Toussaint Louverture (40 page)

From one point of view, it is incredible that Christophe should have accepted terms with the French without Toussaint's tacit consent and encouragement. On the other hand, other generals had done so while out of communication with their chief commander and had come to no harm. Some members of Toussaint's officer cadre may have begun to feel that they would prosper better if Toussaint were out of the picture—as Toussaint had once felt about Jean-François, Biassou, Blanc Cassenave, Dieudonne, Villatte, Rigaud, Sonthonax, and Hedouville.

Toussaint had taken care to open a separate line of communication with Boudet a month earlier, so the idea of coming to terms with the French must have been on his mind for some time. On the heels of Christophe's submission, when his own security at Marmelade was imminently threatened from Dondon, he wrote to Leclerc a generally conciliatory letter, which ended with a caution: “whatever the resources of the French army might be, he would always be strong and powerful enough to burn, ravage, and sell dearly a life which had also sometimes been useful to the mother country.”
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Pamphile de Lacroix seconded this opinion: “however feeble he might have become, he would not cease to be redoubtable, entrenched in the heart of the colony, in the middle of inaccessible mountains, whence he could come out to carry ravage and sedition all around him.”
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The French estimated that Toussaint still had some four thousand troops at his disposal, as well as the larger numbers of armed cultivators he might raise. Leclerc wrote to the minister of marine on April 21 that “it will be impossible for me to enter into campaign again before having received the twelve thousand men for which I have asked you.”
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The surrender of Christophe a few days later must have encouraged the captain general, who hoped in the same letter to exploit “dissensions” rumored among the black chiefs. However, Leclerc was already becom-
ing dangerously dependent on “colonial troops”—that is to say, black rebel units that had quite recently changed sides with their officers.

During the last week of April, Toussaint (whose own communications had been much interrupted) learned of his brother Paul Louverture's submission at Ciudad Santo Domingo. The fact that so many black generals—Paul Louverture, Maurepas, Clervaux, and now Christophe—had been maintained in their French military ranks after capitulation lent credence to the Napoleonic propaganda that the French army was committed to the defense of general liberty. The fact that, even at this point, Toussaint was unwilling to pronounce the magic word that would have rallied more of the population to his cause suggested that independence from France had never been his goal. At the moment that he began to treat with Leclerc, he must have felt both isolated and surrounded—and under immediate threat of an assault on Marmelade from Dondon which, if it failed to capture him, would have put him desperately on the run.

Dessalines was difficult to persuade, and probably was never entirely persuaded. “Listen well,” he told his men. “If Dessalines surrenders to them a hundred times, he will betray them a hundred times.”
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More than likely Toussaint felt the same; characteristically he betrayed nothing of the thought.

“He never showed anything,” wrote the daughter of one of Toussaint's numerous white secretaries. “My father often told us the impression he had from these private meetings. By the doubtful light of a little lamp, the somber face was still more black. When he scrutinized you, he was like a lynx. But when he was observed, he withdrew into himself, masked his regard. Raising his eyes to heaven, he hid his pupil beneath his thick eyelid, letting nothing show but the white. So, he became hideous. My father, as young and brave as he was, could not face this demonic visage.”
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Filter out the antique racism and a rather disconcerting picture of Toussaint still remains. In hypnosis, such eye movement is a symptom of trance. In Vodou it is a sign of possession. To most people the alien is frightening; no wonder the young Frenchman read a “demonic visage” into Toussaint's entranced expression. No doubt Toussaint really was
communing with his spirits when in these late-night meditations he struggled to choose the right word, or phrase, or action. In the close of his supposed letter to Napoleon, Toussaint turned again to the Christian God: “Let him decide between me and my enemies, between those who have violated his teachings and abjured his holy name, and the man who has never ceased to adore him.'
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On May 6, Toussaint Louverture rode into Cap Francais in the midst of three hundred horsemen of his honor guard. Leclerc, who was dining shipboard with the naval officers, seemed to be taken by surprise. By the time he hastened back to shore, Toussaint's guard had occupied the government palace, and by one (perhaps exaggerated) account, his men were stalking the grounds with their sabers drawn. Jacques de Norvins, a young French officer, described the scene: Toussaint Louverture “had followed Leclerc into his salon where they sat down on a couch facing the door. I was not much reassured by this interview, nor by the haughty manner of Toussaint's numerous guards who, leaning on their sabers, filled the surroundings, the courtyard and the apartments of the residence, while others guarded their horses, and while Toussaint also leaned on his saber, which he held upright between his legs … Any bad sign on the part of Toussaint,” Norvins concluded, and “at any moment the sabers of those black dragoons could have come out of their scabbards.'
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In this crackling atmosphere, it was Toussaint who seemed to dictate terms to Leclerc. The black generals still in rebellion—Vernet, Charles Belair, and Dessalines—would be retained in their ranks in the French army, despite the fact that, when reproached by Leclerc for the massacres in which some three thousand civilians had died, Toussaint replied flatly, “It was Dessalines.” When Leclerc insisted that Toussaint himself continue service as his “lieutenant,” Toussaint demurred: “My general, I am too old and too ill; I need rest and to live in the country. I can no longer serve the Republic. I want to go with my children to my plantation at Ennery.”
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Undoubtedly he strongly suspected that Leclerc meant to have him arrested and did not mean to give him the least opportunity.

