A Wilderness So Immense (38 page)

Since 1796, when he was hailed as the black Spartacus foretold by the
Abbé Raynal, Toussaint L’Ouverture had professed a consistent loyalty to republican France, which had abolished slavery throughout its territories two years earlier. Watching the arrival of Leclerc’s flotilla from the hills above the capital, L’Ouverture’s well-grounded suspicions of Napoleon’s intentions grew stronger. Why send such a force if one’s intentions were amicable? “Friends,” muttered Toussaint L’Ouverture as he gazed at Leclerc’s warships, “we are doomed. All of France has come. Let us at least show ourselves worthy of our freedom.” In the city below, General Henri Christophe, the future president of Haiti, stood ready to torch the capital rather than surrender it to Leclerc.
¹⁰

Born of slave parents in 1743, the self educated tactician and statesman Toussaint L’Ouverture began his rise to prominence as a physician to the insurgent army during the 17Q1 slave uprising against the French colonial regime in St. Domingue (Haiti) and soon became a leader of the black troops. After the National Convention abolished slavery throughout the French empire in 1794, he supported the French against British invaders and was promoted to general in
1795.
By 1801, still professing allegiance to revolutionary France and its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, Toussaint L’Ouverture had consolidated his own authority on the liberated island. Although his troops repulsed the expedition sent by Napoleon to reinstate slavery on St. Domingue, Toussaint L’Ouverture was captured by treachery, sent to France, and imprisoned high in the Jura Mountains near the Swiss border. He died there of cold and starvation on April 7, 1803
—
-five months after yellow fever claimed the life of Napoleon’s brother-in-law, General Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, commander of Napoleon’s disastrous Haitian expedition.
(Courtesy Library of Virginia)

About noon on February 2 Leclerc sent a cutter into the harbor bearing copies of a proclamation from Napoleon. “Whatever may be your origin, and your colour,” Leclerc proclaimed in the name of the first consul, “you are all Frenchmen, you are all free and equal before God and the Republic.” Hoping to avert the loss of lives and property, including as many as seventy American merchant vessels in the harbor, Lear met with General Christophe the next evening. When Toussaint L’Ouverture had successfully turned back a British invasion, Lear reminded Christophe, he had frequently avowed that, so long as freedom was guaranteed to the blacks, “the Island belonged to France and they had a right to take it when they pleased.” Christophe replied “in the most decided tone, that he could put no confidence in their declaration to confirm the freedom of the Blacks—that they meant to deceive him.”
¹¹

For two days Leclerc’s fleet hovered off Cap Français, “the wind so light that they did not attempt to come in,” while oarsmen carried empty reassurances and stern warnings back and forth across the harbor and while citizens packed their treasures and fled to the country (or in the case of the Americans to the merchant ships anchored in the harbor). Christophe’s orders from Toussaint L’Ouverture were no secret, and everyone knew that despite Leclerc’s friendly rhetoric he had landed “a large body of troops” and taken Fort Dauphin, ten miles to the west. “Hostilities having commenced,” Christophe advised Lear, his orders were to “oppose the entrance of the fleets—and that the first Gun fired should be a signal for setting fire to the town.”
¹²

Just before sunset on Thursday, February 4, two French warships moved toward Fort Picolett at the entrance to the harbor. “A shot was fired at her from the Fort, which was returned, and a short cannonading took place.” Then came the sound of cannon fire from two small forts five or six miles away. “This firing was the signal for begining to set fire to the town and plantations in the plain and neighborhood,” Lear wrote.

“The destruction of the Town is far greater than in 1793,” Lear wrote on Friday. “I judge there are not more than 70 houses … saved. The loss of property is total.” Henri Christophe had set fire to Cap Français, but by carefully following Bonaparte’s deceitful plans Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc ignited the war for Haitian independence and made it an especially vicious and dishonorable conflict—but one in which Toussaint L’Ouverture’s countrymen did show themselves capable of freedom.
¹³

The remarkably candid duplicity of the first consul’s secret instructions to General Leclerc matched the fundamental lie upon which the entire expedition was based: in the name of the ideals of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, fraternity—forty thousand French troops were sent to reimpose the slave system of the ancien regime in St. Domingue. “In order to better understand the[se] instructions,” Bonaparte wrote, “the time of the expedition should be divided into three periods.” In the first two or three weeks, Leclerc was to land and organize his forces and acquaint “the mass of [his] army with the customs and the topography of the country.” In the second phase, “the rebels are pursued to the death.” In the final phase—to begin when generals Toussaint, Moïse, and Dessalines “no longer exist”—all scattered elements of their armies were to be “destroyed with time, perseverance, and a well contrived system of attack.” Finally, “after the third period … the old pre-Revolutionary regulations [shall be] put into force.” Plain and simple, Leclerc’s overall objective was to turn back the clock and revive the slave-based sugar colony of the ancien regime.
¹⁴

Deceit was a key element of the mission. “The conduct of the captain-general,” Bonaparte wrote,

