Toussaint Louverture (38 page)

Dessalines doubled back across the plain of Cul de Sac, razing the plantations and rounding up white prisoners. On February 28, he met Toussaint above the town of Petite Riviere, on a hilltop called La Crete a Pierrot. A fort begun there by the British had once been under the command of Blanc Cassenave. Later on, Toussaint had completed the fortifications, with the help of a French engineer. The hilltop, tucked in a bend of the Artibonite River, controlled the passes into the Grand Cahos mountains and access to the Mirebalais area and the Central Plateau from Arcahaie and Saint Marc on the coast. The fort, which was hardly a hundred yards square and armed with only twelve cannon, was the centerpiece of the second phase of Toussaint's defense.

As Cap Francais was for the time being uninhabitable, Leclerc established a temporary headquarters in Port-au-Prince. Among the surviving white population, the first flush of enthusiasm for the French arrival was rather quick to fade. Though glad to be relieved of the more tyrannical aspects of Toussaint's rule, the proprietors of Port-au-Prince were concerned that the French army might treat them and their territory not as fellow citizens and French ground to be defended, but as a conquered land to be exploited and looted. Napoleon's armies had formed such habits all over Europe, and stories of their predatory style had already circulated in Saint Domingue.

To a considerable extent, such fears were proved true. Of the 2.5 million livres General Boudet found in the Port-au-Prince treasury, he immediately scattered a million and a half among his troops—nor did he forget himself in this redistribution. The locals accused him of a spirit of pillage. Leclerc had seen some version of Toussaint's tax rolls (the government was supposed to have taken in some 20 million livres
during the past year), so he had a notion of how much money he ought to be able to find. When he learned that 1.5 million livres were still in the treasury of Les Cayes, Leclerc dispatched Admiral Latouche Treville to confiscate it. He arrested Bunel, Toussaint's diplomat and paymaster, and seized a ship bound for the United States with 3 million livres, undoubtedly intended for the purchase of more arms.

Port-au-Prince civilians found themselves under a military rule at least as harsh as Toussaint's had been. Their animals and supplies were requisitioned for the army—but never paid for. As they had feared, the inhabitants were treated as a conquered people. They had to make a full declaration of all their means or be accused of collaboration with the black enemy. Eager to restore sugar and coffee production (for the profit of the army), Leclerc ordered the landowners back to their plantations, accusing them of harboring groundless fears—while he himself went nowhere without a heavy guard. In reality, the outlying areas were far less secure than they had been under Toussaint, and the planters began to recognize that despite his shortcomings, their chances of restoring their fortunes might have been better with him than with Leclerc.

Dessalines had intended to destroy the fortifications at La Crete a Pierrot before pressing further into the interior, but after his conference with Toussaint he ordered the walls to be repaired instead, and hastily had new trenches dug outside of them. The day after Toussaint's departure, March 1, Dessalines executed all the white inhabitants of Petite Riviere and all the white prisoners he had brought there from the plain of Cul de Sac, with the exception of a doctor named Descourtilz and a handful of musicians from a band maintained for Toussaint's formal entertainments. He left these survivors in the fort under guard of Lamartiniere and a small garrison, while he himself led a force to the interior with the idea of razing and burning Mirebalais.

Toussaint, so far as the French were concerned, had disappeared. Leclerc, whose boots must have begun to chafe by then, believed that, having been forced south from Ravine a Couleuvre, Toussaint must be somewhere in the area of Petite Riviere. He changed the focus of the
French maneuvers with the idea of trapping him there—a strategy Toussaint had apparently anticipated. A noose was gradually drawing tight on La Crete a Pierrot, but Toussaint himself would not be found there, and the fort on the hill was a death trap—for the French.

Now wandering in the Grand Cahos mountains, Rochambeau's column never found Toussaint, who was by then far north of where he was believed to be, and Rochambeau also failed to engage Dessalines, who eluded him in the mountains on the way to Mirebalais. Rochambeau's men did manage to intercept the pack train carrying the treasuries from the Western Department into the interior; it is likely that the legend of Toussaint's “buried treasure” really ends here. Meanwhile, some divisions of the French army had captured stupendous sums on the coast, and when news of Rochambeau's huge score spread, units that so far had found no plunder grew all the more eager for their opportunity.

