Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (48 page)

did you sacrifice the Swiss? Because they were
black.
” Rigaud, he went on, refused to obey him for the same reason: “because of my color.” Once the

war began, when some free-coloreds led uprisings in the north in support

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of Rigaud, Louverture angrily accused the “men of color in general” of

conspiring to destroy Saint-Domingue.3

Rigaud denied that his resistance to Louverture was motivated by rac-

ism. It was, he insisted, simply a response to the vicious treatment he had

suffered at Louverture’s hands. “I have chiefs, but I have no master,”

Rigaud wrote, “and never did an irritated and foul-mouthed master treat

his slave in a manner as atrocious as I have been treated.” Rigaud noted

that he had been born, like “General Toussaint,” to a mother who was a

“négresse.” He had a brother who was black whom he had always “obeyed

and respected.” He had been educated by a black schoolteacher. All these

individuals had always given him orders, and he had always followed them.

“And is there, in any case,” Rigaud continued, “such a difference between

Toussaint’s color and my own?” “I am too strongly penetrated by the Rights

of Man to believe that one color is superior to another,” Rigaud declared. It was Louverture, he insisted, who was the real racist.4

Louverture also accused Rigaud of rebelling against the French govern-

ment. But the free-colored general used the letter he had received from

Hédouville to claim that it was he who was the legitimate representative of

the government, and Louverture the seditious rebel. Both sides also invig-

orated their polemics with more serious accusations. The U.S. consul Ed-

ward Stevens described how Rigaud “studiously propagated” the idea that

under Louverture the colony “was to be sold to the British government,

and once more brought under the Yoke of Slavery.” Louverture, mean-

while, claimed that it was the free-coloreds who were enemies of liberty,

and that under Rigaud’s command they intended to reestablish slavery as

soon as they were able.5

Like all enemies, Rigaud and Louverture sought obsessively to highlight

their differences. In fact, however, they resembled each other enormously.

Both of their regimes were predicated on maintaining former slaves on

plantations and on cultivating economic ties with British and U.S. mer-

chants. While free-coloreds made up a larger part of the ruling class in the

south, their interests were not substantially different from those of the new class of black property owners that had emerged in the north and west. At

base, the conflict between Louverture and Rigaud was not driven by differ-

ences in racial identity, or even differences in ideology or practice. It was a conflict over territorial and political power. Louverture was determined to

assert his control over the entire colony. But the south had, throughout the

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history of Saint-Domingue, been a region apart from the rest of the colony,

one with a particular culture sustained by its extensive contacts with other

Caribbean islands. Building on this foundation of autonomy, Rigaud and

his partisans had created a strong and independent regime. They wished,

naturally enough, to maintain control, and fought back when Louverture

threatened to destroy what they had built.6

“My apprehensions of an immediate rupture between the two rival

chiefs of this colony have been realized,” Edward Stevens wrote in late

June 1799. On June 18, 4,000 of Rigaud’s troops entered the towns of Pe-

tit- and Grand-Goâve, routing the smaller forces under the command of

Louverture’s officer Laplume. This defeat was a kind of revenge: in 1795

Laplume had brought several thousand troops under Louverture’s com-

mand rather than submit to the authority of Rigaud. It was also a direct

challenge to Louverture, who had insisted on the transfer the towns to his

command a few months earlier. Rigaud’s bold attack earned him an impor-

tant ally: the powerful free-colored officer Alexandre Pétion defected to

Rigaud’s side, swelling the ranks of his army. Composed mostly of “black

troops that have served under him since the commencement of the revolu-

tion,” along with a few “cultivators,” his infantry was “well disciplined,” and his cavalry, “composed entirely of mulattoes,” was “the best in the colony.”7

Rigaud’s partisans were not confined to the south, however. After his

victory there were revolts in Le Cap, the Artibonite plain, and, most seri-

ously, in the Môle and the region surrounding Port-de-Paix, where

Louverture had faced uprisings consistently during the previous years. The

rebels failed to take Port-de-Paix, defended by one of Louverture’s loyal

officers, but they did surround it. Louverture had enemies everywhere. In-

deed, he was the target of two assassination attempts. In the first, his per-

sonal physician was killed, and a bullet passed through Louverture’s hat.

During the second Louverture’s carriage was riddled with bullets and his

coachman killed. The general escaped “miraculously” only because he was

riding behind the carriage.8

It was the greatest political challenge Louverture had yet faced. In the

north and west he responded with swift brutality. In the months following

the uprisings, Louverture’s troops executed conspirators without mercy.

Descourtilz described Louverture publicly punishing one officer in the

town for indiscriminate killings, telling him: “I told you to clear the trees, and you uprooted them.” The officer responded by saying: “What do you

want? When it rains, everyone outside gets wet.” Descourtilz claimed that

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Louverture had hypocritically ordered the widespread executions only to

publicly disavow them. This may well have been true. But Louverture—

who had often been quite merciful to those he defeated—might well have

been disturbed by the extent of the revenge. Still, there is little doubt that the officers under his command, notably Christophe and Dessalines, committed numerous atrocities during the campaigns against Rigaud and his

partisans.9

Having crushed the uprisings in the north, Louverture invaded the

south to destroy Rigaud’s regime. He had numbers on his side. According

to Stevens, Louverture had the support of “most of the Blacks, and all of

the Whites of the colony” and was “too powerful” to be defeated.” He had

45,000 troops in his army, compared with Rigaud’s 15,000. Louverture

knew, however, that to win the war he needed to isolate Rigaud. He turned

to his new ally, the United States. Writing to John Adams in mid-August,

he announced that “in order to satisfy his pride and ambition,” Rigaud had

started a rebellion “odious” to “all the Governments on earth.” He lacked,

he explained, one “repressive measure” he needed to end this revolt—a

navy. Louverture requested that the United States use its ships to help

him “reduce” the “pirates” that were fanning out from Rigaud’s ports, at-

tacking both French and foreign ships. Edward Stevens wrote to Washing-

ton around the same time, arguing the United States should “cooperate

with the British in cutting all supplies of provision and ammunition to

Rigaud.” To do so would be in the best commercial interests of the United

States, for if Louverture should “prove unsuccessful,” then “all the ar-

rangements we have made respecting commerce must fall to the ground.”

