In 1800, while Jefferson was running against incumbent John Adams for president, Virginia had been shaken by a slave revolt led by a twenty-five-year-old black preacher named Gabriel. Obviously inspired by events on Saint-Domingue, Gabriel had recruited over a thousand fellow slaves to march on Richmond on the night of August 30. There they planned to seize the state arsenal, arm themselves, and kill all the whites in the state except a handful of Quakers and Methodists who were “friendly to liberty.”
Gabriel and his men had gathered at the appointed hour in woods about six miles from Richmond. Before they could march, a violent rainstorm pelted down, washing out bridges and submerging roads. The storm lasted most of the night, forcing the plotters to return to their plantations. The next day, a slave who had refused to join the conspiracy told his master what had almost happened. Governor James Monroe called out hundreds of well-armed state militia with orders to shoot to kill if necessary. Gabriel, his brother, and about thirty others were seized and sentenced to death.6
Governor Monroe wrote a full report on Virginia’s narrow escape and sent a copy to Thomas Jefferson. Telling the grisly news to a Philadelphia friend, the presidential candidate said: “We are truly to be pitied.”
Those anguished words reveal Jefferson’s inner struggle over slavery, and his growing conviction that blacks and whites could never be reconciled. That ambivalence had made him ignore—or dismiss—Toussaint Louverture’s attempt to create a multiracial society. Jefferson considered this an impossibility, and he was eager to see Louverture removed from power before his example inspired more Gabriels to rise in Virginia and other southern states.7
• • •
In Europe, Jefferson’s election as president had coincided with the mutual exhaustion of France and Britain after eight years of global warfare. As peace negotiations began in November 1801, Napoleon shipped a 20,000-man army to Saint-Domingue, commanded by his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc.
Unknown to Jefferson, this expedition had another larger purpose. In March 1801, the “Man of Destiny,” as Napoleon liked to be called, had browbeaten the reluctant Spanish king into retroceding the immense territory of Louisiana to France. It had been given to Spain in 1763 as compensation for her losses in the Seven Years’ War. In secret orders, Bonaparte told Leclerc to transfer the bulk of his army to New Orleans as soon as he restored French supremacy in Saint-Domingue, a task that Bonaparte estimated would take only six weeks. The goal was the creation of a self-sufficient overseas empire.
Louisiana would supply Saint-Domingue and the other French West Indian islands with food at cut-rate prices, eliminating the need to buy from the Americans. The islands would continue to produce sugar, coffee, and indigo to swell France’s depleted exchequer. Ships of other nations would be excluded from carrying this lucrative cargo.
A confident Leclerc arrived off the port of Cap Francois in February 1802 and promptly went to work on “the gilded Africans,” as Napoleon contemptuously called the black rebels. The size of the French fleet and army made Louverture and his generals more than a little suspicious. It was much too large to be the escort of a delegation from Paris, reaffirming France’s theoretical sovereignty. The French had sent several of these ambassadors during the previous tumultuous decade.
When Leclerc called on Jean Christophe, one of Louverture’s best generals, to surrender the port city, he declined. Leclerc promptly attacked from land and sea. Christophe responded by burning Cap Francois and retreating into the countryside.
All-out war erupted throughout Saint-Domingue. At first it seemed to go well for the French. The Spanish section of the island was quickly occupied with the help of the resident white and mulatto population. Black garrisons in other ports surrendered to oncoming French brigades. In ten days Leclerc captured all the key ports and coastal forts and was preparing an offensive into the interior. But Toussaint Louverture remained beyond his grasp, and another black general, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, rampaged through the countryside, slaughtering every white person he found—and any black who tried to help them.
An attempt at negotiations failed, and on February 18, 1802, Leclerc launched an offensive against Louverture’s interior stronghold, Gonaives. Advancing in four columns, the French discovered they had to wade through “fire and bayonets” for every foot of ground. Losses were heavy on both sides, but the offensive paid off when several black generals switched sides. Leclerc combined force with lavish offers of money and power to those who joined him in a pacified Saint-Domingue.
General Leclerc discovered a strange illness was creeping through the French part of his army. Soldiers weakened without warning; in a day they were too sick to walk. Then came black vomit, yellowing skin, convulsions, and death. The disease was yellow fever, inflicted by the bite of the female mosquito, Aedes aegypti. But the French commander, as determined and as ruthless as his imperious brother-in-law, pressed his offensive, and soon more black generals—notably the gifted Jean Christophe—switched sides.