The tension was diffused, somewhat, by a banquet, but Toussaint
was not in a festive mood. “He said he was sick,” Norvins reports, “and did not even eat any soup; no more did he want to drink any wine. Only, at dessert, I offered him some Gruyere cheese; he took the plate and cut out a square piece, from which he removed a big enough thickness from all four sides, took in his fingers what remained from this singular operation, ate it without bread, and drank a glass of water from a carafe broached since the dinner began; it was thus that he did honor to the General in Chief's table.”
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Following this austere celebration, Toussaint rode out, still surrounded by the men of his guard (which, two thousand strong, would “retire” with him at Ennery). On the public square at Marmelade he bade farewell to his assembled troops, then continued toward his Ennery plantations. En route, legend has it, he was hailed by someone who asked, “General, have you abandoned us?” and Toussaint replied, “No, my children, all your brothers are under arms, and all the officers conserve their ranks.”
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It was not only in the ranks of the French army that the blacks of Saint Domingue remained under arms. Even after Toussaint's surrender, resistance never completely stopped—nor did Toussaint stop tacitly encouraging it. A general effort to disarm the population soon proved almost completely futile. Sans-Souci, who was even more enraged than Toussaint at the way Christophe's surrender had cut him off at the knees, began organizing for a fresh rebellion almost immediately. The guerrilla leader Sylla was actively resisting at Mapou, a point between Ennery and Plaisance, at the time of Toussaint's retirement to Ennery, and Sylla's presence helped secure Toussaint there. It took a major assault to dislodge Sylla from that position, and even then neither he nor his men could be captured.

Suspicion of Toussaint's secret involvement in such eruptions was constant. Makajoux, a commander in the neighboring town of Pilate, wrote to his French superior, “Toussaint and the other chiefs have surrendered only in appearance, and have only sought to give their troops an entry among you in order to surprise you at the first possible moment.”
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Leclerc himself had the same attitude: “That ambitious man, from the moment that I pardoned him, has not ceased to secretly
conspire … He has tried to organize an insurrection among the cultivators to make them rise en masse. The reports that have come to me from all the generals, even General Dessalines, on the conduct he has maintained since his submission leave me in no doubt in that regard. I have intercepted letters which he wrote to a so-called Fontaine who is his agent in Le Cap. These letters prove that he has been conspiring and desiring to regain his old influence in the colony. He has been waiting for the effects of diseases on the army.'
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Those effects were already rampant. In a separate letter of the same date, Leclerc put it bluntly: “If the First Consul wants to have an army in Saint Domingue in the month of October, he will need to send it from the ports of France, for the ravages of disease here are beyond all description.”
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And yet, reinforcements were practically useless; so severe was the fever season of 1802 that troops were said to march from the ships directly into the grave.

