Toussaint Louverture (28 page)

By November 1799, the civil war between the mulattoes and the blacks had settled on the siege of Jacmel, which Toussaint delegated to Dessalines, who had routed Rigaud from the positions he had taken further to the north. During the same month the Directory collapsed in France, and Napoleon Bonaparte assumed executive rule of the nation. Though this arrangement described Napoleon as “first consul” in a consulate of three, it was patently clear that France's new system of government was a military dictatorship, controlled by a single dictator. Such a hard swing to the right was apt to be favorable to proponents of slavery, as Toussaint could not help but suspect. In December, the Consulate issued a constitution stating that the colonies would henceforth be governed by “special laws”—alarming news for Toussaint and all the
nouveaux libres
of Saint Domingue, as such exceptions to the laws that governed the French homeland had previously been used to permit and justify slavery.

Agent Roume, though rapidly falling out of sympathy with Toussaint, wrote to First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte to complain of the effects which such decisions at home were having in the colony, in the souls of men whom Roume characterized as “simple but good.”
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The notion of “special laws” for the colonies led the blacks of Saint Domingue to suspect they were going to be governed by “a new
code noirbased
on the old one.”
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Worse, a flurry of letters had begun to circulate, all claiming that an army with a mission to restore slavery would appear on the Spanish side of the island and attack French Saint Domingue across the frontier. The effect of such rumors on Toussaint is not hard to imagine.

On April 27, 1800, Toussaint extracted an order from Roume to take possession of Spanish Santo Domingo. Well aware that the home government did not want this region to fall into the control of its black general in chief, Roume had been refusing since January to sign the order. His once congenial relationship with Toussaint had gone sour. Aware of Maitlands semisecret visits, Roume disapproved of Toussaint's dealings with the British; and the civil war distressed him so
much that he concocted a covert plan to halt it by bringing in a Spanish fleet from Cuba to draft both Toussaint's and Rigaud's armies for an all-out assault on Jamaica. Toussaint knew nothing of that fantastic scheme; it was the issue of Spanish Santo Domingo that brought him to a crisis with Roume.

He had Roume locked up for a time in Fort Picolet, on the cliffs above the harbor of Le Cap, but when the agent still held out, Toussaint applied pressure from different angles. A committee of prominent whites led by Mayor Borgella of Port-au-Prince issued a proclamation that Toussaint was “the only man who can seize the reins of government with a certain hand”
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and giving him authority (which it had no legitimate power to give) to overrule Roume's decisions. At the same time, a false rumor that Toussaint had been appointed “proconsul” by the new French government was being circulated by the American consul Stevens and by General d'Hebecourt, one of the French officers in Toussaint's inner circle. Toussaint, headquartered in Port-au-Prince to direct the campaign against Rigaud in the south, made a quick run up the coast to Gona'fves, whereupon huge demonstrations broke out all over the Northern Department, with
nouveaux libres
calling for Roume's deportation. General Moyse was, ostensibly, unable to contain these riots—the same sort of riots he himself had incited against Hedouville. Six thousand men assembled in Le Cap and voted Roume out of his position as agent.

Roume had recently annoyed the British by expelling one of their agents, Douglas, from Le Cap, and Toussaint's British allies were quietly pressuring him to get rid of Roume altogether, but Toussaint did not really want to go so far. He preferred to keep the colony's interests balanced between the interests of the superpowers of his day, and if no representative of the French government remained in Saint Domingue he would be in open rebellion against France, thus wholly dependent on whatever protection he could expect from the United States and from the British navy. At about the same time, his old friend Laveaux, who had been turned away by local authorities from a mission to Guadeloupe, was expected to land in Spanish Santo Domingo. Here was one agent of France whom Toussaint might have welcomed without ambivalence. But Laveaux's ship was captured by the British before
he could land, and taken to Jamaica as a prize. Roume would be the agent, or no one would. When Roume finally signed the order to take over the Spanish territory, Toussaint invited him to resume his office.

