Read Toussaint Louverture Online
Authors: Madison Smartt Bell
In France, the spring 1797 elections had brought a royalist majority to power. In the new National Assembly the dispossessed land and slave owners of Saint Domingue found a vigorous advocate in Vincent Marie Vienot de Vaublanc. His speeches were bitterly critical of Sonthonax, “who has sacrificed everything to the Africans, in the hope of dominating them through each other,” but instead finds himself “reduced to trembling before them and to seeing his orders despised by men who owe only to him the authority with which they abuse him.”
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In Vaublanc's view, Sonthonax had become the prime example of the humiliation of whites brought about by his own misguided policies, notably the abolition of slavery. Vaublanc's rhetoric called more or less openly for the restoration of the ancien regime in Saint Domingue.
Toussaint Louverture was well aware of these developments and of the menace they represented to liberty for all. One theory suggests that he forced Sonthonax out of the colony as a sacrifice to Vaublanc's faction, which had indeed called for Sonthonax's removal. But Vaublanc's rhetoric was also aimed directly at Toussaint and his officers. “And what a military government! To whose hands is it confided? To vulgar and ignorant negroes, incapable of distinguishing the most unrestrained
license from the austere liberty which yields to the law.”
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In September 1797, Laveaux made a speech defending Toussaint against such vitriol, describing him as “a man gifted with every military talent” and “a Republican full of sentiments of humanity”
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and protesting that his loyalty to France was absolute.
In November, Toussaint himself wrote to the French Directory, reminding the government that he trusted in France enough to send his children there. At the same time he made it painfully clear that preserving liberty for the former slaves of Saint Domingue would be more important to him even than the welfare of his children should circumstance force him to make that choice. The conclusion of this letter, much as it tries to insist on his belief in French support for general liberty, is riddled with doubt and crowned with defiance: “could men who have once enjoyed the benefits of liberty look on calmly while it is ravished from them! They bore their chains when they knew no condition of life better than that of slavery. But today when they have left it, if they had a thousand lives, they would sacrifice them all rather than to be subjected again to slavery. But no, the hand that has broken our chains will not subject us to them again. France will not renounce her principles … But if, to restore slavery in Saint Domingue, you were to do so, then I declare to you, that would be to attempt the impossible; we knew how to face danger to win our liberty, and we will know how to face death to keep it.”
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France decided to try a diplomatic course. On March 27, General Joseph d'Hedouville arrived in Saint Domingue as the agent of the French government. On March 27, 1798, he landed in Ciudad Santo Domingo, on the Spanish side of the island which had been ceded to France by the Treaty of Basel but into which Toussaint's power did not yet reach. En route overland to French Saint Domingue, Hedouville consulted with Commissioner Roume and with General Kerverseau. The latter was Toussaint's sharpest critic in the French military, but Hedouville had also been briefed by Colonel Charles Humbert Marie Vincent, who was Toussaint's greatest military friend and supporter after Laveaux.
When Toussaint wrote to Laveaux following Sonthonax's forced
departure, he blamed much of the trouble on the difficulty of governing by committee, for the Third Commission really had squandered much of its energy on internal strife. Far better, Toussaint reasoned, that France should be represented in Saint Domingue by one sole leader. “I want him to be European, this chief, because I want us not to lose sight of the country from which emanates the power that rules a colony two thousand leagues away from its metropole.”
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Of course, Laveaux himself had met this description better than anyone. The new agent was a different sort of officer.
Hedouville's recent service in the region of Poitou, which had been a hotbed of counterrevolutionary and royalist uprisings since 1793, had earned him the sobriquet “Pacificator of the Vendee.” Sonthonax, upon his second return to France, had drawn a comparison to Saint Domingue by denouncing Toussaint as “one of the chiefs of the Vendee of Saint Domingue.'
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Villaret-Joyeuse, a partisan of Vaublanc who would later command the fleet that brought Napoleon's invading army to the colony, made that comparison more precise: “Why don't you try in Saint Domingue what you have done with so much success in the Vendee? Saint Domingue is also a Vendee to be reconquered; it is devastated by the double scourge of civil war and foreign war; it's only by force of arms and by energy mixed with gentleness that you will succeed in bringing it into submission.”
