by Alec Waugh
Today Dessalines’ many brutalities are forgiven and forgotten. There was much to forget and to forgive. In Haiti’s bloodstained story he is the most ruthless figure. He was a great fighter and he loved fighting. As long as he was fighting he did not much mind whom he fought. As long as he was killing he did not much mind whom he killed. In the intervals there were women. But women were a sideshow.
It is impossible to detect in his behaviour a consistent policy. During the two years of Toussaint’s pacific administration he drove his Negroes to work at the sword’s point. During his war with Leclerc he butchered, because they were white, every Frenchman whose property lay across his line of retreat. As a general in Leclerc’s army he was known as the butcher of the Negroes, and slaughtered with the liveliest ferocity a hundred blacks because a few French officers had been assaulted. The war he waged with the French when the news of French treachery in Guadeloupe was known is the bloodiest in history. Terrible things happened during those weeks when Leclerc, his body faint and his eyes bright with fever, wrote dispatch after desperate dispatch to France, and Pauline dangled her pretty toes over the palace wall, her eyes fixed broodingly on the green mangroves and the lilac outline of the hills, her ears avid for the caressing words of the young aide-de-camp beside her. Darker things were to happen after Leclerc had sunk to death, after Pauline had sailed away to a less ill-starred marriage, and the fierce Rochambeau was left in charge of the French army. On neither side was any quarter given; no refinement of torture was left unpractised. Rochambeau imported bloodhounds from Cuba. He prepared black dummies, their stomachs stuffed with food, with which he trained the bloodhounds to make always for the bellies of the blacks. The disembowelling of prisoners was the favourite Sunday afternoon amusement of the Creoles at Cap Français. Lady Nugent’s journal, in the intervals of deploring the moral lapses of the young Jamaicans, makes wistful reference to the atrocities that were being staged four hundred miles away, while her husband was complacently informing Lord Hobart that the French would be unable to hold out – which was to the good, he thought. ‘We shall have nothing to fear from the blacks,’ he wrote, ‘provided we resume our former commercial intercourse, thereby preventing them from raising a marine. There are still chiefs of Toussaint’s school. We should only have to play the same game as before between Toussaint and Rigaud to succeed as well in neutralising the power of the brigands.’
A few months later, England and France were again at war. With the outbreak of war, Rochambeau’s last hope had gone. He could get no reinforcements. He could get no supplies. The blacks were attacking him by land, the English were blockading him by sea. He made peace with Dessalines and, with the honours of war, delivered himself into English hands.
It is from this moment that Dessalines appears in his full stature. Over a distance of a century and a half one reads now with a brooding wonderment the story of the next two years. Say what you will of him, Dessalines was on the heroic scale. He was of the lineage of Tamburlaine. Though his speeches and proclamations were doubtless prepared by another hand, the voice of a conqueror rings through them. Each phrase is like the roll of musketry. There is the heroic gesture, a reckless arrogance of hate, in his tearing of the white from the tricolour and making the colours of his country red and blue; in his rechristening of St Domingue; in his wiping away of the last semblance of white rule in the new name, Haiti. He let Rochambeau go on Rochambeau’s own terms. He signed the papers that they brought him. He promised immunity to the white Creoles. They could go or stay as it pleased them. They would be safe, he promised. Why should he not promise if it served his purpose? A good many promises had been made in the last twenty years. Had any of them been kept? With Rochambeau safely imprisoned in Jamaica, he would decide what it was best for him to do.
He decided quickly. The French had scarcely sailed before he was thundering out his hatred of those that stayed, before he had issued orders that none of those who remained should be allowed to leave. As the weeks passed, his intention grew more clear. Edward Colbert, the English representative, was writing back to Nugent that he had little hope for their safety and that Dessalines was counting his own departure as the signal for commencing the work of death. He had wanted to intercede for them with Dessalines, but ‘as their destruction,’ he wrote, ‘was not openly avowed by him, I was apprehensive that I might accelerate what I was anxious to avoid.’ He reports Dessalines’ visit to the south. ‘In his present progress through the southern and western parts of the island he is accompanied by between three and four hundred followers, the greatest part of whom have the appearance of being extremely well qualified for every species of rapine and mischief.’
