Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (41 page)

from Laveaux in Le Cap, he did so independently, forging an autonomous

regime.

Rigaud’s administration resembled that in place in the north in many

ways. It pursued the goal of maintaining the plantation economy, building

upon Polverel’s regulations. But Rigaud introduced an innovative approach

to managing abandoned plantations. Seeking alternatives to direct man-

agement by the state, he began to rent them out to private citizens. The

policy had two major advantages: the administration gained badly needed

revenue, and the work of reconstruction and production on the plantations

was placed in the hands of individuals working for their own profit. It also, of course, had a potential political liability: many of those who had the

money to take advantage of this policy were members of the wealthy class

of people of color who had once been slave masters in the region. Those

who had owned nothing in the old order—not even their bodies—found

few opportunities to do anything but remain on the plantations, as they

were ordered to do, and serve as laborers to these new masters. The plac-

ing of abandoned plantations in private hands represented another step

away from the thrilling promise, made by Polverel in August 1793, that this

land would be distributed to the ex-slaves. Disappointed ex-slaves in the

south, as in the north, saw the ghosts of slavery in the new order.9

There were also tensions between ex-slaves and ex-masters in the

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military. Before the commissioners had left, they had ordered Rigaud to

“lead and coordinate the insurgent bands of Africans” in the region. But

the leaders of these powerful and independent bands—particularly a

Kongolese-born man named Dieudonné, who commanded 3,000 soldiers

camped in the mountains above Port-au-Prince—cherished their indepen-

dence and did not wish to submit to the authority of Rigaud and Bauvais.

Ex-slave troops and their officers had good reason to be suspicious. In

1792, after all, the Swiss—slaves who fought on the side of the free

coloreds—had been sold out by their erstwhile allies, and most paid with

their lives. In early 1793 the insurgent leader Alaou, soon after his trium-

phant meeting with Sonthonax in Port-au-Prince, was assassinated by

troops loyal to Bauvais in what they presented as a preemptive strike

meant to stop a planned assassination of their leader. Sonthonax himself

had contributed to Dieudonné’s hostility to the colored leaders: in June

1794 he had placed his commissioner’s medallion around Dieudonné’s

neck, warning him that the free coloreds were a threat to freedom.10

In late 1795 the tensions between Dieudonné and Rigaud and Bauvais

reached a breaking point. Dieudonné complained of their discrimination

against black officers, pointing out that there were none in the towns under

their command. Fed up, he opened negotiations with the British in Port-

au-Prince. During the previous years his army had besieged the city by

damming up the streams that brought water from the mountains to the

city. Now, as a goodwill gesture, his troops let the water flow down once

again. Dieudonné requested that a market be opened where his followers

could sell the harvests from their mountain plots, and in early January his

soldiers, “armed and defiant,” sold poultry and vegetables to the hungry

residents of Port-au-Prince.11

It was at this point that Louverture, who commanded stretches of the

Western province bordering those held by Dieudonné and was worried

that the Republic might soon lose several thousand fighters to the British,

intervened. “Although I have not had the pleasure of meeting you,” he

wrote to Dieudonné in February, “I know that, like me, you are in arms for

the defense of our rights, and for general liberty, and that our friends

Polverel and Sonthonax had the greatest confidence in you, because you

were a true Republican.” Why, just as France had granted them “all the

rights we are fighting for,” was Dieudonné allowing himself to be tricked

by the Republic’s enemies? “The Spanish had, for a time, dazzled me,”

Louverture admitted, but he had seen the error of his ways. “I encourage

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you, my brother, to follow my example.” Even if Dieudonné had “little

problems” with Rigaud and Bauvais, he could trust General Laveaux, “who

is a good father to us all.” And he could trust Louverture, who was “black

like him.” The only path to happiness, Louverture insisted, was in “serving

the French Republic.” “It is under its flags that we are truly free and

equal.”12

Louverture sent two emissaries to carry this letter to Dieudonné. He

also gave them secret instructions: if Dieudonné was unwilling to come

over to their side, they should encourage his followers to rise up against

him. As Louverture reported with satisfaction to Laveaux days later, his

plan worked beautifully. Dieudonné refused Louverture’s entreaty, but one

of his lieutenants, Laplume, led an uprising that brought the several thou-

sand troops who followed him to the Republican side. Dieudonné was im-

prisoned and died soon afterward. Laplume’s troops, however, did not sub-

mit to Bauvais and Rigaud, but instead put themselves under Louverture’s

protection. Laveaux promoted Laplume to the rank of general. The ten-

sions that had been smoldering between the colored officers and the lead-

ers of the “African bands” were not resolved, just transferred into the be-

ginnings of a conflict between Rigaud and Louverture.13

In the Northern province, meanwhile, Louverture was increasingly at

odds with another officer of color, Villatte, who controlled the area around

Le Cap. As Louverture and Villatte fought alongside each other against the

Spanish, there were conflicts over the ill-defined borders between their

zones of command. In January 1795, 180 of Louverture’s troops defected

and placed themselves under Villatte’s command. Louverture wrote to

Laveaux in April that he was willing to forgive Villatte for encouraging this defection—Catholicism, he wrote, taught men to forgive those who had

“offended them”—but complained that the action put him in a difficult po-

sition. In June Louverture suffered a greater blow when, in the midst of a

revolt in Acul, Louverture’s commander in the area, Joseph Flaville, put

himself under Villatte’s command, bringing a substantial number of troops

with him.14

Such insubordination, Louverture wrote to Laveaux, was like a river

overflowing its banks, “ravaging” all in its path, and stopping the torrents in one place would only give them more force elsewhere. Laveaux intervened

and removed Flaville from the area, but Louverture’s resentment against

Villatte continued. In January 1796 he complained that “men from Le

Cap” were circulating among his troops trying to recruit them to join

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Villatte’s forces. “They say that the troops are well paid and taken care of in Le Cap,” while those under Louverture’s command lacked pay and food.15

Villatte had good reasons to be suspicious of Louverture, a man he had

fought against during 1793 and early 1794, before his late rallying to the

Republic, and whose power was increasingly in competition with his own.

