Toussaint Louverture (39 page)

Ravine a Couleuvre, February 22-23, 1802

It was a bitter disappointment for Toussaint to have so nearly missed his quarry. After a doleful meeting with Dessalines on the heights of Morne Calvaire, he retreated to Chasseriaux Plantation, near Grands Fonds in the Petit Cahos mountains; his family had already found shelter in that area and his honor guard was waiting for him there. The French, meanwhile, limped back to Port-au-Prince in scarcely a cheerier frame of mind; they had lost two thousand men at La Crete a Pierrot. Pamphile de Lacroix ordered his men to march in squares with empty centers, so that the citizens of the capital would not realize the extent of the French losses.

Like Ravine a Couleuvre, La Crete a Pierrot is best understood as a loss for both sides. The French had technically gained ground, but they had the same difficulty holding it that Napoleon would soon encounter in campaigns against guerrilla resistance in Spain. “This is a war of Arabs,” Leclerc wrote to Napoleon. “We have hardly passed through when the blacks occupy the neighboring woods and cut our communications.”
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“Though victorious everywhere,” wrote Lieutenant Moreau de Jonnes, “we possessed nothing but our guns. The enemy did not hold anywhere, and yet remained master of the country.”
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Or in the words of a nineteenth-century French historian, Antoine Metral: “Everywhere this ground hid enemies, in a wood, behind a boulder; Liberty gave birth to them.”
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Also at Toussaint's camp at Grands Fonds were Sabes and Gimont, the two emissaries whom General Boudet had sent ashore at Port-au-Prince before forcing his landing there. Since Lamartiniere had taken them prisoner, they had been dragged all over the country, and narrowly missed being slain with the other white captives by Dessalines at Petite Riviere. NowToussaint summoned them into his presence, debated with them the legitimacy of Leclerc's actions versus his own, then sent them under safe-conduct back to General Boudet, with a note suggesting that his nephew Chancy, captured while carrying dispatches to Dommage several weeks previously, might be released in exchange.

The French Army's Siege of La Crête-à-Pierrot

By some accounts, Toussaint also sent a letter to Napoleon for Boudet to transmit. Though this document has never been definitively identified, a version which circulated at the time fits well enough with the rest of Toussaint's correspondence to be credible. “The high post I occupy is not my own choice, imperious circumstances placed me there against my will … I saw this unfortunate isle a prey to the fury of factions. My reputation and my color gave me a certain influence on the people who live here; and I was called to authority with almost a unanimous voice.”
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“Adulation has ruined Toussaint,” Colonel Vincent had written to a friend just before the expedition sailed.
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If authentic, Toussaint's words do suggest that he was at least a little intoxicated by the power which he had obtained by a considerably more circuitous route than what he describes. His next claims, though, are hard to dispute: “I stifled sedition, calmed revolt, established tranquility; I replaced anarchy with good order; finally I gave the people both peace and a constitution. Citizen Consul, are your own pretensions founded on any more legitimate titles?”
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This question, if audacious, was a fair one.

“You offer liberty to the blacks,” Toussaint goes on, “saying that wherever you have been you have given it to those who did not have it. I have only an imperfect knowledge of events which have recently taken place in Europe, but the reports that have reached me do not agree with that assertion. The liberty which one may enjoy in France, in Belgium, in Switzerland, or in the Batavian, Ligurian and Cisalpine republics would never satisfy the people of Saint Domingue. We are a long way from aspiring to an independence like that.”
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The statement is so startling as to throw the authenticity of the entire letter into doubt. Never before had Toussaint openly raised the issue of independence—but circumstances had changed drastically since the French invasion began. To say that what the French called lib-
erty was not good enough for the people of Saint Domingue was a slap in Napoleon's face. Why would Toussaint risk such a provocation?