Colbert had prophesied correctly. Within a week of his return to Jamaica the process of slaughter had begun. Dessalines knew that as long as there was a Frenchman left in Haiti his position would be insecure. The total extermination of the French that he had planned was a task that he could entrust to no one else. From the south, through Jeremie and Aux Cayes, he marched north to Port-au-Prince.
‘Dessalines arrived here on Friday afternoon,’ records a letter found among Nugent’s correspondence. ‘Turned loose four hundred to five hundred bloodthirsty villains on the poor defenceless inhabitants. He gave a general order for a general massacre (strangers excepted).1 I had five in my house. It gave me great pain to be unable to save a single one of them. They were all informed against by black wenches. . . . The murderers are chosen by Dessalines. They accompany him from the south to the north. What havoc when they arrive at the Cap. The poor victims were slaughtered in the streets, in the square, on the seaside, stripped naked and carried out of the gates of Leogane and St Joseph and thrown in heaps. A few days, I fear, will breed a pestilence. . . . Had you seen with what avidity these wretches flew at a white man you would have been astonished.’
A few days later he was at the Cap. The massacre was carefully stage-managed. Guards were placed outside the house of every English and American. It was the French only who were to be killed. For a day and a night the narrow, cobble-paved streets echoed with groans and cries. Then, suddenly, Dessalines grew weary. It was a waste of time breaking into houses, searching cupboards, dragging people from under beds. He announced that he would give safety to all whites, provided that they came into the square to testify their allegiance to him. One by one the terrified creatures crept from their lairs into the open. Dessalines waited patiently beside his soldiers till the square was full. Then he tapped upon his snuffbox. It was the signal for his men to shoot.
Next day he issued the challenge of his own defence:
Quel est ce vil Haitien si peu digne de sa régénération qui ne crôit pas avoir accompli les décrets de I’ Eternel en exterminant ces tigres attérés de sang. S’il en est un, qu’il s’ éloigne la nature indigne de reprendre de notre sein, qu’il aille cacher sa honte loin de ces lieux, I’ air qu’on y respire ne fait point pour ces organes grossiers, c’est I’ air pur de la liberié auguste et triomphante. . . .2
In the constitution of Haiti was drafted the proud clause: Jamais aucun colon ni Européen ne mettra le pied sur cette en titre de maitre ou de pro-prietaire.3
But there was nothing to be feared any longer from Napoleon. He had cut his losses, disposing of New Orleans in the Louisiana Purchase. ‘This,’ he said, ‘confirms forever the power of the United States. I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride.’
Four hundred miles away across the windward passage, Nugent, in his yellow-coloured residence in Spanish Town, addressed Dessalines, whom he described to Hobart as the brigand chief, as ‘Your Excellency’, and in the weary well-bred indifference of official English explained the terms on which Jamaica would be ready to trade with Haiti. Nugent had no doubt of what would happen. With a tired smile he listened to the accounts that came to him of Dessalines’ extravagance, of the splendour and corruption of the court, of the troops encouraged to supplement by plunder a daily ration of a herring and a
half loaf. Dessalines might declare himself an emperor, but the country was on the edge of bankruptcy. Dessalines might assert that Haiti, brown and black, consisted of one brotherhood. He might offer his sister to Pétion in marriage. But no declaration would convince the mulatto that he was not the superior of the Negro. No declaration would persuade the Negro to trust another Negro. The Negro could be ruled, on occasion he could rule. But he was incapable of cooperation, of rule by cabinet. When the news of Dessalines’ murder was brought to Nugent – a murder, if not actually instigated, at least approved by Christophe – he was not surprised. He was not surprised six months later when history repeated itself; when the conflict of Rigaud and Toussaint, the conflict of brown and black that was to be the main issue in Haitian history for the next hundred years, had been resumed between Pétion and Christophe.