Toussaints troops were still so tied up in the civil war that he could send only General Age, a white French officer but up to now a Toussaint loyalist, to carry out the mission. Age traveled alone, or the next thing to it. When he reached Santo Domingo City, Governor Don Garcia refused to acknowledge his authority, though Age threatened the arrival of Toussaints army. Don Garcia gave him six soldiers for an escort back to the French border. When Age returned discomfited, Roume rescinded the order, announcing (honestly enough) that it had been extracted by force. Toussaint was furious, but for the time being he was too consumed by the civil war to do anything about it.

For months, Toussaints tremendous black army had been halted outside the defenses of Jacmel. Beauvais, never wholly enthusiastic about war with the overwhelming black army, had finally decided to leave his post and the colony—only to be shipwrecked and drowned. In January 1800, the redoubtable mulatto officer Alexandre Petion—who had previously served in Toussaints command but now decided to switch sides—slipped through the lines around Jacmel and took over the defense. During the next few months, the tightening siege gradually reduced the inhabitants to a state of starvation.

With such a huge numerical advantage, Toussaint's army could easily have surrounded Jacmel on land, but to seal off the town by sea was trickier. Though the British were supposed to allow Toussaint to operate in Saint Domingue's coastal waters, the four ships he sent to blockade Jacmel were captured and hauled off to Jamaica. This event, which coincided with Roume's expulsion of the English agent Douglas, put a strain on Toussaints arrangement with Maitland. Still worse, the French Jew Isaac Sasportas had just traveled from Saint Domingue to Jamaica to raise a slave rebellion there, and got himself arrested. If Toussaint had ever had anything to do with that conspiracy, he disavowed it now—by some accounts it was he who betrayed Sasportas in the first place. Agent Roume, however, would have been happy to disrupt Toussaint's coziness with the English, and may well have had a hand in Sasportas's doomed expedition. For whoever might have been
concerned, the Jamaican authorities made a point of hanging Sasportas on a gallows high enough to be visible from the shores of Saint Domingue. Toussaint sent General Huin, who had handled much of the original Toussaint-Maitland dealings, to Jamaica to iron out these difficulties. In the end the British stood back and allowed the Americans to support Toussaint at Jacmel.

When the USS
General Greene
joined the blockade, Jacmel's situation became truly desperate, and when the
General Greene
finally bombarded the harbor forts, the defenders held out for less than an hour. Petion managed to evacuate the women from the town, then led the male survivors on a sortie to rejoin Rigaud on the Grande Anse. Broken elsewhere in the colony, the Rigaud rebellion was now confined to the southwest peninsula. Dessalines soon followed up the Jacmel victory by taking the town of Miragoane, and from there he pursued Rigaud's remaining forces into the plain of Fond des Negres. Toussaint, meanwhile, made a triumphal visit to Jacmel, where he addressed the survivors in evangelical terms: “Consider the misfortunes which threaten you; I am good and humane; come and I will receive you all … If Rigaud presented himself in good faith, I would receive him still.”
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New delegates from the French Consulate arrived in Hispaniola in June 1800: the experienced Julien Raimond, General Jean-Baptiste Michel, who had been part of the Hedouville mission, and Toussaint's friend and partisan Colonel Vincent. The armed force meant to accompany them proved unavailable at the last minute, so these three took the precaution of landing on the Spanish side of the island (as Hedouville had done). Vincent traveled separately from the other two, accompanied by false rumors that he had orders from the home government for Toussaint's arrest. He was supposed to have been halted by an insurrection in Arcahaie, but the riot was forestalled when a local commander who either had been left out of the loop or pretended to be arrested the officer in charge of stirring up the rising before he could trigger it. Vincent continued north along the coast, passing unmolested through Toussaint's stronghold at Gona'ives, but at Limbe he was seized by an angry mob of
nouveaux libres,
beaten, and stripped of the papers he carried. The crowd took his epaulettes from him too, and dragged him
several miles over the mountains on foot. During one halt he was blindfolded and led to believe he was about to be shot. “I will never forget,” Vincent wrote later, “another black man named Jean Jacques, commander of the northern plain; he had never seen me before, but seeing me mistreated by these Revolting Negroes who seemed very much decided to take my life, he covered me with his own body, in the desert to which I had been taken.”
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Michel, who took a different route to Cap Francais, suffered similar treatment. In both cases the apparent object was to confiscate the envoys' papers and make sure they had no secret mission. Meanwhile (as Dessaliness army smashed into the Grande Anse in pursuit of Rigaud), Toussaint was making a triumphal progress north from Jacmel. When the people of the towns along his way came out to honor him as Saint Domingue's sole ruler, he seemed much less shy of accepting such accolades than when he had first taken over Port-au-Prince from the British.

