Toussaint Louverture (32 page)

Moyse, who hated whites even more bitterly than Dessalines, had a still more intransigent attitude. “The French are no good in this country, and there is no one but them who trouble us, but I will do so much to them that I will oblige them all to leave and abandon their properties. If it was in my power, I would soon be rid of them. That would be one less job to do; what one has begun, one must finish. Let France send her forces here, what will they do? Nothing. I wish she would send three, four, or five hundred thousand men; that would be so many
more guns and ammunition for our brothers who are not armed. When we first began to fight for our liberty, we had only one gun, then two, three, and we finished by having all the guns of the French who came here.”
²³

In the fall of 1801, Moyse became the focal point of a gathering discontent with Toussaint's draconian labor policy and gathering suspicion of his friendliness with the white planter class. As usual, there was tremendous instinctive resistance among the African-born majority of the former slaves to cooperating with the laborious requirements of the French-model society Toussaint and the other Creole black leaders were trying to create. The natural preference of the Africans was to revert to subsistence farming, which was not very demanding in Saint Domingue (one observer calculated that in this fertile zone three months of work would produce the necessities for twelve), and to the manners and mores of African village life—a tendency which would persist in Haiti for the next two hundred years. In 1801 there was plenty of land available for such use, especially on the thinly populated Spanish side. To prevent unauthorized migration into that area, Toussaint had forbidden sales of formerly Spanish land in lots smaller than fifty carreaux (roughly two hundred acres), but this policy was difficult to enforce. The more the military had to force the former slaves to do plantation labor, the more unpopular the army became.

Toussaint had made Moyse commander of all the Northern Department—previously and potentially the most productive region of the colony—but Moyse was not willing to take the extreme and violent measures Dessalines had used to make the south and the west produce. Contrary to Toussaint's program for reestablishing the plantation economy, Moyse was inclined to allow the plantations of the north to be parceled out into small holdings. The new Canton Louverture cut a slice out of Moyse's territory in the north, and Moyse suspected that Toussaint would give this command to Dessalines, rather than to him. Moreover, Moyse felt that the constitution which Toussaint had devised for the colony contained dangerous infringements on general liberty. Julien Raimond's son-in-law Pascal, who had become one of Toussaint's aides after the collapse of the Third Commission, warned
his general in chief that Moyse seemed implausibly unconscious of trouble brewing all over the north.

On the night of October 29, a revolt broke out on the Northern Plain in the style of the first rising of 1791—whites were massacred from Fort Liberte to the gates of Cap Francais. The new insurrection swept all over the Northern Department within two days, carrying the towns of Dondon, Acul, Plaisance, Port Margot, and Limbe. The war cry of the rebels was “General Moyse is with us—death to all the whites!” Joseph Flaville, the ever-insubordinate commandant of Limbe, slaughtered the last refugees on the waterfront there as they were trying to find boats to escape. Bayon de Libertat, Toussaint's former master and old friend, was counted among the dead. Moyse might have made a point of that. “Whatever my old uncle does,” he had said, “I cannot resign myself to be the executioner of my race; he is always chewing me out for the interests of the metropole; but those are the interests of the Whites, and I won't love the Whites until they give me back the eye they made me lose in battle.”
²⁴

The revolt was well and carefully timed, and caught much of the black military leadership off guard, or almost. Dessalines was celebrating his marriage to Marie Claire Heureuse,
&femme de couleur
he had met during the siege of Jacmel, when she persuaded him to allow her to bring medical supplies through his lines to nurse the sick and wounded in the surrounded town. The wedding festivities, which cost 100,000 livres and went on for three days, took place at Petite Riviere, in the Artibonite region. Toussaint joined the celebration, though he had to tear himself away from La Dame Fissour to do so. Moyse, who had other plans, did not attend.

Unfortunately for Moyse's intentions, Henry Christophe also skipped Dessalines's wedding, and was in position to shut down the revolt inside the gates of Cap Francais before it was well begun. He arrested a ringleader named Trois Balles and soon extracted enough other names from him to make thirty arrests. Within twenty-four hours, he was able to reassure the American merchants and agents who had fled to their ships at the first signs of trouble that Le Cap had returned to good order.