Christophe was Dessalines’ second-in-command. With terror he had watched the gradual disintegration of the country under Dessalines, the disorganization of the troops, the emptying of the treasury, the abandoned plantations. What would happen, he asked himself, when the French returned? Once the invaders had been flung back. But Leclerc had advanced on a country prosperous and prepared by Toussaint’s rule. What chance would a disorganized and impoverished country stand against Napoleon? Haiti must be made powerful and rich, proud of itself, respected by other nations. Dessalines stood in the way of Haiti.
Thus Christophe argued. He had no doubt of what was needed. He had no doubt of his own power to realize those needs. When, after Dessalines’ death, representatives of the various departments had met to draw up new constitutions, he was so sure that that convention would place him with unlimited powers at its head that he did not trouble to attend the meeting. He remained at the Cap with the quick-brained little mulatto who was to be raised to the dignity of rank under the title Pompey Baron de Vastey, planning the details of his campaign. He was the only man in Haiti who could save Haiti; he knew that.
He had counted, however, without two things. One was his own unpopularity; a year earlier Leclerc had written home that Christophe was so hated by the blacks that there was nothing to be feared from him. On that he had not counted, nor on Pétion.
Pétion was one of the few with intellect in Haiti. He was the son of a French artist and a mulattress. He was almost white; he had spent much of his time in Paris. He had served in the French army and had studied in the military schools. He was mild and sweet-natured, with a poetic mind. He brought with him to the convention one firm resolution: that he had not driven out the French tyranny to authorize another tyranny, and a black tyranny, in its place.
Patiently, tactfully, diplomatically, he argued clause by clause the constitution that was to defend the Haitians’ liberty and limit the power of their ruler. It was no easy task. Sometimes as he looked round at that black semicircle of surly, stupid faces, a feeling of discouragement came over him, a feeling of doubt. ‘This is not really what I meant,’ he thought. It was something quite other than this that he had planned. What was it that he had planned? He had forgotten. It was so long ago. When one was young one saw life in clear issues. Afterward things grew confused. You fought for people with whom you were only three parts in sympathy against people to whom with a quarter of yourself you still belonged. You could never enter wholeheartedly into any quarrel. There was always a part of you left outside. Just as in life he had never anywhere been quite himself. Not here in St Domingue, where his father had been ashamed of him; nor in Paris, where they had pretended to ignore his colouring. Not even in Paris among the young officers with whom he had joked and drunk, with the woman he had loved. Always between himself and them there had been the veil of difference, this quartering of savage blood. Never anywhere had he been quite himself. That was the thing that he had dreamed of, that was the thing he had fought for, a condition of society with which man could be in tune, in which he could be himself. It was for that that he was arguing now in this hot room, to these ignorant savages. It was this he dreamed of – a Utopia, where man could be off his guard.
But even as he argued, his faith weakened in the thing he argued for. They were not educated yet to democracy, these Negroes. Christophe would never accept these limitations to his power. Later, Christophe’s indignant repudiation of the constitution came as no surprise to him. It was with no surprise that he learned of Christophe’s angry mustering of men, of his forced march over the hills into the long, sun-parched, arid plain that stretches from Ennery to Saint-Marc.
Without surprise, but wearily, Pétion heard the news. Wearily and halfheartedly he gathered together the remnants of the army, marched out with it to the plain, to be flung back, wrecked and scattered; himself escaping with his life, and in the disguise of a peasant woman, upon the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. A few hours more and Christophe would be in the capital. Pétion, for one last effort, gathered his strength together; with the hatred of the brown for the black, with the hatred of brain for force, with the hatred of breeding for unsponsored vigour, he mobilized his troops, marched out with them into the plain and, employing fully for the last time all that France and his father’s blood had taught him, he broke and dismembered Christophe’s untutored powers; broke them, scattered them; then let them go.