In fact, though the new emissaries brought news that Napoleon had confirmed Toussaint in his position as general in chief (which, given the Hedouville controversy, should have greatly relieved the black leader), and a reassuring proclamation from Bonaparte to all the
nou-veaux libres
(“Brave blacks, remember that only the French people recognize your liberty and the equality of your rights”),
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they were also under orders to forbid Toussaint to occupy Spanish Santo Domingo. Furthermore, the new emissaries were supposed to bring the civil war to an end, but Toussaint, who was not immediately to be found in either Port-au-Prince or Le Cap, was intent on taking care of that matter himself. When he finally met Vincent and Michel, on June 25, he did not seem overjoyed by the confirmation of his rank, and he declined to have the sentence (“Brave blacks,
etc.”)
embroidered in gold on the battalion flags as Napoleon had ordered.

On July 7, Dessalines handed Rigaud a crushing defeat on the plain of Aquin. In light of this event, it meant little for Toussaint to permit Vincent to carry the “olive branch of peace” into Rigaud's last redoubt in Les Cayes. Indeed, when Rigaud learned that Napoleon and the Consulate had confirmed Toussaint in his military functions, he tried to stab himself with his own dagger.

On August 5, Toussaint himself entered Les Cayes, and Rigaud took flight, first to Guadeloupe and then to France. Toussaint announced an amnesty for his erstwhile mulatto opponents but left General Dessalines to administer it in the south. Dessalines exercised very little restraint in his reprisals. The French general Pamphile de Lacroix described the result as a “human hecatomb,” with some ten thousand colored persons of all ages and both sexes left dead, often by mass drownings, “if one can believe the public voice,”
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though biographer (and staunch Toussaint defender) Victor Schoelcher objects that if all the alleged slayings had really occurred, the known mulatto population would have been exterminated three times over. But it is clear the amnestywas something of a sham. Toussaint had once mocked Rigaud because “he groans to see the fury of the people he has excited,”
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but now, when he saw what Dessalines had done, he groaned on quite a similar note: “I said to trim the tree, not uproot it.”
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The instigation of “spontaneous” riots by the sector of the citizenry sometimes called the “Paris mob” had become a tried-and-true strategy for French revolutionaries during the late 1780s. According to some theories, the royalist conspirators in Saint Domingue were following that model when, with the help of trusted
commandeurs
like the Toussaint who had not yet become Louverture, they planned the first slave insurrection on the Northern Plain in 1791. The
gens de couleur
understood this method: Villatte's brief overthrow of Laveaux was marked by a riot in the town, and Rigaud planned one in the Southern Department to give himself an emergency exit from his first meeting with Hedouville. Toussaint, always a savvy observer of such events, almost certainly adapted the strategy for his own use—using popular uprisings to restore Laveaux to his governorship, to drive out both Sonthonax and Hedouville, and to intimidate Roume, Michel, and even his good friend Vincent. He was more careful than most not to let his own hand show in the instigation—instead he entered those anarchic scenes (even those of his own devising) to rescue the victims and restore order. “I won't tolerate the fury,” he said. “When I appear, everything has to calm down.”
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Vincent, who had opportunity to observe this “great art of the chief” from several angles, described it with a grudging admiration:
‘with an incredible address he uses every possible means to stir up, from afar, misfortunes which only his presence can make stop, because, I think, for the most part it is he alone who has engineered them.”
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For better or worse, the same strategy has been used in Haitian politics from Toussaint's time to ours.

In October 1800, Toussaint gave thanks for the victory over Rigaud and his faction before the altar of the principal Port-au-Prince church. Among other things this orison shows how well he had mastered the priestly language of his time—and how smoothly he could blend it with his own political messages: