Read Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution Online

Authors: Laurent Dubois

Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (56 page)

them; we will burn the harvests and then take to the hills. They will be

forced to leave.” “Then,” announced Dessalines, “I will make you indepen-

dent. There will be no more whites among us.” As French reinforcements

gathered outside the fort, Dessalines spirited part of his army out by night, leaving those inside under the command of the officer Lamartinière. He

intended to mobilize local cultivators in an attempt to attack the French

surrounding the fort.50

The French, strengthened by the arrival of a unit under the command

of Rochambeau, surrounded the fort and began bombarding it with can-

non fire. After an artillery barrage, Rochambeau ordered a new frontal as-

sault, only to see his troops shattered as they approached the fort, retreat-

ing after the loss of several hundred soldiers. At night, wrote Lacroix, the

attacking soldiers heard their enemies singing “patriotic songs” that cele-

brated “the glory of France.” Hearing these songs, some soldiers looked to

their officers as if to say: “Could our barbaric enemies be right? Are we no

longer soldiers of the Republic?” Had they become, they wondered, “ser-

vile instruments” of politics, fighting for an immoral cause? The conflict in Saint-Domingue was, after all, one being fought between “two French armies, two enemy sisters,” with veterans of the long revolutionary wars fac-

ing off against each other.51

Although they held out bravely for three days and three nights, as the

siege continued the troops inside the fort became increasingly desper-

ate. Decimated by the cannon fire, on the brink of starvation—before

Dessalines left, Descourtilz reported, even he had “contented himself”

with two bananas as a meal—and running out of water, they had little hope

of holding out for long. Lamartinière decided on a daring attempt to break

out of the fort with the 500 soldiers left under his command. In what

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Lacroix admitted was a “remarkable feat of arms,” he managed to break

through the French lines and join with Dessalines’s troops. When the

French entered the fort, they found Descourtilz among the debris and

corpses. He had managed to survive, along with the “white musicians” who

had been employed previously by Louverture, and who had been ordered

by black officers to play such songs as the revolutionary favorite “Ca Ira!”

during the siege. In taking Crête-à-Pierrot, the French had suffered 1,500

soldiers killed and many more wounded, a serious loss for the expedition-

ary force. Leclerc, embarrassed by the defeat, ordered his officers to mis-

report the extent of the casualties, as he did in his own reports.52

Louverture’s army had held out and inflicted heavy losses on their en-

emy. Most important, it had survived. In the north, the rebel army ad-

vanced on the French, taking a number of towns in the mountains. Among

their leaders were Henri Christophe, the officers Macaya and Sans-Souci,

and Sylla, whose name suggests a Mandingo origin. In late March some of

Louverture’s troops under the command of Sans-Souci approached Le

Cap, reaching the hospital on its outskirts. Meanwhile rebels set fire to so

much of the northern plain that “at midnight it was possible” to read in the

center of Le Cap “by the light of the flames.” In early April Leclerc sent recently arrived French reinforcements into the plain, with some colonial

troops as scouts to lead them. The latter, however, defected, and many

French troops were killed in ambushes. A hundred were taken prisoner by

Sans-Souci and delivered to Louverture. “Toussaint still holds the moun-

tains,” Leclerc reported in late April, and he had under his command 4,000

troops and “a very considerable number of armed cultivators.” The only

way to “end this war” was to conquer and then occupy the mountains of the

north and the west, and to hold onto those areas he already controlled. But

to do so, he continually reminded the minister in Paris, he would need

more troops.53

Henri Christophe controlled an important stretch of the northern plain

and the nearby mountains, commanding an army of 1,500 soldiers and sev-

eral hundred armed cultivators. In mid-April, as battles with the French

continued in the area, he made contact with Leclerc and indicated he

would be willing to negotiate a surrender. The two men met in Le Cap,

and after Leclerc assured Christophe that “we had not come here to de-

stroy liberty,” Christophe agreed to the same conditions earlier offered to

Maurepas: he would preserve his rank and be integrated into the French

army.54

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Why did Christophe, who had started the war against Leclerc by burn-

ing Le Cap in February, surrender in April? This remains a puzzle. In

March the final peace treaty between Britain and France had been signed,

and although the news of this was not officially proclaimed in Saint-

Domingue until early May, it was probably already known through unof-

ficial channels. This news may have affected Christophe’s decision. He may

also have been tired of fighting, and unsure that his loyalty to Louverture

would pay off in the end; in a mid-April letter to Christophe, a French of-

ficer had invited him to give up the “errant and vagrant” life he was leading as a rebel leader and abandon the cause of the “ambitious” Louverture. According to one recent account, Christophe, having been given assurances

by General Leclerc, truly believed that Leclerc could “better guarantee his

future and the liberty of his brothers than the former governor, whose star

was fading.”55

It was a major victory for Leclerc, and a turning point in the first stage

of the war for Saint-Domingue. Louverture, probably fearing that with

peace with the British definitively signed he would be unable to hold

out against the French troops for much longer, and understanding that

Christophe’s defection had severely undermined his military position, soon

contacted Leclerc and began negotiating for his own surrender. The two

men soon met in Le Cap, where Louverture, surrounded by several hun-

dred members of his honor guard, signed an agreement according to which

he was to keep his rank and retire to his plantation at Ennery, while his soldiers would preserve their ranks and be incorporated into the French