His generals turned to him with amazement. What, was he about to let the tyrant free? Now, when he had him in his power, when the whole of Haiti was his for the plundering! Pétion shrugged his shoulders. That irresolution, that mulatto’s doubting of himself that stood always between him and real greatness, mingled a little, possibly, with the poet’s indifference, the poet’s sense of all things’ ultimate futility, made him stay his hand.
Let Christophe, he said, go north beyond the mountains; the south was safe.
So Christophe went north to crown himself a king, and Pétion, in Port-au-Prince, drew up a constitution; a republican constitution with himself as president, and in Spanish Town, four hundred miles away, the governor of Jamaica smiled.
It was less easy than Pétion had imagined. He needed money to strengthen his frontier against Christophe, to prepare his defence against the French. And Rigaud had come back from France. There was a year of civil war to empty the exchequer, an exchequer that it was impossible to fill unless the people worked. They would not work if they were not driven. He lacked the heart to drive them. In his way he loved them as they loved him; the simple people who laughed so readily, who would forgive you anything provided you could make them laugh. But to be loved was not enough when you were beset by enemies.
Pétion grew despondent. The doubting of himself – the mulatto’s doubting of himself – and the mulatto’s contempt and hatred of the black, mingled with the mulatto’s envy of the white, returned to him, making it easy for him to shrug his shoulders, to let things drift. Why worry? Why fight for a liberty that its possessors could not use? Let the blacks go back to savagery. Why try to inoculate them with a sense of mission?
There was a sneer on his lips as he listened to the tales of Christophe that his spies brought to him. So Christophe was making a great man of himself up there! He had a splendid court and many palaces and counts and dukes and barons. He had a gold currency. And English admirals called on him. Professors came out from England to establish schools. The country was rich and that meant that the people of the country were enslaved. He smiled when they told him of the palace of Sans Souci. The Negro’s love of vanity, he called it. They told him of the citadel above Milhot, of how the people of the plains struggled to carry bronze cannon up the slope. How when the slaves paused, panting at their load, Christophe would line them up and shoot every tenth man, with the remark, ‘You were too many. No doubt now you are fewer you will find it easier.’ Of how to prove his authority he would give his troops on the citadel the order to advance and watch file after file crash over the wall to death.
Pétion sneered at Christophe. What else could you expect from an illiterate nigger? How long did they imagine it would last? Tyranny had its own medicine.
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He sneered, too, at the citadel. What was it, he asked, but an expression, as was all else that Christophe staged up there, of the Negro’s inordinate self-pride? What was the use of it, after all? It would be the easiest thing in the world to surround it, to starve it out. And as for all that gold stored there in its recesses, of what use would that be there? What could it buy but ransoms? Bullion was not wealth. One day he would take his troops up there to show what it was worth.
He never did.
Pétion was never to see the citadel, never to see the sun strike yellow on its curved prow from the road to Milhot. But with the mind’s clearer eye, the poet’s eye, he saw it, and seeing it foresaw how that proud ship would outlive the purpose it was built for, the imperial idea that it enthroned; how it would stand, derelict through the decades, to outlive ultimately even the quarrel, so eternal-seeming, of brown and black.
Today those pages of John Vandercook’s in Black Majesty that describe all that Christophe achieved within his brief fourteen years of power read like a fairy tale. You cannot believe that the book is history, that one man, and at that a Negro, could in so short a time have done so much. You have to go to the Cap itself to realize that.
Milhot, from Cap Haitien, is a half hour’s drive. It is a bad road through a green and lovely wilderness. You can scarcely believe that this bumpy track was once an even carriage drive, that these untended fields were orderly with care, that the crumbling stone gateways, half buried in the hedge, opened on carefully kept lawns, on verandaed houses, on aqueducts and sugar mills. Along the road passes an unending stream of women carrying, some of them on their heads, some of them on donkeys, bags of charcoal and sticks of sugar cane to market. They move slowly. The sun is hot. There is no hurry.
