Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (45 page)

than Hédouville, as he began to negotiate the British withdrawal. In late

April Maitland made an offer to Louverture: in return for a guarantee of

“good treatment” for the French planters in the areas under British con-

trol, and a promise not to destroy property in the region, he would evacu-

ate peacefully. Louverture dutifully sent the proposals to Hédouville,

who authorized his general to negotiate, ordering him to grant amnesty to

all “former French” who had not emigrated and had not served in the Brit-

ish army. When Louverture signed a deal with Maitland, however, he

stretched the amnesty beyond what Hédouville had ordered, applying it

even to those who served in the militia in the areas that had been occupied

by the British, as well as all those who had fought with the British but had

abandoned them, even if they had done so quite recently.22

Louverture’s troops occupied Saint-Marc and Arcahaye, then marched

triumphantly into the capital of the colony. At the Government House in

Port-au-Prince, two British soldiers were still standing guard, having been

left behind accidentally in the confusion of retreat, but Louverture’s troops convinced the disbelieving men that it was, indeed, time for them to leave.

Maitland moved the troops from the Western Province to the two final

outposts he had in Saint-Domingue: Jérémie in the south, and the naval

fort at Môle in the north. A few French planters struggled aboard ships,

carrying what they could, to flee. Others, however, “tore off their Croix de

Saint-Louis [a royalist symbol] and made contact with their former slaves

in the Republican army.” They assumed that personal loyalties had sur-

vived the years of turmoil and sought assistance and, perhaps, forgiveness.

Louverture, meanwhile, ordered all the cultivators in the areas he had just

captured to return to the plantations where they had once been slaves.23

Hédouville complimented Louverture on his successes. “The love of

liberty and the motherland,” the agent noted, had given Louverture quali-

ties that even the best education could not have provided him. In early

June, however, when Louverture and Hédouville met for the first time

in Le Cap, their meeting was tense, burdened by mutual suspicions.

Louverture would later recount that he found the agent surrounded by

young officers “without principles” who were enemies of liberty. Wearing

counterrevolutionary fashions popular in Paris, they repeated the slogans

of Vaublanc, claiming that the “cultivator was unworthy of the freedom he

218

av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

enjoyed.” He himself, Louverture wrote, became the butt of their “disdain

and derision.” Some of these officers joked that with four brave soldiers

they could arrest the “monkey with a handkerchief on his head.” When one

French officer complimented Louverture by telling him it would be an

honor to take him to France where he could enjoy the rest he deserved for

his service to the nation, Louverture icily replied: “Your ship is not big

enough for a man like me.”24

After meeting with Hédouville, Louverture returned to the west and in-

dependently contacted General Maitland to negotiate for the final with-

drawal of British troops from Jérémie and the Môle. Hédouville wrote an

angry letter to Louverture, warning him that the British were trying to sow

divisions among the French, but Louverture ignored the warning. In the

coming months he insisted that the British general deal directly with him.

When the two men met at the Môle in late August to finalize the transfer

of the town, Maitland treated Louverture to a “sumptuous meal” in his tent

and presented him with “the splendid silver that had decorated the table”

as a gift from the king of England.25

Louverture’s flouting of metropolitan authority had reached new

heights. He was negotiating with Britain independently as the ruler of

Saint-Domingue. He had his reasons to be angry with the French govern-

ment, which had sent a man with no colonial experience, surrounded by a

racist entourage, to give him orders. Why, Louverture may have wondered,

didn’t the Directory regime place its confidence in the hands of those,

like him, who had been most responsible for preserving and governing the

colony? Why did they send whites to command him, when he had proven

his loyalty and competence over the past years? In his writings Louverture

expressed hope for reconciliation and for unified Republican support of

emancipation. But his actions suggest that he was increasingly wary of

the French government and of the fragility of its commitment to free-

dom. He began to make sure that liberty could be protected, even against

France itself.

Hédouville had been given the mission of “reestablishing the prosperity of

agriculture in the colony.” He was to oversee the return of plantations to

their “legitimate” owners (the former planters) and apply a “uniform” pol-

icy on plantation labor, one that provided what was “necessary” to the culti-

vators and “appropriate” to property owners. It was up to Hédouville to de-

cide exactly what “necessary” and “appropriate” meant. And his idea of the

e n e m i e s o f l i b e r t y

219

capacities and needs of the laborers bore a striking resemblance to the

ideas of planters like Vaublanc. The ex-slaves were insensitive to the prom-

ise of personal gain; they “never think of tomorrow,” he claimed, and were

happy if they simply had some cassava and “a few roots” to eat. The best

way to counteract the inherent laziness of the workers, he believed (again

like Vaublanc), was to force them to sign contracts with their ex-masters,

who would carefully supervise them. In July Hédouville ordered all culti-

vators to sign three-year contracts with those in charge of the plantations to which they were “attached.” Louverture would later write that many in

Saint-Domingue were surprised to see that the principles of Vaublanc, de-

feated in Paris, were nevertheless being applied in Saint-Domingue. But

initially Louverture seems to have approved of the agent’s regulations.26

Many plantation laborers, however, saw the new policy as a retraction

of their rights. In his 1793 labor regulations, Sonthonax had required culti-

vators to sign one-year contracts on their plantations, after which they

were permitted to move to another plantation if they wished. Rigaud’s ad-

ministration in the south had instituted a similar practice. Louverture had

consistently ordered workers to return to their plantations, but he had not

issued regulations regarding the length of their terms of contracts. In the

areas under his control many former slaves seem to have moved between

plantations, seeking better treatment or the company of family and friends,

with relative impunity. In the increase in the terms of the contracts,

some smelled the scent of slavery. A few laborers claimed they would

rather “live in the woods their whole life” than sign three-year contracts,

and in some towns the registers in which the contracts were to be signed

were ripped up.27

The future of plantation laborers was tied to another delicate question:

