Toussaint Louverture (29 page)

Toussaint would stop at practically nothing to secure himself—and the principle of general liberty for all the former slaves—from present or potential enemies, within and without. As important as eliminating any possibility for further rebellion on the part of the mulatto caste was the extension of his authority over the entire island. The last two delegations from the French government had penetrated Toussaint's realm
via Spanish Santo Domingo, and with next to no military force at their disposal. Observing the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte had caused Toussaint to begin considering the possibility of a serious armed incursion by the same route.

Vincent, Michel, and Raimond had arrived with an order forbidding Toussaint to take possession of the Spanish side of the island. In this first week of November, Minister of Marine Forfait reiterated this order. In a separate letter to Roume he requested that the latter remain in his role as agent of France in Saint Domingue and give Toussaint the benefit of his counsel—pending Napoleons planned reorganization of the colony's administration which (Forfait assured Toussaint) “will convince you of the special esteem he has for you and for your brave Blacks.”
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Given the earlier promise, or menace, of “special laws” being once more applied to French colonies, Toussaint was not much comforted by Forfait's dispatches, except in that they confirmed the authority of Roume. Not long before, a French fleet carrying reinforcements to an army in Egypt had published a false destination: Saint Domingue. Toussaint had been spooked by this carefully deployed rumor and moved to believe that the next expedition supposedly bound his way might actually arrive where it was advertised.

Roume had always been a reluctant partner inToussaint's project to take over Spanish Santo Domingo. Toward the end of November 1800, Toussaint accused him of sabotaging that plan. On this and other less specific charges (like Sonthonax and Hedouville before him, Roume was said to have “sowed discord among us and fomented trouble”), Toussaint had Roume arrested. Instead of deporting him to France, he had Moyse escort him to Dondon, to remain with his family, guarded by twenty men, in a mountaintop shack sometimes described as a chicken house, “where he will stay until the French government recalls him to make an account of himself.”
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Nine months later, Toussaint sent Roume to the United States, where he lingered a while in Philadelphia before finally returning to France.

Roume had come to Saint Domingue with the First Commission in the early 1790s, which gave him much longer experience than most of his
French counterparts there; moreover, the family relationships he described in his admonitory letter to Rigaud gave him special insight into the culture of the colony's blacks and
gens de couleur.
To Kerver-seau, Roume praised Toussaint as fervently as he did to Rigaud, writing in January 1799, “Whatever high opinion I had of his heart and his spirit, I was still a long way from the reality. He is a philosopher, a legislator, a general and a good citizen. The merit of Toussaint Louverture is so transcendent that I have a lot of trouble understanding why so many intelligent people don't see it, and only try to mock and slander him. If, after the justice I have just rendered to this astonishing man, I was not afraid of seeming too vain, I would add that since we have been together, two things are one: either he tells me just what I was about to tell him, or it's I who advances just what he wanted to propose to me. The same zeal for the Republic, the same love for Saint Domingue, the same urgency for the reestablishment of order and agriculture, and for the constitutional organization of the country.”
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A few months later, the symbiosis between Roume and Toussaint had very much decayed, and even at this writing Roume may have suspected that the letter to Kerverseau might end up in Toussaint's hands, for Toussaint certainly did try to intercept Roume's correspondence later on, when the trust between them was broken.

Once Roume was out of Toussaint's keeping, he wrote from Philadelphia, perhaps with a freer hand, frankly accusing him of a “project to make Saint Domingue rebellious against France and to usurp for himself the supreme power in the island.” Everything he had won up to now, “so far from slaking the insatiable Toussaint, has only increased his avarice, his pride, and his passion for conquest.”
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The latter passion, Roume suggested, might move Toussaint to launch his armies on Jamaica or Cuba or both. In a subsequent letter, Roume (who himself could never begin to control Toussaint) portrays him as the pawn of his white advisers: “In spite of the fanatical ambition and profound rascality of Toussaint, I affirm one more time that he is less guilty than those vile white flatterers, Age, Idlinger, Collet and the others. The most terrible of his passions, the desire to rule, had made this old negro, barely escaped from the chains of slavery, mad and enraged.”
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In a letter to the Spanish ambassador to the United States, Roume mentioned his
feeling that Toussaint might soon be betrayed and overthrown by certain officers in the black army, and explored the notion of having him kidnapped for trial and imprisonment somewhere outside Saint Domingue.

The extreme contradictions in Roume's view of his subject over the years make one wonder if the Frenchman had himself been deranged by his experience with Toussaint—sometimes his picture of Toussaint's “Machiavellianism” seems downright paranoid—or if all his opposite statements were somehow necessary to cover the contradictory quality of Toussaint's actual character. Even in his most hostile letters, Roume remained fascinated. Toussaint is “an extraordinary being,” he wrote, and “he alone holds the thread through the labyrinth”
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of Saint Domingue's peculiarly complex story.

