Toussaint Louverture (13 page)

Within the supposed royalist conspiracy, as in so many other arenas of the colonial period, Toussaint is a potent but invisible presence. From his own words later in his career, and even more from his actions and inactions, we know that he never, ever liked to show his hand. Though perfectly capable of signing his name to legal documents, he would not reveal his ability to do so. Apparently he suppressed his own name from the rolls of the Masonic lodge of which he was a member. If he used his fourteen-year-old nephew Charles Belair as a proxy to sign that early letter to the colonial authorities, it is by no means unbelievable that he could have used Boukman, Jeannot, Jean-François, and Biassou as proxies in the early phase of the revolt. It's believable, too, that he knew from the start that the revolt could be transformed into a revolution.

What was his state of mind on that legendary afternoon when Cambefort, Tousard, and Bayon de Libertat “let slip” in his presence the gist of their plot for a rebellion? Toussaint was perfectly capable of reading the newspapers and probably was as well-informed as his
grand blane
companions about the course of events in France. He would certainly have absorbed the revolutionary rhetoric of
liberte, egalite, frater-nite and
recognized its implications for his race and his class. His link to the circle of the Providence Hospital in Le Cap and his frequent travels all over the Northern Department made him privy to whatever information passed byword of mouth.

The
petits blancs
had a bitter hostility to prosperous
affranchis,
which meant that Toussaint would have been likely to side against
them—yet his loyalty to the other white faction would not have been complete. As a landowner and owner of slaves, Toussaint was to a certain extent in with the
grand blancs
proprietors, but because of his race he would never be of them. Even the leveling tendencies of Freemasonry and the Catholic Church were not enough to dissolve the racial barrier. French Revolutionary ideology, however, might very well break down the racial wall, if someone had the resources and determination to carry that ideology all the way to its logical and ultimate conclusion. Toussaint had already read the Abbe Raynal's prediction that a leader would materialize among the African slaves of the New World to lead them all to freedom. Mixed with French Revolutionary rhetoric, it made an interesting cocktail.

Toussaint had a large material investment in the colonial status quo which the royalist conspiracywas meant to restore and preserve. But the rest of his story shows that he also had an ability to see beyond that immediate practical interest; he was endowed with a greater foresight than Blanchelande, Cambefort, Tousard, Bayon de Libertat, and their kind. In a flash, he would have seen the whole future that they had failed to see. What a sweet irony it must have seemed to him, that the rulers of the colonial world should actually invite and encourage him to launch the series of actions that would, in ten years' time, replace French Saint Domingue with an independent black nation. And if he were careful, secretive, and discreet (as long practice had taught him always to be), Toussaint Breda might emerge at the end as Toussaint Louverture, the nearly omnipotent master of his universe.

With the proclamation of Camp Turel, Toussaint came out from behind the curtain which had hidden his movements in 1791 and 1792, and placed himself squarely on the stage of the military and political theater of Saint Domingue. Still, his political motives remained somewhat obscure in the summer and fall of 1793. In the August 29 proclamation, he declared himself the partisan of liberty. That, however, did not necessarily mean that he intended to fall in with the French Revolution as it was being expressed in the colony by Commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel. Indeed, Toussaint was still at war with the Jacobin commissioners, still fighting, as the proclamation put it, for the king.

The declared royalism of the rebel slaves in the early 1790s has always looked peculiar. Macaya's equation of the kings of Congo, France, and Spain with the three wise men who followed the star seems, at first glance, a piece of perfect nonsense. However, a little better than half of the slaves who had risen in arms had been born in Africa and so had some direct experience of the African style of kingship. What they knew of European kings was conjectural—none had ever visited the Western Hemisphere. The kings of France and of Spain were almost as remote to these New World revolutionaries as the star that had shone on the birth of Christ so many centuries before. On the other hand, the
French king had put his signature on the Code Noir, which ordered a more lenient regime for Saint Domingue's slaves than the one which the colonists actually maintained. According to the legend of Bois Caiman, Louis XVI had in some sense been invoked there as the guarantor of the rights that the slaves were rising to claim: three days of liberty per week and abolition of the whip. From African wars and the sale of prisoners, Saint Domingue's slaves knew something about captured and imprisoned kings. By analogy, they could form an idea of Louis's increasingly fragile position as hostage of the Jacobins in France.

