Toussaint Louverture (27 page)

A risky game—but Toussaint was playing it with consummate skill. While constantly, adamantly proclaiming his and the colony's loyalty to France, he had managed to place Saint Domingue under the protection of an enemy naval power. Enemy ships now had more privilege in the French colony's ports than the ships of France herself! But Toussaint would not let British and American naval protection tempt him to a declaration of independence, in part because only France had abolished slavery, while Britain and the United States showed no sign of doing so any time soon. Trade with the United States was essential for Saint Domingue's survival and British acquiescence was essential to that trade. At the same time, remaining French was Saint Domingue's best guarantee of general liberty for its people.

Whatever other intentions he might have had, the preservation of general liberty was always Toussaint's first and ultimate purpose. So long as France remained firmly committed to the abolition of slavery,
Toussaint's attachment to France was quite real. And he knew that, for the moment at least, the risk that he might go so far as to declare Saint Domingue independent outright would discourage the Directory from punishing him for behaving, in some respects, as if Saint Domingue were already independent in fact. In this way, Toussaint had achieved a delicate balance for his fledgling state among the superpowers of his time—powers he seemed expert in playing against one another.

There were still internal problems to confront. As Maitland had anticipated, the evacuation of the British had helped to make Toussaint more powerful than any other leader in Saint Domingue. His armament had become very imposing; not only did the British leave him their forts with cannon intact, they also left sixty thousand muskets in good working order. Though the colored commanders Rigaud and Beauvais still shared the Southern Department between them, no one could challenge Toussaint's dominance in the north and the west. Despite Hedouville's strenuous effort to set them against each other, Rigaud and Toussaint sustained a spirit of cooperation for several months after the agents flight. On February 3,1799, Beauvais, Rigaud, and Laplume traveled to Port-au-Prince to meet Toussaint and Roume for a celebration of the anniversary of the National Conventions abolition of slavery. But a few days later, the entente between Toussaint and Rigaud began to crack when Roume took a couple of military districts out of Rigaud's command and turned them over to Toussaint.

Suspicious that Rigaud was plotting a mulatto takeover in Port-au-Prince, Toussaint delivered a harangue in the capital's largest church, warning Rigaud and all the
gens de couleur
that he could do away with them all if he only chose to raise his left hand against them; it was just their good fortune that for the moment he chose to use the tools of law instead. This threat had a double resonance: in Vodou, malicious black magic is understood to be the work of the left hand, while the right is in charge of healing, benevolent action.

Toussaint's largely secret negotiations with the British and Americans were still going on. Suspicious of the secrecy, Rigaud accused Toussaint of conspiring with Maitland to restore slavery. Toussaint then
revealed one of the secrets he had kept with the British general: he let Rigaud know that Maitland had wanted either Beauvais or Laplume to assume command of Jeremie (near Rigaud's hometown, Les Cayes, on the Grand Anse) when the British evacuated, but that he, Toussaint, had insisted that Rigaud take control of the port. At that point, Toussaint would likely have chosen Rigaud as his successor as general in chief (an early indication that Toussaint had already begun to think that this choice would be his to make), but now, thanks to Rigaud's abuse of his trust, he was beginning to prefer Beauvais. Rigaud, Toussaint charged, had shredded Toussaint's order for thanksgiving masses following the departure of the British, offending “the supreme being, to whom I always give credit for the success of my operations.” The next accusation was distinctly more serious: “I know,” said Toussaint to Rigaud, “that in the design to get rid of me you have posted men sworn to you along the road to Arcahaie”
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—that is to say, assassins.

The ink was barely dry on the last secret convention Toussaint had signed with Maitland when Rigaud, exasperated to the point of no return, published the letter in which Hedouville had transferred his authority as agent to him. It was June 15, 1799, and Rigaud was already marching in force toward Petit and Grand Goave, the two posts which Roume had transferred to Toussaint's command not long before. He captured those two towns so swiftly that Laplume was barely able to escape by throwing himself into a boat. At Arcahaie, having eluded whatever assassins Rigaud might have sent to waylay him there, Toussaint met Richter, one of the American consuls, to hurry up his arms shipments. Barrels of gunpowder with British stamps were offloaded at Port-au-Prince. Clearly, the United States and Britain were backing Toussaint in the conflict, while some observers thought that Rigaud had been incited by Anglophile French colonists and remnants of the old Colonial Assembly who had always hated the
gens de couleur
and hoped the whole race would be wiped out in a civil war with the blacks.

Toussaint began taking a similar line. The address he made to an assembly of field hands on the Cul de Sac plain is his longest speech in Creole ever recorded:

The view here expressed of the whites' benevolence and commitment to general liberty was perhaps a little exaggerated. Christophe Mornet, Toussaint's commander in the Cul de Sac region, was enforcing the labor policy with such enthusiasm that one gratified white observer commented that “little remained to be done for the gangs to be working just like in the old days.”
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But in this same speech
Toussaint apologized for that severity, shifting the blame to Christophe Mornet, and offered all his listeners passports to leave their plantations and go where they liked. As the conflict with Rigaud flowered into all-out civil war, Toussaint found it expedient to rally his black base by suspending his stringent labor policy. He promoted several days of festival that brought swarms of blacks into Port-au-Prince from the outlying area, and on the gallery of the government house he joined in Ibo warrior dances, to help whip up enthusiasm for battles which were sure to come.