What was to become of Louverture’s soldiers now that the war with the

British was over? In the regions evacuated by the British, slavery was abol-

ished, but Louverture immediately ordered the newly freed back to “their

old plantations,” and had his troops gather together “the dispersed cultiva-

tors” to make sure they returned to their former homes. But the rank-and-

file soldiers who carried out his orders must have done so with some anxi-

ety. For in Louverture’s order, the only real alternative to military service available to former slaves was plantation labor. After years of war, many soldiers disdained those who worked on the plantations, whom they called

“garden negroes,” “poor devils,” and, using the old term for recently ar-

rived Africans in the colony,
bossales.
One former slave, a captain named 220

av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

Patience, had come so far from the plantation that in 1802 he had his for-

mer master serving under him as his lieutenant. Indeed many black of-

ficers commanded white soldiers, sometimes former masters, throughout

the colony. Soldiers who had seen their lives transformed through military

service were understandably anxious that they might be demobilized and

have to put down their guns and pick up hoes once again.28

From the moment of his arrival in the colony, even before the British

evacuation had been secured, Hédouville had sought to limit the size and

power of Louverture’s army. He resented the expenses incurred by the

large army, complaining that the “black troops” were given a costly ration

of bread when they could easily survive on cassava, bananas, and potatoes

gathered in the countryside. (The troops never ate their bread, the agent

claimed, selling it instead; but when it was not issued to them they never-

theless “murmured” in complaint.) Hédouville also thought the colony was

overpopulated with black officers. Most of these men, he wrote, could

barely read and were at the “mercy” of their secretaries, the detritus of the white community. They followed “no law but their will” and exercised an

“intolerable despotism.” Since their rank was determined by the number

of men they commanded, Hédouville claimed, they constantly pulled culti-

vators from the plantations, sometimes by force; he outlawed such recruit-

ment, unless carried out under his explicit orders, in June 1798. Every “ra-

vine” in the Northern Province possessed an arrogant officer who had been

catered to by the “negrophile” policies of the white administrators who had

preceded him.29

Hédouville’s lament was echoed by other writers, such as the French

traveler Michel Etienne Descourtilz, who ridiculed the “ignorant” black

officers. Some wore so many rings that their fingers were puffed up from

lack of circulation; they also wore earrings “like women.” He described one

named Gingembre-Trop-Fort, who he claimed barely knew French, wore

two watches on long chains, and rode his horse with a pillow on top of his

saddle. Such portraits were an attempt to counteract, and parody, the dra-

matic challenge such officers actually represented. As experienced veter-

ans of the war for liberty, some among them would, in a few years, join in

trouncing the French army. Many of them had emerged from the “multi-

tude” of Africans who had strengthened the insurgent camps in 1791 and

1792, and were as ready to fight to keep liberty as they had been to win it.30

Hédouville’s attempts to gain control over the colony’s army led him into

open conflict with one popular and high-ranking black officer: Moïse. From

e n e m i e s o f l i b e r t y

221

early on in Louverture’s rise to power, Moïse had been beside him, and

Louverture had made him his adopted nephew. By 1798 Moïse commanded

the garrison at Fort-Liberté (formerly Fort-Dauphin), close to Le Cap. In

mid-July Hédouville accused Moïse of gathering cultivators on a planta-

tion, presumably with a seditious intent, though he allowed him to remain

at his post. In October, however, using a series of fights in the town as a

pretext, Hédouville effectively deposed Moïse, placing a local black official in charge of the town and an officer named Grandet in charge of the troops

of Fort-Dauphin. Moïse and his supporters saw this as an attack against the

black army, and even against the regime of liberty itself. Indeed, just as the conflict between Hédouville and Moïse was beginning, Moïse complained

that Grandet was capturing fugitive blacks who had escaped from slavery

on the Spanish side of the island, and was returning them to their masters

on the other side of the border. To Moïse and others this policy portended

a dangerous retreat from the principle of emancipation.31

Moïse left Fort-Dauphin with some of his partisans and began mobiliz-

ing laborers on plantations to join him. But he also called on a more daunt-

ing supporter. Within days Louverture was on the march. He ordered

Dessalines to arrest Hédouville and Christophe to capture the leaders

who had replaced Moïse at Fort-Liberté. Soon thousands of troops under

Louverture’s command, as well as crowds of cultivators, surrounded Le

Cap. On October 23 Hédouville, joined by most of the white officers

who had come with him, boarded ships in the harbor of Le Cap and sailed

back to France. Joining Hédouville in his flight were the commissioner

Julien Raimond and several black officers, including Pierre Léveillé, one of

the heroes of the Villatte affair, and Jean-Baptiste Belley, who had re-

turned to the colony after serving out his term in Paris. Such men were,

like Louverture and unlike Hédouville, deeply committed to defend-

ing emancipation and racial equality. But they were disturbed by various

aspects of Louverture’s increasingly authoritarian exercise of power, his

friendly dealings with the British, his generosity to and closeness with re-

turning planters, and his bold dismissal of official French emissaries such