Next, Christophe subdued Limbe, Port Margot, and Acul, captur-
ing Joseph Flaville in the process. General Vernet soon regained Plaisance. Dessalines, once recovered from his wedding night, was not far behind. On the plantations where white owners had been slain, he simply massacred the entire work gang.

Toussaint himself was so enraged that when he passed through the rebel zone he ordered the mutineer regiments on parade and summoned certain men to step out of the ranks and blow their own brains out. None refused to obey this order. Christophe had brought Joseph Flaville as a prisoner to Le Cap; Toussaint ordered him and several other conspirators to be blown to bits by grapeshot in the Place d'Armes, before the cathedral there. In a similar scene at Fort Liberte, the rebel Captain Hillarion was bayoneted. In the hills above Le Cap, Toussaint slaughtered a hundred-odd cultivators who had joined the rebellion, and he conducted similar exemplary executions all across the Northern Plain. For years afterward, the residents of Trou du Nord pointed out an old caimite tree around whose trunk the rebels of that region had been massacred.

In the case of Moyse himself, Toussaint—most uncharacteristically—seemed to hesitate. At Dondon, the revolt had been subdued by Moyse himself. At Marmelade, the next town west along the Cordon de l'Ouest, Toussaint received Moyse as if his nephew might possibly still be a loyal subordinate commander. “Everything leads me to believe that you are the author of this revolt,” he told Moyse. “Everywhere the rebels have been putting it out that they act in your name—your honor depends on your j ustifying yourself, and the first way to do it is to bring everything back into good order, because if you are guilty your general's rank will not save you—You are coming from Dondon—how many rebels have you punished there? None. How many have you had arrested?—No one. How can it be that you, commander of the Northern Department, come from a quarter where horrible assassinations have been committed and you have not had anyone arrested or punished! Go back to Dondon, have the guilty parties arrested, but don't have anyone shot—let them be brought to me alive and under sure guard.”
²⁵

By the look of these orders, Toussaint was trying to give Moyse an out. If he was doing it for reasons of sentiment, it was a highly unusual
move—never before or after did Toussaint leave anyone standing who had threatened him. Agent Roume, whose analysis of the Moyse affair has a distinctly paranoid flavor, suggests that Toussaint might have been behind the Moyse rebellion himself, and that he meant to leave Moyse free and in feigned rebellion against him, so that when a French military expedition arrived in Saint Domingue, Moyse could lead the white soldiers into fatal ambushes. Far-fetched, yes—but as Roume justly points out, it was unlike Toussaint to let Moyse go, and unlike Moyse to put himself back in Toussaint's power without a struggle.

Returning to Dondon, Moyse obeyed Toussaint's orders, up to a point. He arrested twenty-four men, shot thirteen of them, and sent eleven back to Toussaint—but it was the dead men, presumably, who would have implicated him more certainly in the revolt. Nevertheless, Toussaint still left Moyse at large. But Dessalines appeared at Marme-lade to let Moyse know he had no business there. Now part of the Canton Louverture, the town was under Dessalines's command. Moyse passed briefly through Le Cap, without finding much of a welcome; when he returned to Dondon the inhabitants shuttered themselves in their houses.

Toussaint may have hoped that Moyse would flee the colony; if so, Moyse was too stubborn to depart. During a conference at Hericourt Plantation, Christophe and Dessalines persuaded the general in chief that Moyse must be disposed of—Dessalines insisted that Toussaint must get rid of him altogether. Toussaint ordered Moyse's arrest and had him confined in the fort of Port de Paix. By that time all of his secretaries, aides, and junior officers had been executed for their part in the revolt—so Moyse was convicted on the testimony of these dead men. Brought before a firing squad, Moyse himself gave the order to fire.

This episode caused the violent deaths of the two men to whom Toussaint had probably been closest: Moyse and Bayon de Libertat. It also left a dangerous fault line in the reconstructed social fabric of the colony. The violence of the repression silenced Moyse's sympathizers, but it did not make them disappear.

Immediately after asserting control over Spanish Santo Domingo, when “from Cap Samana to Cap Tiburon the authority of the chief of
the Blacks extended its sovereign power,” Toussaint had hastened to secure his position politically by creating a constitution for the colony. In March 1801 a constitutional assembly, composed of representatives elected from the departments of the colony, convened; curiously, this body included no
nouveaux libres.
Moyse was elected, but refused to serve—an early harbinger of his discontent with Toussaint's consolidation of power.