army. With Louverture came Dessalines, and the two men, along with

Christophe, dined with Leclerc and his officer corps in Le Cap to celebrate

the event. While Christophe and Dessalines ate the food offered them,

Louverture refused everything. He ate only a small piece of cheese, doing

so only after having cut large slices off each of its sides, and holding it with his hands rather than using the silverware. He had granted his submission,

but not his trust, to the French. He was right to be suspicious, though he

miscalculated the kind of poison they were to use against him.56

“All the chiefs of the rebels have submitted,” Leclerc boasted to Bonaparte

in early May. Nevertheless, he explained apologetically, the “moment” had

“not yet arrived” to move onto the second stage of Bonaparte’s plan: the re-

moval of these officers to France. In fact Leclerc desperately needed these

officers, and the troops they brought with them, to maintain his hold on

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the colony. The troops he had initially brought with him had been severely

reduced by battle and disease, and he had not received sufficient rein-

forcements from across the Atlantic to be able to depend only on French

troops. For resistance continued throughout the colony, as many had not

followed Louverture, Dessalines, and Christophe into submission. In June

Leclerc wrote to Bonaparte that he would try to make the 4,000 troops he

expected to arrive soon pass as a force of 6,000. In the meantime, he had

no choice but to continue using the colonial troops to fight the insur-

gents.57

Leclerc was aware that the loyalty of the recently surrendered black

troops was quite fragile. The colonial minister in Paris had published some

of Leclerc’s earlier reports in French newspapers, and these publications

had made their way back to Saint-Domingue. In order to avoid antagoniz-

ing the people in the colony, Leclerc asked the minister to make sure that

future publications not include anything that “can destroy the ideas of lib-

erty and equality, which all here have on their lips.” Writing to Bonaparte,

he requested something more difficult: “I beg you to outlaw the publica-

tion of any jokes about blacks in the French newspapers. These undermine

my operations here.” Leclerc was certainly not committed to antiracism—

in the same letter to Bonaparte he complimented General Rochambeau

for being an honest man and a good soldier, and added, “he doesn’t like

blacks”—but he knew that anything that smelled of racism might make it

very difficult for him to hold onto Saint-Domingue.58

Leclerc also felt that Louverture’s very presence in the colony was a

threat. In this belief he was not alone. “Toussaint and the other leaders

only appear to have surrendered,” wrote one French officer, “and only

sought to give their troops an entry into your ranks so that they can sur-

prise you at the first appropriate moment.” According to Lacroix, the

“spirit” among the cultivators was also still rebellious, and they said that

their “submission” was in fact only a cease-fire until the month of August,

when many had predicted that the onset of disease would lead to the “anni-

hilation of the entire European army sent to Saint-Domingue.” Leclerc

would later write that Louverture had surrendered only because

Christophe and Dessalines told him that they were no longer willing to

fight the French, and in the meantime he was “trying to organize an insur-

rection among the cultivators in order to make them rise up as a mass.”59

Among those who were still actively fighting the French were the of-

ficers Sans-Souci and Sylla, the latter set up in a camp in an area called

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Mapou. It was, wrote one officer at the time, a “rallying point for bad sub-

jects and the last hope of the enemies of France and of all public order.” It was also not far from where Louverture was living on his plantation at

Ennery, and indeed it seems that Sylla was in regular communication with

his old commander. The rebels at Mapou defended their camp skillfully,

using the old tactics of the slave insurgents of 1791. They surrounded the

approaches with traps: pits covered with branches, and boards studded

with nails and covered over with leaves, which as one officer wrote pierced

not just “bare feet”—of which there were many among Leclerc’s troops—

but shoes. The rebels added the “barbarous refinement,” in the words of

one French officer, of putting “a few rocks or pieces of wood” in front of

them, requiring advancing soldiers to leap or jump down into the thin layer

of vegetation they took for solid ground.60

In late May a French mission sent against Mapou ended in disaster. It

was weakened before it began when some of the colonial troops who were

to accompany it defected to Sylla’s side. The remaining troops tried to at-

tack a position high up on a group of rocks as they were fired on from

above, seeking to avoid the rocks rolled down toward them, and falling into

the murderous traps that were all around. From the camp women shouted

“cries of joy” every time a French soldier fell. Eventually Sylla was dis-

lodged from the Mapou by a force that included colonial troops, though he

regrouped elsewhere. Other French columns suffered more; one group of

thirty sent to attack a band that had been ambushing French troops were

“killed to the last.”61

Suspecting that Louverture was secretly both in contact with and sup-

portive of the rebel groups led by his former officers, in early June Leclerc decided to rid the island of this “gilded negro.” “Toussaint is acting in

bad faith,” wrote Leclerc to Bonaparte on June 6, “just as I expected.”

The same day, some of Leclerc’s officers, using a clever pretext—that

Louverture was needed to work with a local officer to end acts of banditry

that had been taking place in the region where he lived—enticed him to a

meeting and then overcame the general’s light guard and arrested him.

“You are now nothing in Saint-Domingue,” one of them announced; “give

me your sword.” “So finished the first of the blacks,” writes Lacroix. “For

the first time,” comments one biographer, “Louverture lost at the danger-

ous game of deception.” His family—including his wife Suzanne, his sons

Isaac and Placide, and a niece—were also arrested and sent across the At-

lantic with him. As he boarded the ship to exile at Gonaïves, he famously

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