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Hedouville, whose successes in the Vendee had relied on diplomacy as much as battle, arrived in Saint Domingue better supplied with gentleness than with force: the home government had allowed him scarcely any fresh European troops. Kerverseau, having sized up his situation, advised him to display confidence, though he had very little material strength: “I must tell you then, that despite your character as Agent of the Directory, Toussaint will be more powerful than you. An order signed by him will have more force than all your proclamations, than those of the Directory, than all the decrees of this Legislative Corps. But all his power will be yours, once he is certain of your principles.”
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Hedouville installed himself in Cap Francais on April 20, 1798. Toussaint, wary of the newcomer, was not there to meet him; in a series of letters, he excused himself by citing his campaigns against the English invaders on the west coast and the distance over difficult terrain.
In view of his notoriously rapid movement all over the colony, the latter explanation was not very convincing. In fact, Toussaint was busy conducting his own negotiations for a British withdrawal with General Thomas Maitland, who had arrived to take over the British operations in Saint Domingue just three weeks before Hedouville's landing.
The adventure in Saint Domingue had not turned out as the British hoped. They had not been able to make the area of the colony they occupied anywhere near as profitable as it had formerly been for France. They earned something better than £500,000 from exports during the occupation, which, on the other hand, cost them more than £7 million in money, as well as about 20,000 casualties. At Maitland's arrival, the British had only 2,500 European soldiers under arms, plus a few thousand black and colored troops of doubtful reliability, while Toussaint was reputed to have 20,000 men to bring against them.
Having driven the British from Mirebalais and the interior, Toussaint was now able to put pressure on the cordon of forts which protected Arcahaie. In March 1798, he broke through it. Though the formidable Lapointe was still holding out for the British in Arcahaie itself, Toussaint's advance allowed him to seriously threaten the British positions to the north, at Saint Marc, and to the south at Port-au-Prince. The British situation in the Western Department looked less and less tenable.
Maitland had studied the rivalry between Rigaud and Toussaint and concluded that the two generals were unlikely ever to cooperate. He believed that Laplume, who since the overthrow of Dieudonne had commanded a large force for the French republic just to the south of British-held Port-au-Prince, was a quasi-independent third factor; for Laplume's loyalty to Toussaint was never certain. The British general knew that possession of Port-au-Prince would greatly empower whichever leader it was yielded to. If Toussaint got the prize, the British would still have both Laplume and Rigaud in a buffer zone between Port-au-Prince and the British post at the port of Jeremie toward the western tip of the Grande Anse. Furthermore, by dealing with Toussaint, Maitland might drive a wedge between him and Hedouville, whose arrival made an easy exit for the British less likely.
On April 23, Maitland offered to withdraw all British forces from the west of Saint Domingue, on condition that the French colonists who had collaborated with the British be granted amnesty. Over the next few days, Toussaint negotiated that the forts and their cannon would be turned over to him intact—a major and rather surprising concession. The accord was signed on April 30, and not until the following day did Toussaint write to Hedouville at Le Cap to notify him of the fait accompli. Teeth presumably clenched, Hedouville approved his action, noting marginally that French law and the French Constitution permitted no one to come to terms with proscribed emigres. But Hedouville could not influence events in the Western Department from where he sat, and troops commanded by Christophe Mornet and Toussaints brother Paul were already advancing toward Port-au-Prince across the Cul de Sac plain.
A great many Frenchmen chose to depart on British ships; those who remained were understandably apprehensive. Laplume was also present in force outside Port-au-Prince, and when he struck a peace agreement with the mulattoes of Croix des Bouquets, Bernard Borgella, the
grand blancs
mayor, sent a delegation to thank him. Then Christophe Mornet arrived in Port-au-Prince to assure Borgella that the transition would be orderly. A Frenchman in the town described Mornet's men:
His tattered troops, covered in a few rags molded to their trunks, true sans-culottes, starving and in want of everything, naturally should have breathed nothing but pillage; so far from anything like that, not only did they not commit the lightest insult, but we even saw them, upon entering a city evacuated by the enemy, go without rations for two days without a murmur. Where are the European soldiers who, in such a case, could maintain so exact a discipline?