Maybe Napoleon, who would not receive the letter for two months at least (supposing he ever received it at all), was not the intended audience. Toussaint knew something about propaganda, and he had reason to hope that such a message would feed doubt among the French officers and even their troops. Most of the French soldiers had begun their careers during the revolution. They did see themselves as liberators, and some already wondered exactly why they had been sent to suppress a revolution that claimed the same ideas—liberty, fraternity, equality—as their own. During the siege of La Crete a Pierrot, the white soldiers heard the black soldiers inside the walls singing their own revolutionary anthem, “The Marseillaise.” Doubt crept in. Later in the struggle, a good number of soldiers from Polish regiments actually did change sides. If Toussaint really did write the letter, he meant for his critique of Napoleon to play on the French officers' suspicions of the first consul's imperial ambitions.

Whether this letter to Napoleon was authentic or not, Toussaint was definitely trying to establish a new diplomatic channel with Boudet—a loop that excluded Captain General Leclerc. However, Sabes and Gimont had barely departed on their mission to Boudet when word came to Toussaint's camp that General Hardy had swept across Toussaint's property at La Coupe a l'lnde, taking numerous prisoners and, most importantly, Toussaint's favorite horse, the white stallion Bel Argent. Furious, Toussaint set off in pursuit. On March 29, Hardy was caught between Toussaint's men and Christophe's at Don-don and forced to beat a hasty retreat to Cap Francais. Though Bel Argent was not recovered, this victory was a terrific boost to the morale of the black resistance.

Immediately following the evacuation of La Crete a Pierrot, Toussaint had sent word north that Leclerc's forces had been annihilated there. This message wasn't as true as he wished it were; though noticeably limping, the French army was not crippled yet. But his master strategy had been successful in luring practically all the French troops into the Artibonite Valley toward La Crete a Pierrot. Leclerc had left Le Cap defended by a mere four hundred soldiers under the
mulatto General Boyer, supported by twelve hundred sailors from the fleet moored in the harbor. During the siege at La Crete a Pierrot, Toussaint had been very successful in whipping up guerrilla resistance along the Cordon de l'Ouest, led by maroon chieftains like Sylla, Romain, and Macaya (he who beat the drum too often). Troops from Toussaint's regular army were also operating all over the Northern Department, under Christophe and Colonel Jean-Baptiste Sans-Souci, who commanded at Grande Riviere and proved especially expert in combining conventional and guerrilla tactics.

During the month of March, these guerrilla leaders, working in coordination, cut French communications between the Northern Department and the rest of the country, raised rebellion at Borgne, Port Francais, and Morne Rouge, burned Limbe, and isolated Cap Francais, leaving the town open to an assault by Sans-Souci from Grande Riviere. Seriously unnerved, Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse reported to Napoleon that San-Souci's attack had carried terribly close to Le Cap; “if they had felt their own strength as well as knowing our weakness, the idea of what could have happened makes one shudder.”
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The battle in which Toussaint and Christophe routed Hardy actually went on for several days and alarmed Villaret-Joyeuse still further. Hardy had lost four or five hundred men in his flight, and the whole Northern Plain had been set afire (one more time), to the effect that “at midnight and in the middle of the harbor one could read by the light of the flames.”
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Hardy's return, which coincided with the arrival at Le Cap of fresh troops from France, moved Sans-Souci to retire. He delivered about a hundred prisoners to Toussaint, who had returned to his headquarters at Marmelade. At this point Toussaint had recovered control over all of his original power base, the Cordon de l'Ouest. Leclerc dared not cross the territory he had supposedly just conquered, but had to rush back to Cap Francais by boat. On April I, he wrote to Napoleon that he had only seven thousand fit men in the field; five thousand of his troops were in the hospital. Another five thousand were already dead, though Leclerc did not mention it.

The French forces of invasion had expected a swift and total victory. As it turned out, that's what they absolutely needed. Though they were able to win many engagements with startling speed, their successes
were never complete. Unacclimated European troops could not sustain the rigors of a campaign in this country over the long haul. Well aware of this difficulty, Vincent had urged the use of as many acclimated Spanish Creole troops as possible, but no one heeded this advice.