If his son Isaac's memoir is to be credited, Toussaint Louverture was the grandson of an African king, and something of that royal atmosphere was even preserved during his childhood, but Toussaint had been born on Hispaniola and never traveled off the island until the very end of his life. What he knew of Africa was legend. He knew as much about France as we do about the moon—yet we know quite a lot about the moon, even if we've never been there.

Just a couple of weeks before the proclamation of Camp Turel, Antoine Chanlatte, an
homme de couleur
who commanded for General Laveaux and the French at Plaisance, reported the failure of an attempt to win the rebels of that area to the side of the commissioners and the French Revolutionary government. The rebels in question were led by “Toussaint a Breda,” who had a headquarters at Marmelade, a key post in the all-important Cordon de l'Ouest. A movement of some rebel slaves to switch sides was scotched by Toussaint, who declared (in Chanlatte's paraphrase) “that they wanted a king, and that they would not lay down their arms until he was recognized.”
¹

But Louis XVI had been dead since January, and Toussaint certainly knew it. Even if his communications with his
grand blanc
allies in the milieu of Bayon de Libertat had been completely severed by the slave rebellion (which is by no means certain), he had plenty of contact with the Spanish colonial military—of which he was now formally a part. The French Revolutionary government was now at war with the other nations of Europe, and also busy smashing down a Catholic-royalist revolt in the Vendee. Robespierre had become the single most powerful man in France, thanks to his chairmanship of the much-feared Committee of Public Safety, the body empowered to carry out
the Terror on all enemies of revolutionary government, be they foreign or French. The guillotines began to run nonstop. Toussaint had some awareness of these developments, and in the summer of 1793 he was still maintaining his royalist bent.

On August 27, just two days before the proclamation of Camp Turel, Toussaint wrote a furious letter to Chanlatte, addressing the colored officer as “the scoundrel, perfidious deceiver.”

“We know very well there is no more King, since you Republican traitors have had his throat cut on an unworthy scaffold,” Toussaint fumed, “but you are not yet where you want to be, and who is to say that, at the moment when you speak, there is not another king? How poorly informed you are, for an agent of the commissioners. One easily sees that your doors are well guarded, and that you do not often receive news from France; you receive still less from New England.”
²
Here Toussaint clearly meant to let Chanlatte know that his own sources of information were much better, both in Europe and in the newborn United States.

“It is not possible that you Fight for the rights of man, after all the cruelties which you daily Exercise; no, you are only fighting for your own interests and to satisfy your ambition, along with your treacherous Criminal projects, and I beg you to believe that I am not unaware of your heinous crimes … It is among us that the true rights of man and justice Reign!—we receive everyone with humanity, and brotherhood, even our most Cruel enemies, and we pardon them wholeheartedly, and with gentleness we coax them back from their errors.”
³
The language of this conclusion is a rehearsal for the proclamation from Camp Turel two days later, and Toussaint even signed the letter to Chanlatte with the name “Louverture,” though it was not a public communication. He would never answer to “Toussaint a Breda” again.

It was extremely rare for Toussaint to express himself with such unbridled passion, and perhaps with a degree of disorientation. The royalist project had run on the shoals, both in France and in Saint Domingue. Louis XVI had died on the guillotine; so had Governor Blanchelande. Bayon de Libertat and most of the rest of Saint Domingue's royalist party had fled from the blazing Cap Francais with Galbaud's fleet. Having landed at Baltimore, they were now doing their
desperate best to regroup in the United States (while perhaps furnishing Toussaint Louverture with scraps of information from that country). A year or so earlier, Toussaint had lent his support to a settlement plan that would have put the majority of rebel slaves back to work on the plantations, in exchange for amnesty and manumissions for a handful of the leaders (meaningless to Toussaint himself, who was already free) and an amelioration of the basic conditions of slavery; the latter condition was consistent with the deal supposedly hatched in the original royalist plot for a “controlled” slave insurrection. By August 1793, any possibility of such a settlement had completely disintegrated. For the mass of
nouveaux libres
it was now liberty or death, and Toussaint Louverture would be the man to lead them to one or the other.