On July 3, Roume, under pressure from Toussaint, declared Rigaud a rebel and traitor to France, though the agent still hoped to mediate a peaceful settlement. Five days later, Toussaint sent his main force, which now amounted to between twenty and thirty thousand men, to confront Rigaud at Petit and Grand Goave. Though Rigaud's main strength was in the south, particularly in his home region of Les Cayes, his faction had footholds all over the colony, particularly in the coastal towns. Beauvais, commanding at Jacmel on the south coast, hoped at first to remain neutral, but when
gens de couleur
in the surrounding countryside were attacked by Mamzel and the Doko maroons (probably on Toussaint's orders), he was forced to join the struggle on the side of Rigaud and his race. Meanwhile, Toussaint was riding rapidly all over the Western and Northern departments to suppress rebellions in the Artibonite Plain and at Mole Saint-Nicolas. On July 25, he broke a siege of Port de Paix, where Rigaud's partisans had attacked Toussaint's General Maurepas.

Not so very long before, Cap Francais had been a mulatto stronghold. In the summer of 1799, Toussaint executed Pierre Michel (the officer who'd been first to rescue Laveaux from mulattoes then led by Villatte) for an attempt to turn over this important town to Rigaud's supporters; fifty other conspirators were put to death at Le Cap on August 4. Rigaud's partisans wanted to assassinate Toussaint, if they could not defeat him on the battlefield; during the summer of 1799 Toussaint had three narrow escapes from ambushes which seemed to target him personally: at Pont d'Ester in the Artibonite Valley, near Jean Rabel on the northwest peninsula, and at Sources Puantes on the road to Port-au-Prince. He broke up another ambush on Desdunes Plan-
tation in the Artibonite, and ordered six ringleaders to be blown to bits by point-blank cannon fire on the parade ground at Gonai'ves.

In the midst of all the fighting, Toussaint waged a propaganda war. During the early stages of the conflict with Rigaud, Agent Roume had done his best to defuse it, writing an open letter to Rigaud which urged him not to be trapped in Hedouville's scheme to set him and Toussaint against each other. Roume saw the racial dimension of the conflict and was alarmed by it. An elegant passage turned on the point that Roume himself was married to a
femme de couleur:
“Toussaint Louverture knows only two kinds of men, good ones and bad ones; it is I who assures you of that; I, the husband of a mulatress; I, the father of a quar-teron; I, the son-in-law of a negress—believe me, my mulatto brothers-in-law, believe me, who has long known the sentiment of the General in Chief, believe that I have come to the degree of admiration which he inspires in me by recognizing him the impartial friend of the Blacks, the Reds, and the Whites.”
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This familial view of Saint Domingue's racial situation was one that Toussaint could certainly share. In peacetime he could rise to the level of impartiality which Roume described here, and even during the civil war he liked to point out the numerous loyal mulattoes who remained in his army, many of them in high-ranking, trusted positions.

But now, Toussaint claimed that Rigaud had built his party by assuring all the
gens de couleur
that “the Mulattoes are the only natives of Saint Domingue, that in consequence the country belongs to them by right, that it is theirs, as France is for the Whites, and Africa for the Negroes.”
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In his efforts to incite the blacks against the whites, Toussaint argued, Rigaud proved himself “faithful to the principles of Machiavelli.”
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The author of
The Prince was
much on Toussaint's mind these days; he had also accused Hedouville of fleeing his post “to escape the disastrous effects of his Machiavellianism.”
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Now he returned to the Villatte rebellion to demonstrate the Machiavellian cast of Rigaud's faction, alleging that in 1796 the mulattoes were already plotting to seize all three departments of the colony—Villatte in the north, Beauvais in the west, and Rigaud in the south—in a plot masterminded by Pinchinat. Should there be any doubt that the mulattoes
hated all the blacks and wanted to destroy them, there was always the example of the Swiss.

The product of this kind of thinking was a war of racial extermination. Toussaint's rising second in command, General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, emerged as the chief executioner. In regions where Toussaint had run into ambushes and assassination attempts, the reprisals were crushing. Dessalines was always more consistently hostile to mulattoes than Toussaint. “The Blacks,” he said, “are friends of repose; whenever they get stirred up it's because someone else put them in motion, and you will always find colored men behind the curtain.”
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Dessalines respected courage wherever he found it, and colored men who stood up to him were often invited to serve in his command—as many of them did. To those unable to bear arms, Dessalines would say, “What are the rest of you good for?—to give bad advice. Enough!”
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His men understood the remark to be a death sentence.

Toussaint was determined to settle all internal conflicts quickly and absolutely, because there were plenty of external threats still on his horizon as the eighteenth century drew to a close. The Directory had given him no definite reaction to his expulsion of Hedouville; in an increasingly shaky state itself, it had decided simply to watch and wait. In France, both Hedouville and Sonthonax were outraged against him, while the Vaublanc faction was still pressing for the restoration of slavery. Despite some tactful efforts (abetted by his new British allies) to extract them, his two eldest sons were still hostages in France.

Though Toussaint had not been censured for his conduct toward Hedouville, his deals with the English and the Americans might also have provoked the French government, especially the prohibition of French military vessels in Saint Domingue. Though he had made no open bid for independence, it was becoming more and more apparent that Toussaint did not especially want to see French military vessels in port anywhere on the island—which meant that he needed to bring the Spanish region of Hispaniola under his control. But while the civil war continued he could spare no troops for that operation. Therefore, Rigaud's rebellion had to be utterly crushed. Thus far, Toussaint's ruth-
less repression of the mulatto revolt resembled the Terror in France, whose original purpose, as declared by Robespierre, was to create seamless internal solidarity for the confrontation of foreign enemies.