With Roume under wraps in his Dondon chicken house, Toussaint was not immediately concerned with what the French agent might think of him. He notified Governor Don Garcia that he meant to carry out Roume's order of April 27 by sending Moyse with a sufficient force to take control of the eastern portion of the island for France, ignoring not only the more recent orders of Forfait to the contrary, but also the fact that Roume himself had rescinded the April 27 order on June
16.
Accounts of the progress of the black army across the formerly Spanish territory differ. Though Toussaint had promised that private property would be respected (a usual feature of his rhetoric which was usually supported by his actions), one Spanish observer claimed: “The flight of the Spaniards who abandoned their lands was found justified by the abominations committed by this army and especially by the General Maurepas, that execrable tiger, who, with impunity, behaved himself just like his bandits who went to the last excesses against people of both sexes and their property.”
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Moyse and Toussaint himself were accused of appropriating rich Spanish plantations for themselves and of looting livestock and other goods while leaving the rightful owners destitute.

By other accounts, the French administration and the fresh energy which Toussaint imported into the region were a shot in the arm for the former Spanish colony, which had languished for a long time in the doldrums. The French general Pamphile de Lacroix claimed that the
union of the two territories was of mutual benefit, that it created a commerce in livestock badly needed on the French side which was very profitable to the livestock owners on the Spanish side; moreover, “the black soldiers, subject to an austere discipline, had done only a little damage; and there remained in the country no more than the troops needed to hold garrisons, and these garrisons also helped circulate money.”
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Once in control of Santo Domingo, Toussaint quickly suspended the clear-cutting of the forests, where the Spanish had been frantically harvesting mahogany and other valuable hardwoods as their best way of getting money out of the colony they were about to lose. He began an important road-building program, and according to Lacroix, he trained the Spanish horses to faster gaits than those known to the Spanish horse trainers. “In the final analysis, this invasion of the blacks, though so much feared, right away became a benefit for the nomadic people of the Spanish part.”
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The benefit was not accepted without some resistance. Don Garcia received Toussaint's ultimatum on January 6, and was able to mobilize some fifteen hundred men toward the border (one of their commanders was Toussaint's old adversary Antoine Chanlatte). Meanwhile, Toussaint had sent two columns into Spanish territory. Three thousand men commanded by Moyse crossed at Ouanaminthe, while forty-five hundred led by Toussaint and Paul Louverture came via Mirebalais. The Spanish defense soon crumpled; Chanlatte was defeated by Paul Louverture at the Nisao River; and Toussaint received a delegation letting him know that since both Chanlatte and the French general Kerverseau had abruptly fled on a boat bound for Venezuela, there would be no further opposition to a peaceful takeover. By that time, Moyse's force was two days' march from Ciudad Santo Domingo, where civilians feared a repetition of Jean-François's massacre at Fort Liberte.

On January 26, Toussaint accepted the keys of Ciudad Santo Domingo from Don Garcia—his former commander in the Spanish service. These two did a little verbal fencing over Toussaint's previous career in the Spanish military, but in the end the settlement was friendly enough. Though Toussaint refused to take a conventional Spanish loyalty oath, he did solemnly swear to amnesty all Spanish
colonists who chose to remain and govern them according to their newfound rights as French citizens. A month later Don Garcia took most of the remaining Spanish troops to Cuba.

In accordance with current French law, Toussaint announced the abolition of slavery in formerly Spanish Santo Domingo. The importation of African slaves to the Western Hemisphere had been first conceived and carried out in Hispaniola; now a son of African slaves had put an end to it on the same spot.

Who was the man who had done these things, and what were his ultimate intentions? If Toussaint had meant to declare independence, now would have been the time. Maitland, speaking for Britain, and the John Adams administration in the United States had made it sufficiently clear that they would support an independent Saint Domingue. But Toussaint resisted this temptation. Though he had begun to behave in many ways as the chief of an independent state, he stopped well short of any open declaration. So long as Saint Domingue remained French at least in name, she could better elude complete dominance by either Britain or the United States, whose presence in the region was much more imposing. As François “Papa Doc” Duvalier would do in twentieth-century Haiti, Toussaint was charting a separate course among the much greater powers that surrounded him, careful never to become a satellite of any one of them.

His enemies, of whom there were plenty, saw him as a dictator in the making. It was even rumored that the British had encouraged him to crown himself king. But Toussaint seemed to prefer a republican government, at least in form. To be sure, that was a fledgling system in Saint Domingue, where the vast majority of the population had left slavery less than a decade before. If Toussaint's actual methods of government were a long way from pure democracy, the same could certainly be said of France.

Both his private character and his public style combined elements of ruthlessness and benevolence so extreme that it is hard to imagine just how they could coexist in the same person. His repression of Rigaud's rebellion was at times so merciless that it is difficult to deny a strain of hypocrisy in the public prayers he uttered during the very
same period. Nevertheless, some of his actions suggest that he retained the belief that forgiveness and reconciliation always remain possible even in the worst of cases—a Christian tenet underlying all his ceremonial gestures of faith.

If a kindly paternalism was evident in Toussaint's way of ruling, the signs of raw authoritarianism were certainly there too. Wherever it might spring up, rebellion would be crushed. The labor policy was strict and severe, and its enforcement meant increasing intrusion of the military into all areas of civil administration and civil life. Toussaint's Saint Domingue was on a defense footing, and would maintain that stance by whatever means necessary.

The thing to be defended, above all, was the freedom of the former slaves. Thus far, at least, Toussaint's purpose was clear and unwavering. At whatever cost, the flag of universal liberty flew—and would continue to fly—from one end of the island to the other.