Julien Raimond, experienced in diplomacy from his service on the various commissions and his long effort lobbying for rights for the
gens de couleur,
was a member of the assembly, along with two other colored men; the seven whites came from the
grand blancs
class, chief among them Bernard Borgella, the mayor of Port-au-Prince who had become part of Toussaint's inner circle. By May, the assembly had produced a succinct and lucid document of seventy-seven articles grouped in thirteen sections. The seventy-seventh article authorized Toussaint Louverture to put the constitution into practice right away, pending its approval by the French government.

Article 1, defining the territory of the colony, declares that Saint Domingue is “part of the French empire, but submitted to special laws.”
²⁶
The last phrase (aside from its echo of the home government's most recent pronouncement) had a disagreeable resonance; “special laws” in the past had permitted slavery as an exception to the Rights of Man. But Article 3 puts it very plainly: “Slaves cannot exist on this territory; servitude is abolished forever. All men are born, live and die free and French.” The article goes on to outlaw racial discrimination of any kind, in terms of employment and under the law. Article
6
declared the “Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion” to be the only faith recognized in Saint Domingue.

There follow several sections on morals and property rights, and a firm restatement of Toussaint's labor policy. Article 17 states, somewhat euphemistically: “The introduction of cultivators, indispensable to the reestablishment and growth of agriculture, will take place in Saint Domingue; the Constitution charges the governor to take appropriate measures to encourage and favor this augmentation of arms, to stipulate and balance the different interests, to assure and guarantee the respective engagements resulting from this introduction.”
²⁷
What “the
introduction of cultivators” boiled down to was the importation of slaves. By the terms of Article 3, such arrivals would have to be freed as soon as they reached the colony, but the cloudy language about “engagements” suggests that some form of indentured servitude was being contemplated. Like the early rulers of Haiti who followed him, Toussaint was willing to participate in a one-way version of the slave trade in order to increase his workforce and his army. Perhaps he justified this dubious idea on the grounds that all slaves imported to Saint Domingue would, constitutionally, be freed there. Bunel was dispatched to Jamaica to purchase ten thousand slaves from the English (at the same time that he made sure that the constitution would not disturb To ussaint's arrangements with Maitland), and Corbett, the British agent at Port-au-Prince, was also discussing the importation of slaves with Toussaint.

In Article 28: “The Constitution names as Governor the citizen Toussaint Louverture, General in Chief of the Army of Saint Domingue, and in consideration of the important service he has rendered to the colony in the most critical circumstances of the Revolution, and by the wish of the grateful inhabitants, the reins of government are confided to him for the rest of his glorious life.”
²⁸
Article 29 says that future governors would be limited to a five-year term, renewable “by reason of his good administration,” but Article 30 awards Toussaint the right to name his successor—in a secret document to be unsealed only “at the unhappy event of his death.”
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This clause looked a lot like a recipe for the foundation of a dynasty, but (since Toussaint's legitimate sons were young and inexperienced, and the older two were hostages in France) it functioned more as an apple of discord among the black officer corps. Toussaint might have chosen Moyse or Maurepas or Charles Belair or Christophe or Dessalines to succeed him; the secrecy of the succession was probably not the stabilizing element it was meant to be. In Article 31, whoever succeeded Toussaint Louverture was required to take an oath to “remain attached to the French government.”
³⁰

It is commonly held that the Constitutional Assembly was no more than a puppet body, and that the constitution of 1801 was a de facto
declaration of independence. Yet it seems more likely that the composition of the assembly reflected Toussaint's desire to produce a document that ‘would be palatable not only to France but also to other powers closer by: the English colonies and the United States. Toussaint himself had no direct experience of the ‘world beyond the shores of Hispaniola, but he made sure that the Constitutional Assembly ‘was controlled by men ‘well seasoned in foreign affairs. Despite the frequent insistence on loyalty and subordination to France, the imperial tendency of the document ‘was unmistakable; the constitution gives Toussaint the dubious distinction of inventing the Haitian concept of rulership for life. And yet his counselors may have been sincere in advising him in that direction.