What, in the beginning, had he been fighting for? Prior to 1791 he had been a very successful participant in the economy of the colonial ancien regime. His economic interests made him a natural partner of the
grands blancs,
as did a number of his personal ties and his involvement in Freemasonry. But Toussaint was ever a proud man, though skilled in camouflaging his pride. He would have been as galled by the virulent racism of colonial society as Vincent Oge and his kind, though far less likely to let his resentment show. By studying history he had trained his foresight; he may have expected from the very beginning that the first insurrection on the Northern Plain would inevitably lead to the abolition of slavery and an absolute reversal of the social hierarchies that had been based on slavery. Or he may have been radicalized by the course of events from 1791 to 1793, as many around him were.

From August 1793 onward, it was clear that he would be fighting to establish permanent liberty for all the former slaves of Saint Domingue. Who would be his allies in the struggle was a much more ambiguous question.

The survivors among the insurrection's first leaders, Jean-François and Biassou, had adorned themselves with extravagant titles (“grand admiral” or “generalissimo”), while Toussaint veiled himself with the description “general doctor.” The Spanish colonial military installed Jean-François and Biassou as generals, while Toussaint became a com-
paratively humble
marechal du camp.
At war with France in Europe, Spain hoped to reconquer French Saint Domingue with its newly engaged black auxiliaries: there were nowhere near enough white troops in Spanish Santo Domingo for any such undertaking. But Generals Jean-François and Biassou preferred to relax on what laurels they had been able to win earlier. Practically all the active campaigning was done by Toussaint, whose successes on the battlefield began to make a real impression.

Toussaint was angling for control of the Cordon de l'Ouest—the string of posts through the mountain range from Dondon in the interior to the western seaport of Gonaives which divided Saint Domingue's Northern Department from the rest of the colony. He had a personal interest in the region, for he and his wife owned large plantations in the canton of Ennery, an area sheltered by the mountains just northeast of Gonaives. These were important establishments from the military point of view as well, since Ennery offered the first line of retreat if Gonaives, exposed on the coast, should prove untenable.

Toussaint also established a headquarters at Marmelade, a village centrally located between Ennery and Dondon. In the early summer of 1793, he took Marmelade from Colonel Vernet, a mulatto who commanded for the French republicans there. Vernet retreated to Pilboreau Plantation on the heights above Ennery, a major crossroads, where he had the ill luck to encounter Commissioner Polverel, who was hastening back to Le Cap from Port-au-Prince. Trouble with Galbaud was in the wind, so maybe Polverel was suffering from stress when he asked Vernet how many men he had brought back from his defeat; when Vernet told him two hundred, Polverel snapped, “Let's say two hundred cowards.”
⁴
At that, Vernet took his two hundred men to join Toussaint, who eventually made him one of his most important commanders, and also adopted him as a nephew.

Toussaints hard-fought engagements with Laveaux in the summer of 1793 were meant to protect the approaches from the Northern Plain to Dondon, at Morne Pelee and LaTannerie. Laveaux had won those battles, and his men occupied both La Tannerie and Dondon. Toward the end of June, a member of the French republican garrison at Dondon
reported hearing two days' worth of lively cannon fire from the direction of Le Cap; he could also see the “inflamed air” from the burning of the colony's most beautiful city. He was witnessing from afar the outcome of
I'ajfaire Galbaud,
as Le Cap was sacked and burned by rebel slaves on June 22,1793. At the same time, the Dondon garrison received an order from Galbaud to arrest Sonthonax and Polverel if they should pass through Dondon, but by then it was not the commissioners but Galbaud himself who was on the run, and the French soldiers at Dondon were in no position to do anything but try to get themselves out of what had suddenly become a frightening predicament.