation, which lasted a long time, ended up nowhere and taught me nothing. I left him, putting him on notice that I would return the next day to know if he didn't have anything else to tell me.23

  Napoleon, who had absolutely no interest in judging the dispute that Toussaint presented between himself and Leclerc, had instructed Caffarelli to question him closely on three points: “what treaties he had made with the agents of England,” “his political views,” and “information about his treasure.”24 A rumor had traveled from the colony to Paris that Toussaint, shortly before he settled the peace with Leclerc, had buried a fortune i
n gold on one of his properties at Ennery then, in classic pirate style, murdered the men who had done the digging. In two hundred years no evidence to support this legend has ever turned up.

  However, Toussaint avows in his memoir that at the opening of the French Revolution he was worth 648,000 francs. This very substantial value would have put him on par with the grands blancs of Saint Domingue in all respects save the all-important racial one. Napoleon, whose government was as usual strapped for cash, was very interested to know what had happened to this money and if it could possibly be recovered.

  Caffarelli got nowhere with this line of questioning. Toussaint had introduced the sum of his worth into the memoir as a prelude to saying that he had invested most of the money in wartime efforts, especially against the English invaders. His memoir insists that while he had found the public treasuries empty when he was first appointed as governor general, he had done much to fill them during his tenure. However, the Leclerc expedition had the good luck to get control of most of this money in the early days of the invasion. An unnamed homme de couleur, entrusted with the treasury of the Northern Department at Cap Francais, turned it over to Leclerc when the French general occupied the ruins of the town. The treasury kept at Gonai'ves, probably comprising all revenues from the Artibonite region if not the whole Western Department, was intercepted in the Cahos mountains by Rochambeau's division when it crossed diagonally from Fort Liberte to Gonai'ves. Toussaint told Caffarelli that his and his wife's combined resources amounted to 250,000 francs at the time of the French landing (thus greatly depleted from ten years before) and that part of these private funds had been kept with the Gonai'ves treasury, the other part with the treasury of Le Cap, and so had been lost to the French with the rest.

  When Caffarelli quizzed him on the tale that six men sent to bury Toussaints treasure before Rochambeau crossed the Grand Cahos had been “massacred upon their return,” Toussaint protested that it was “an atrocious calumny invented by his enemies”25 and insisted that as soon as the rumor began to spread he had produced, alive and well, the guards who were supposed to have been slain.