His conflict with Louverture put him also at odds with Governor Laveaux,

who was already unpopular with many in Le Cap. Under Villatte’s regime,

free coloreds had taken up places in the town’s administration, but some

resented the fact that they were still under the orders of Laveaux. They

were disappointed when he named a white officer, rather than Villatte,

general of the army of the Northern province. As Laveaux wrote in January

1796, some free coloreds despaired that it was not “one of them” who was

governor of Saint-Domingue in his place. “It is my country and not his,”

they said. “Why send us whites to govern and administer our country?”

They also had more immediate grievances. Since the fires and mass exodus

of 1793, many people of color had occupied and rebuilt abandoned houses

in Le Cap. They saw the ownership of these houses as recompense for

the service they had rendered the Republic, as well as a contribution to

the restoration of the shattered city. But one of Laveaux’s administrators,

a local merchant named Henry Perroud, insisted that since these aban-

doned houses were the property of the Republic, those who occupied

them should pay rent to the state.16

These grievances eventually boiled over in late March 1796. On the

morning of the twentieth a group of “citizens of color” entered Laveaux’s

house and announced that they were arresting him “in the name of the

people.” He was dragged to prison and found Perroud already there.

The municipal government issued a decree declaring that the governor

had “lost the confidence” of the people and had therefore been replaced

by Villatte. But some resisted the coup. One of Villatte’s officers, Pierre

Léveillé, circulated throughout Le Cap speaking out against Laveaux’s ar-

rest. The governor, he declared, was the “protector of the blacks,” and if

he died the free coloreds would turn over the colony to the English, and

slavery would be reestablished. Léveillé was stopped by Villatte’s follow-

ers, but not before he sent a message to the officer Pierre Michel, who

commanded outside Le Cap, asking him to help. Michel rallied together

his officers—including Pierrot, Sonthonax’s first recruit in 1793—and de-

manded that Laveaux and Perroud be released.17

Michel also sent word to Louverture. “He who attacks Governor

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Laveaux attacks the mother country and all of us,” Louverture wrote back

to Michel. He issued a proclamation to the inhabitants of Le Cap, criticiz-

ing them for sowing conflicts in the midst of war. “You asked for liberty and equality, and France gave it to you.” Why didn’t they wish to follow the

governor whom France had given them? “What will the mother country

say,” he asked, when she learned of their treasonous actions? She would

treat them all as “barbarians.” “Blindly obey the laws,” Louverture com-

manded sternly, “and those nominated to execute them.” Meanwhile he

wrote to the closest French authority—the consul in Philadelphia—to de-

scribe what had happened.18

The combined threat of Pierre Michel’s nearby troops and the immi-

nent arrival of Louverture sowed fear among the rebels in Le Cap. On

March 22 they released Laveaux and Perroud, and Villatte fled. Six days

later Louverture marched into Le Cap at the head of a large troop. He

found that many townspeople remained wary of Laveaux because of a

rumor circulating that two recently arrived ships had brought to Le Cap

hundreds of chains that were to be used to reenslave the population.

Louverture opened the doors of the administration building to prove that

Laveaux was not hiding any chains, and calmed the crowds in the town.

Laveaux again took up his post as governor. Louverture had saved the Re-

public’s representative in the colony, and in the process asserted his mili-

tary and political power in Le Cap.19

The Villatte affair has traditionally been interpreted as racial conflict

pitting mulattoes against blacks. Laveaux supported such an interpreta-

tion and was seconded by Henry Perroud, who wrote indignantly that the

men of color to whom France had given so much had turned against the

metropole, while the “African chiefs” had “respected the representatives of

the Republic.” The Africans—“those men who appeared ferocious only so

that they could win their liberty”—had in fact saved the governor from the

scheming “mulattoes,” who were “enemies of the French nation.”20

While it is tempting to explain the conflict in such terms, and to natural-

ize the differences between Africans and mulattoes, the reality was more

complex. Laveaux listed among Villatte’s fellow conspirators several men

who were not mulattoes, including several leading black officers and one

officer who declared that his “only regret was that he had been born

white.” The Kongolese Macaya, for example, who had switched sides be-

tween Sonthonax and the Spanish auxiliaries in 1793, and who had later

been imprisoned by Louverture, put himself under the protection of

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Villatte in early 1796. “Every day he organizes dances and assemblies with

the Africans of his nation and gives them bad advice,” Louverture com-

plained of Macaya at the time. Louverture, meanwhile, had more in com-

mon with men like Villatte than with the ex-slave, often African-born,

troops he led to the rescue of Laveaux. Indeed his policies toward ex-slaves

were in line with those of colored leaders such as Rigaud, who probably

had a hand in encouraging the Villatte conspiracy.21

Even if it was a simplification of the situation, the accusation that

Louverture was an enemy of the colored community was a dangerous one,

and he actively sought to dispel it. Those who had tried “by a few quota-

tions from my letters” to convince others that he had “sworn the Destruc-