On March 4, General Debelle reached Petite Riviere with a force of two thousand men. Outraged by the butchered white bodies strewn over the town, the French grenadiers were easily provoked into charging a skein of black skirmishers outside the walls of the fort on the hill above. By some accounts they were also intoxicated by the illusional prospect of loot. At the last moment the skirmishers dove into trenches just below the walls and the fort's cannon raked the French charge with grapeshot, doing incredible damage. Then a detachment of Toussaint's honor guard cavalry rode out of the woods north of the fort to sweep the field. Lamartiniere had a garrison of only three hundred, but this dismal quarter hour cost the French four hundred dead, and Debelle himself was seriously wounded, along with another French general, Devaux.

Dessalines, meanwhile, had been leading Rochambeau on a merry dance through the Grand Cahos mountains, pausing here and there to slaughter white civilians—a task he always undertook with enthusiasm, though sometimes he would spare a few whites whom he found accul-turated enough “to eat callaloo.” On March 4, a detachment from General Boudet's division found the ruins Dessalines had left at Mirebalais. On March 9, Boudet's main force reached Verrettes, just
south of the Artibonite, where eight hundred white civilians lay stiffening in their coagulated blood. Furious at this spectacle, they moved west along the river and forded it during the night of March n. At first light on March 12, they found black soldiers apparently sleeping outside the wall of the fort at La Crete a Pierrot.

Rochambeau's force was approaching this formidable position as well, but no one wanted to wait for its arrival. The other French generals had all been captivated by the illusion of treasure inside the fort (in fact there was none), and none of them wanted to share it with Rochambeau's unit. General Boudet launched his charge without waiting for support, and the defeat Debelle had suffered during the previous week repeated itself in every detail: hundreds of French grenadiers were slain, and Boudet himself was put out of action by a wound in the heel. Just minutes later, another division commanded by General Dugua fell into the same trap, charging from the town of Petite Riviere. These two efforts cost the French a total of nearly eight hundred casualties, and General Dugua was struck by two balls. Captain General Leclerc, who had accompanied Dugua from Port-au-Prince, was knocked down with a badly bruised groin, and would have been slain by the sabers of the black cavalry if an officer named Dalton had not carried him away from the battle lines on his back. Greed, opined a civilian observer, had made the heroes of Marengo forget the most important military maxim: Never despise one's enemy.

For the moment, Pamphile de Lacroix was the only French general left standing on the field; he paused for a moment to “recognize just how adapted to war the Blacks of Saint Domingue had become.'
⁷⁰
Aside from Toussaints organized troops, all the French movements were constantly harassed by the armed field hands who sniped at their flanks from cover. “It was obvious that we no longer inspired moral terror,” Lacroix brooded, “and that is the worst misfortune that can befall an army”
⁷¹

Dessalines, who never failed to inspire both moral and mortal terror, had returned to the fort on the night of March 11 to exhort the garrison: “I want no one with me but the brave; we will be attacked this morning; let those who want to be slaves of the French leave the fort,
but those who are willing to die as free men stand by me.
⁷²
No one accepted the offer to escape. Standing by the door of the powder magazine with a blazing torch, Dessalines promised to blow up the fort if the French managed to enter it, but during Boudet's charge that morning he chose to climb the ramparts bare-chested and lay waste to assaulting Frenchmen with his sword. As previously, the honor guard cavalry led by Monpoint and Morisset rode out from the woods to deliver a coup de grace. A black militia commander, Gottereau, led a troop of armed cultivators onto the field from the bank of the Artibonite, took a large number of French and slew them with bayonets. That night, packs of dogs came out to eat the corpses that no one could remove from the field. Later on, Pamphile de Lacroix, lacking tools enough to have the rotting bodies buried, ordered them burnt, an attempt that succeeded poorly and created an “odor still more unbearable than the first,'
⁷³
which permeated everyone's wool clothing and suffocated the French camps.