Adams was convinced, and soon the U.S. Navy was blockading the south-

ern ports.10

Having secured such support and suppressed the uprisings against him

in the north and west, Louverture was all but assured of victory. Still, as his army, under the command of Dessalines, marched into the south, the

fighting was brutal. The leaders on both sides had demonized their ene-

mies, and the fighting descended into a “delirium” in which neither side

showed any mercy. “It never entered anyone’s mind to take prisoners.” The

land, too, suffered; as Rigaud retreated, he commanded his troops to cre-

ate a “desert of fire,” making sure they left behind only trees with their

roots in the air. Rigaud lost crucial allies, most devastatingly his longtime comrade Louis-Jacques Bauvais, who, having maintained a tenuous neutrality at the beginning of the conflict, abandoned the colony rather than

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fight on one side or another. (He died soon after when the ship he was on

sank in the Atlantic.) Rigaud also found little support among the cultivators in the Southern Province. Louverture, meanwhile, sought with some success to draw cultivators to his side, sending ex-slave officers, including

one named Gilles Bambara, who was probably African-born, to do the re-

cruiting. When Rigaud retreated to Les Cayes, he “rang the tocsins as a

signal and call to arms,” hoping the cultivators in the surrounding plains

would come to his defense. “No one came forward to answer the call.”

Their refusal to support Rigaud, probably to some extent simply a prag-

matic choice, was also a sign of the hostility many felt toward the labor re-

gime to which they had been subjected during the past years. If they

hoped for better under Louverture’s rule, however, they were to be disap-

pointed.11

In June 1800 an emissary from France arrived in Saint-Domingue, car-

rying a series of proclamations from First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte.

One of these confirmed that Louverture was still the “general-in-chief” of

the army of Saint-Domingue. Since Rigaud had justified his revolt in part

by declaring Louverture’s authority illegitimate, this news undermined his

position substantially. Sensing that the momentum of the war was on his

side, Louverture soon declared a general amnesty for all those who surren-

dered. In late July, Rigaud fled the colony with his family, and soon after-

ward Louverture entered Les Cayes. He reiterated his declaration of a

general amnesty. Nevertheless, in the wake of the defeat there were repri-

sals committed against many prisoners. Some have asserted that

Louverture ordered these massacres but had his generals do the dirty work

so that he could deny knowledge of what was being done in his name.

Dessalines’s role in this period, in particular, remains controversial. Many

see him as the driving force of the brutal reprisals against Rigaud’s parti-

sans, though one historian has also noted that he made an effort to pre-

serve the lives of several prisoners. A few years later, some of those who

had fought with Rigaud would in fact rally to Dessalines’s side as he battled for independence from the French.12

Louverture had consolidated his control over all of Saint-Domingue.

But his territorial expansion was not over. As he fought against Rigaud,

he set his sights beyond the south, looking east. Spanish Santo Domingo

had been ceded to France in 1795, but despite the presence of a few

French officials the Spanish administration continued to control the col-

ony. Louverture’s reasons for wanting to control Santo Domingo were, at

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least initially, tied to the war against Rigaud. Edward Stevens attributed

Louverture’s decision to invade to a curious rumor that ships carrying

15,000 troops and the Abbé Grégoire had landed in Guadeloupe and were

heading for Santo Domingo. Those who spread this rumor perhaps raised

the threat of Grégoire because he was seen as a friend of free-coloreds,

and therefore of Rigaud. Although it is doubtful that Louverture trembled

at the thought of the arrival of the French priest (who in any case was

safely across the Atlantic), he understood the need to prevent Rigaud from

receiving any support from the east. To secure his position he needed to

control all the ports in the colony. Santo Domingo was an ideal place for

hostile new arrivals from Europe to land, as Hédouville had done in 1798,

in order to sidestep Louverture’s control of Le Cap.13

Louverture explained his desire to conquer Santo Domingo, however,

in a different way: he claimed that men, women, and children who were

“French citizens” were being kidnapped to Santo Domingo and sold as

slaves. In April 1800 he announced to the agent Roume that he was deter-

mined to end this abuse by sending his troops across the border into

the Spanish colony. Convinced that the occupation order had to come from

Paris, Roume hesitated to lend his approval to the project, but Louverture

simply locked him up. In late December, after defeating Rigaud, he or-

dered Moïse to lead troops across the border. They were virtually unop-

posed, and a month later the governor of the Spanish colony capitulated—

he and his entourage soon left for Spain—and Louverture’s army occu-

pied the capital city, Santo Domingo. Accounts of his army’s reign in the

colony vary widely. One contemporary presented it in the manner of many

imperial apologists, describing how the “principles of French administra-

tion” brought “new industry and activity” to the Spanish colony, along with

“magnificent” new roads and a new economic prosperity. Others have de-

scribed a regime in which Louverture’s black officers enriched themselves