The terrain was difficult, not to say impossible. In the effort to explain the problem to superiors in France, one young lieutenant flung a crumpled ball of paper on the table, declaring bitterly that Saint Domingue looked like that. To this day one of Haiti's most telling proverbs is
Deye mbn gegne mbn
(Behind the mountains are more mountains). By day the French troops labored through staggering heat on forced marches, suffocating in their sweat-drenched wool uniforms. At night it was surprisingly cold on the heights and often they'd be drenched by torrential evening rains, so pneumonia joined dysentery and the mosquito-borne fevers which afflicted them. Unreliable supply lines often left them poorly fed. And a great many more than their officers would admit had simply been killed outright in battle.

The men of Toussaint's regular army (not to mention the flocks of field hands who were turning into paramilitary groups to resist the invasion), liked bread and salt meat if they could get it, but if not they got by very well on the cassava and fruit that were everywhere available to them. They liked uniforms and boots if they could get them, but if not they fought just as well half-naked and could move barefoot over the most horrendous terrain with the speed and agility of goats. Little settlements all over the mountains provided them with food and shelter. If these men had trouble standing up to the French military on conventional open battlefields, guerrilla tactics suited them down to the ground, and they could hold out forever in these mountains.

What followed has mystified many observers. With Toussaint as strong as he was in the north, and Dessalines threatening the French all over the Western Department, the black resistance had a winning edge over the invasion. Perhaps (as Villaret-Joyeuse so frantically hoped) the leaders simply did not know it.

The prisoners whom Sans-Souci brought to Toussaint at Mar-melade made a great impression. Toussaint treated them well, and even had a beef killed in their honor; he was generally humane to prisoners
under his direct control, though he ‘was often accused of tacitly suggesting massacres by his subordinates. These veterans of European ‘wars were redoubtable; Morisset, a commander of Toussaints honor guard, reported that “none of us can run through the ‘woods or climb mountains and rocks any faster than them”;
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he also claimed to have seen them pull down ‘wild horses by the ears.

The prisoners at Marmelade let Toussaint know that they had landed at Le Cap from a Dutch port just five days before they were captured, and Toussaint also learned around the same time that the Peace of Amiens had been confirmed by the signing of a treaty between England and France. The knowledge that no British blockade would dam a steady stream of such fearsome warriors flowing from France may have disheartened him. He could not have known that Leclerc was writing desperate pleas for reinforcements that were not in fact forthcoming, or that the first signs of a yellow fever epidemic had already appeared among the French at Cap Francais.

On April 26, General Henry Christophe, who was said to be “tired of living in the woods like a brigand,”
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submitted to the authority of Captain General Leclerc, on the condition that he retain his rank in the French army. He turned over some twelve hundred regular black troops, along with the towns of Acul, Boucan, Cardinaux, Saint Suzanne, Port Francais, Mornet, Grande Riviere, and Dondon— practically all the points of entry between the mountains and the Northern Plain. The loss of these posts seriously weakened the defense of Toussaints position in the Cordon de l'Ouest—the distance between Dondon and his Marmelade headquarters was alarmingly short—and brought about his own offer to surrender on May 1.

Whether Christophe's submission was an outright betrayal of Toussaint has been much debated. Vincent had predicted that Christophe would prove loyal to France if forced to a choice, but instead he had burned Le Cap and followed Toussaint in fighting the invasion. Roume believed that Christophe was ready to turn on Toussaint. Yet shortly before he did change sides, when the French camp suggested that he capture Toussaint by treachery and turn him in, Christophe rejected the proposition with huge indignation and also
showed the letters to Toussaint. The theory that Christophe was acting under Toussaint's secret direction when he surrendered to Leclerc is strange but not inconceivable—it is consistent with the idea that Toussaint used Christophe as a cat's-paw when Leclerc first appeared outside the harbor of Le Cap. Certainly, he never liked to let his own hand show openly in such maneuvers.