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When Toussaint entered Port-au-Prince soon afterward, the amnestied French colonists came out to receive him with tremendous fanfare—doubtless born of their relief at the extraordinary self-control of the black troops already occupying the town. Toussaint appeared
with extreme modesty, wearing a plain field uniform without epaulettes, his customary head-cloth tied beneath his tricorner hat. He declined the most extravagant gestures of the welcoming whites, declaring, “Only God should walk beneath a dais; only to the sole master of the universe should one offer incense.”
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He had, however, promised to respect their property, and he backed up the promise by sending the stray cultivators of the region back to work on the plantations. On May 26, he announced to all citizens of Port-au-Prince: “The times of fanaticism are no more; the rule of law has succeeded that of anarchy”
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When the British fleet sailed on May 28, Toussaint arranged aTe Deum in the Port-au-Prince cathedral to celebrate.
The evacuation of the west left the British with only two posts in the colony. Though the naval bases at Jeremie (threatened by Rigaud at nearby Tiburon) and at Mole Saint-Nicolas (which Maitland judged could not withstand a siege backed by the artillery which Toussaint could bring to bear from land) were valuable to the defense of Jamaica, Maitland judged that they were not worth their cost. On July 27, he reported to Governor Balcarres of Jamaica that he was on the verge of deciding to evacuate Saint Domingue altogether.
Throughout the summer of 1798, Maitland received emissaries from both Hedouville and Toussaint, still with the goal of promoting dissension between them—as Hedouville warned Toussaint in a July 5 letter. Aside from the particular differences developing between the agent and the general in chief, the traditionally contentious division of power between Saint Domingue's civil and military authorities was there for Maitland to exploit. On July 30, he decided to close the deal with Toussaint, having concluded (as Kerverseau had done) that as commander in chief of the army the black general held the real reins of power.
The accord for the evacuation of Jeremie, signed by General Huin for Toussaint and Colonel Harcourt for Maitland on August 13, was immediately put into practice; the English were gone from the south by August 23. This agreement, as well as the one for the evacuation of Mole concluded on August 30, contained favorable terms for emigre colonists which were irritating to Hedouville—not to mention that
Maitland had promised earlier that he would surrender Mole to no one but Hedouville himself. But to complete the undermining of the agents authority, Toussaint and Maitland signed a secret agreement at Point Bourgeoise on August 31: a nonaggression pact and trade deal which lifted the British blockade from Toussaint's Saint Domingue, and gave him a free hand within its borders so long as he honored a promise not to export the black revolution to the British Caribbean colonies. (Toussaint kept his end of the bargain a year later by betraying a conspiracy to raise a slave revolt in Jamaica.) The arrangement concluded, Maitland and Toussaint repaired to the last British base at Mole, where the white general treated the black one to a festive dinner, and afterward gave Toussaint the elaborate silver service used at the meal, with the compliments of the king of England.
Toussaint and Maitland shared amiable feelings toward members of the
grand blanc
group in exile, and Toussaint let Maitland know that he would welcome the return of such refugees not only from the United States but also from Jamaica—meaning that the French collaborators who had fled the Western Department with the English would be allowed to come back almost right away. Hedouville, for his part, was expelling
grands blancs
pardoned by Toussaint as emigres, though not so fast as Toussaint was admitting them.
Toussaint's policy gave him a burst of popularity among the whites of the Western Department. The ladies of Port-au-Prince, who had caught on to his taste for elaborate religious ceremonies, took up a collection for a thanksgiving mass. Toussaint, far less reserved than when he had first taken possession of the town, mounted the pulpit to declaim: “I am going to imitate Jesus Christ, whom we adore in this temple—he forgave in the name of his Father; I will forgive in the name of the Republic.”
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