Bonaparte never used the word
slavery
in his instructions to Leclerc—blacks were to be “set to work” and “the old pre-Revolutionary regulations put into force”—but this verbal deceit was in keeping with the entire racist tenor of the mission. “White women who have prostituted themselves to negroes, whatever their rank, shall be sent to Europe.” And “any individual who should undertake to argue about the rights of blacks who have caused so much white blood to flow, shall under some pretext be sent to France, whatever his rank or services.” In private, Bonaparte’s attitudes were consistently racist. “The moment the blacks are disarmed and their principal generals deported to France,” he wrote Leclerc in July, “you will have accomplished more for the commerce and civilization of Europe than has been done in the most brilliant campaigns.” “I am for the whites,” he told his Council of State, “because I am white. I have no other reason, and it is a good reason.”
¹⁶

Except for the burning of cities, plantations, and crops, at first Leclerc’s invasion of St. Domingue went according to Bonaparte’s plan. The French army moved inland from Le Cap on the north coast and Port Républicain (formerly Port-au-Prince) on the west, while Toussaint, Christophe, and the ruthless Jean-Jacques Dessalines waged a terrifying guerrilla war from the island’s rugged hills. By the end of March, however, as Bonaparte’s “first period” strayed into its eighth week, doubt began to blunt the revolutionary zeal of French troops dying in jungle ambushes at the hands of former slaves fighting for freedom and singing “La Marseillaise” and “Ca Ira.” “Have our barbarous enemies justice on
their
side?” Leclerc’s men wondered. “Are we no longer the soldiers of Republican France? And have we become the crude instruments of policy?”
¹⁷

“I have tried several times to make Toussaint and all the generals surrender,” Leclerc complained on April 21, but “I would not be able to adopt those rigorous measures which are needed to assure to France the undisputed possession of San Domingue until I have 25,000 Europeans present under arms.” Five thousand of the seventeen thousand men he had brought ashore were dead, another five thousand were in hospital—and the rainy season was about to begin.
¹⁸

At this critical moment, by lies and bribes and a clever ruse based on the fortuitous interception of rebel communications, Leclerc enticed Henri Christophe to change sides on April 26, with twelve hundred cavalry and a hundred cannon. His treachery changed everything for the moment. Early in May the Haitian Revolution paused. On the promise of freedom for all blacks and maintenance of rank for themselves and their officers, L’Ouverture and Dessalines made their peace with Leclerc.
¹⁹

Despite these developments, the strength of Leclerc’s army was waning fast as the rainy season brought yellow fever into play. “I have at this moment 3,600 men in hospital,” Leclerc reported, “and no day passes without from 200 to 250 men entering the hospitals, while not more than 50 come out.” Then, in compliance with Bonaparte’s instructions, Leclerc arrested Toussaint L’Ouverture on June 7 and shipped him off to France. Imprisoned by Bonaparte in an unheated medieval dungeon at Fort de Joux, high in the Jura Mountains about fifty miles north of Geneva, the black Spartacus foretold by the Abbé Raynal succumbed to cold and starvation on April 7, 1803.
²⁰

Toussaint L’Ouverture’s arrest and deportation began to peel away the deceitful veneer of Leclerc’s expedition. “In overthrowing me, you have cut down in San Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty,” the black general said as he was hustled aboard the frigate
Héros.
“It will spring up again by the roots for they are numerous and deep.” Late in July, when the frigate
Cockarde
anchored in the harbor at Le Cap, any remaining doubt about Leclerc’s secret intentions ended as news spread of Bonaparte’s restoration of slavery in Guadeloupe.
²¹

“I entreated you … to do nothing which might make [St. Domingue’s blacks] anxious about their liberty until I was ready,” Leclerc complained to Bonaparte early in August, but

As yellow fever continued to ravage the French, who resorted to burying their dead after dark to conceal the extent of their losses, insurrection spread among the masses of St. Domingue. “Brigands,” the French called them.

Christophe, Dessalines, and other Haitian generals stayed with Leclerc only because they distrusted one another, but his time was running out. An extensive plot discovered at the end of August, Leclerc reported, “was only partially executed for lack of a leader. It is not enough to have taken away Toussaint, there are 2,000 leaders to be taken away.” The restoration of slavery in Guadeloupe revived the rebellion in St. Domingue. “One does not speak of rebellious blacks and peaceful blacks,” a Spanish observer reported. “With the exception of the few who are in the domestic service of the whites … all the rest, including women and boys, are stubborn rebels.”
²³

On October 11, Leclerc and his generals—French and Haitian, white, black, and mulatto—attended a reception held by his wife, Pauline, the first consul’s sister. There at last the mulatto general Clairveaux broke the spell. “I have always been free,” he said for all to hear, “but if I fancied that the restoration of slavery would ever be thought of, that instant I would become a brigand.” Two days later he deserted Leclerc and rejoined the rebellion, as did Christophe and Dessalines. By mid-October the rebels controlled the countryside. The remnants of Leclerc’s army—about two thousand men—held only the cities of Le Cap, Port-au-Prince, and Les Cayes. Of the thirty-four thousand troops Bonaparte had sent to St. Domingue, twenty-four thousand were dead and eight thousand were in hospital.
²⁴