The situation at La Crete a Pierrot devolved into a siege. Following the bloodbath of March 12, Dessalines ordered the fortification of a small rise just to the east above the main fort, then departed in search of fresh munitions from a depot at Plassac which, unfortunately for the black resistance, Boudet's division had blown up a few days before. At Morne Nolo, Dessalines lost an engagement with a French force led by General Hardy, who cut Dessalines's communications with Lamartiniere at the fort; Hardy's arrival also forced the honor guard cavalry to retreat from the area, seeking to rejoin either Dessalines or Toussaint.

On March 22, the impetuous Rochambeau appeared on the scene, hastily recalled from the ruins of Mirebalais. Andre Rigaud had been assigned to Rochambeau's staff. When he saw the situation at La Crete a Pierrot, he feigned illness and excused himself to Port-au-Prince. Rochambeau was not so prudent. Before Leclerc could countermand him, he tried to charge the small redoubt Dessalines had erected before his departure, now occupied by Lamartiniere with two hundred men and a few cannon. This futile effort cost him three hundred men. However, General Lacroix managed to establish mortar batteries from
which the colored commander Petion, an experienced artilleryman, was able to drop shells into the main fort. From March 22 to March 24, the bombardment was constant.

Toussaint Louverture, meanwhile, had slipped north through whatever French lines still existed; on March 2 he flushed a light French garrison out of Ennery set fire to the town, made a feint toward Gona'ives, then began to circle through Saint Raphael, Saint Michel, Marmelade, and Dondon, raising resistance among the cultivators everywhere he could—as Christophe was doing all over the Northern Plain. Sentiment was not universally in favor of Toussaint in this region, however; the French propaganda in support of general liberty continued to erode his base, and some inhabitants sarcastically suggested, “Let him raise Moyse from the dead to fight the Whites.”
⁷⁴

Toussaint did not yet know that Maurepas had surrendered, and he hoped to relieve and rejoin Maurepas's Ninth Regiment—but first he had to attack and defeat General Desfourneaux at Plaisance. In the midst of this engagement, to his great dismay, he saw that the French had been reinforced by a portion of Maurepas's regiment now under command of Lubin Golart. Toussaint rode before them, shouting out, “Soldiers of the Ninth, do you dare fire on your general and your brothers?” By the account of Isaac Louverture, “These words had the effect of a thunderbolt on those soldiers; they fell to their knees, and if the European soldiers had not fired on him and pressed forward, all the Ninth Regiment would have gone over to Toussaint Louverture.”
⁷⁵
Unluckily for the black resistance, the French fire was well aimed on this day; a messenger bringing word from Dessalines of the state of siege at La Crete a Pierrot was hit and bled to death inToussaint's arms.

From the start, Toussaint had devised a strategy of double encirclement. Once Leclerc had been lured to besiege La Crete a Pierrot, Toussaint, reinforced by Maurepas and the Ninth Regiment, would fall on his rear, surround him, arrest him, and deport him to account for himself in France—following the same route taken by Hedouville, Sonthonax, and most other representatives of the home government who had had the bad judgment to antagonize Toussaint Louverture. But the Ninth was lost, and by the time Toussaint (severely battered in
his battle with Desfourneaux) could rally men enough to try the plan, it ‘was too late.

On March 24, as he toured his posts, General Lacroix found some of his men flogging an elderly black couple ‘who supposedly had been caught leaving the fort. He rebuked the soldiers and ordered the old people released. Once they had limped to a safe distance, however, they mocked the French soldiers by dancing the chica, then fled with the speed of young antelope. Appalled at his error, Lacroix guessed that they must have been couriers from Toussaint Louverture, who was known to be advancing on Leclerc's rear. In fact, they had come from
Dessalines with an order to evacuate the fort. That night, Lamartiniere took the survivors of the nine hundred men Dessalines had left him twelve days before and cut his way out through the French siege lines, leaving Lacroix with his jaw dropped: “We surrounded his post with more than twelve thousand men; he got away without losing half of his garrison, and left us nothing but his dead and his wounded.'
⁷⁶
The latter were all butchered on Rochambeau's order when his men entered the fort the next morning.