It was not yet known in the early 1800s that malaria and yellow fever were mosquito-borne illnesses, but the military did understand that the mountains were healthier than the ports—which may have provided a pretext for sending large numbers of troops into the region of Plaisance and Ennery during the first week of June 1802. “Toussaint is of bad faith,” Leclerc wrote on June 6, “as I very well expected of him, but I have gained from his submission the goal which I hoped, which was to detach Dessalines and Christophe from him, with their troops. I will order his arrest, and I believe I can count on Dessalines, whose spirit I have mastered, enough to charge him to go arrest Toussaint.”
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Events would soon prove that Leclerc had not mastered Dessalines's spirit in the slightest, but probably he would not have dared arrest Toussaint without some assurance from the black generals that the move would not provoke a revolt on their part.

Toussaint's behavior during this fatal period has puzzled most observers, who find it difficult to understand why he walked into the fairly obvious trap which Leclerc had prepared for him. The bait was a pair of letters, one from the regional commander, General Brunet, the other from Leclerc himself: “Since you persist in thinking that the large number of troops found at Plaisance frightens the cultivators there, I
charge General Brunet to concert himself with you concerning the placement of a part of these troops.” Brunet followed up in silkier tones: “We have, my dear general, some arrangements to make together which it is impossible to discuss by letter, but which a conference of one hour would settle.”
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Toussaint clung to these two letters till his last days as a prisoner in France. It seems almost impossible that he did not see through them, though Pamphile de Lacroix argues that he was simply duped. “He cried out when he received General Brunet's letter, ‘You see these Whites, they don't suspect anything, they know everything—and still they have to come consult old Toussaint.'
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“ In this version, vanity, and a susceptibility to flattery which nothing else in his whole career suggests, were the weaknesses whereby Toussaint let himself be lured out of his stronghold at Ennery where it would have been much more difficult if not impossible to capture him, to a meeting with Brunet at Georges Plantation. There the small escort which Toussaint had brought with him was overpowered, and Toussaint was seized, rushed the short distance to Gona'ives, and hustled aboard
La Creole,
which sailed to the harbor of Le Cap, where he was transferred to
L'Heros
for deportation to France.

But never in his whole life had Toussaint shown himself to be so gullible. More plausible is the idea that his last moves were forced—or that, through the same sort of small miscalculations that had moved him to surrender a month before, he believed they were forced. In fact, the displacement of Sylla from Mapou had seriously weakened his position in Ennery. French troops were moving in force into Ennery as well as Plaisance and getting into contentions with the local “cultivators,” many of whom were actually members of Toussaints honor guard. If he did nothing to stop this buildup, he would soon be outnumbered and overpowered at his last retreat. Therefore, in hope of a diplomatic solution, he took the calculated risk of going to meet Brunet, after Brunet, pleading his own ill health, had declined to come to meet him at Ennery. Events proved his calculation to be mistaken.

It is argued by some, most notably the Caribbean commentator Aime Cesaire, that Toussaint's apparently blind cooperation in his own arrest was an intentional sacrifice, meant to separate the momentum of
the Haitian Revolution from depending on himself as an individual, or on any other particular person. In this interpretation, Toussaint's decision to accept Brunet's invitation to Georges Plantation amounts to a deliberate choice of martyrdom. The last letters Toussaint wrote from prison do suggest that some such idea may have entered his mind, but however fervent his Catholicism, it seems doubtful that he would have wanted to push the imitation of Christ quite so far. And although he was certainly able to put the welfare of his people ahead of his own, it was rare for him to lose sight of his personal interests so completely. It's more likely that, under the extreme pressure of his situation, he gambled and lost.

And yet his arrest did prove that the Haitian Revolution could now get along very well without him. At the moment of his deportation, Toussaint understood that perfectly. “In overthrowing me,” he said as he boarded
L'Heros,
“you have only cut down the trunk of the tree of liberty of the Blacks in Saint Domingue: it will spring back from the roots, for they are numerous and deep.”
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