• • •
On May 1, Toussaint Louverture suddenly agreed to peace terms. He would give up power and retire with a moderate-sized bodyguard to a plantation in the interior. His generals and officers would receive equivalent ranks in the French army, which became 50 percent black. Toussaint had learned that Napoleon had signed a definitive treaty of peace with the British at Amiens. This left him and his army at the mercy of Bonaparte’s vastly superior numbers and weaponry. The black leader capitulated, hoping to get the best possible deal from Leclerc. Louverture’s murderous second in command, Dessalines, sullenly accepted similar terms on May 6.8
The war was far from over. Guerilla resistance continued to flare throughout the interior of the island. Leclerc also confronted problems beyond Saint-Domingue’s horizon. In the first months of 1802, Jefferson and his secretary of state, James Madison, learned that the French now owned Louisiana. Next, the American ambassador in London warned them of Napoleon’s plan to make Saint-Domingue a mere way station on Leclerc’s voyage to New Orleans.
Jefferson’s love affair with the French Revolution came to an abrupt halt under the influence of the cooler, more suspicious Madison. On Saint-Domingue, Aedes aegypti was still hard at work, decimating the French regiments. Noting Leclerc’s growing weakness, a watchful Louverture began intriguing for a comeback.
Leclerc was watching him, too. Lured to a nearby plantation without his usual armed escort, the black leader was seized, thrown on a ship, and deported to France as a common criminal. There, Napoleon deposited him in a freezing fortress in the Jura Mountains, where Louverture would die a year later.
• • •
At this point Bonaparte made a ruinous blunder. Pressured by refugee planters from Saint-Domingue and by numerous merchants in Le Havre and other French ports who had grown rich on the slave trade, he decided to reimpose slavery on Saint-Domingue and other French islands. When word of this decision reached Saint-Domingue in June 1802, the black masses rose in fury against the French and the black soldiers allied with them. Captain-General Leclerc was stunned by the ferocity of the blacks’ resistance. “These men die with an incredible fanaticism; they laugh at death; it is the same with the women,” he said.
General Leclerc ordered Chargé Louis Pichon to obtain food and war materiel from America. He was even more eager for Jefferson and Madison to make good on their promise to starve the blacks into submission. The president and secretary of state informed the dismayed Pichon that they would not be able to starve the rebels after all. An agitated Pichon reported that he had found President Jefferson “very reserved and cold.”9
Badly weakened by a growing food shortage and a lack of medical supplies, the French were unable to sustain their counteroffensive. Whole regiments began succumbing to yellow fever. Soon an appalling 60 percent of General Leclerc’s staff was dead. On November 2, 1802, the French commander himself succumbed.
A grimly determined Napoleon poured in 15,000 replacements and continued
the struggle. For a while the fresh troops seemed on the way to restoring French control of the island. But in Europe events were unfolding that soon turned these victories into hollow triumphs. The British decided that their experiment with a purportedly peace-loving Napoleon was not working. It soon became obvious that the war for world supremacy was about to resume.10
• • •
With that near certainty in mind, Napoleon rethought his plans for Louisiana. Bonaparte badly needed money for his war machine. When Ambassador Robert R. Livingston visited him in early 1803, Napoleon asked him how much he would be willing to pay for all of Louisiana. The amazed ambassador was soon joined by special envoy James Monroe, who could speak for President Jefferson. By July 1803, they had bought 868,000 square miles of North America—a third of the continent—for $15 million.
Napoleon continued the struggle to subdue Saint-Domingue, stirring fears that he might repudiate the Louisiana deal. But the moment news of the declaration of renewed war reached the Caribbean, the British West Indies fleet made Saint-Domingue target number one. The royal navy bombarded French-held seaports and smuggled guns and encouragement to the rebels. In November 1803, their army reduced to eight thousand men, the French retreated to Cap Francois and surrendered to a British fleet cruising offshore.
While France’s hopes of colonial wealth and power vanished forever, triumph was the order of the day in Washington, DC. A special session of Congress confirmed President Jefferson’s decision to pay Napoleon’s price for New Orleans and the Louisiana Territory, doubling the size of the United States. Jefferson, with his gift for the electrifying phrase, declared the entire North American continent would soon become an “Empire of Liberty.”11
• • •
General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who had long since switched back to the rebel side, became the ruler of Saint-Domingue. He decided to begin the new year (1804) with a declaration of independence. A brigadier who acted as his secretary, Louis Felix Boisrond-Tonnerre, eagerly seconded the idea. What they needed in order to make the declaration authentic, Boisrond-Tonnerre roared, was “the skin of a white for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen!”
A delighted Dessalines, who could not read or write, ordered Boisrond-Tonnerre to compose the declaration. “Make people know how I feel about the whites!” he said. He had long since made that clear by his merciless conduct on the battlefield. To underscore the new nation’s policy, he picked up a French tricolor and cut the white strip out of it, creating a new national flag.
On January 1, 1804, a huge celebration took place at Toussaint Louverture’s old stronghold, the inland town of Gonaives. After a day of feasting and dancing, General Dessalines mounted a platform draped in the new flags, and with a wave of his hand he silenced the pounding kettledrums and trumpets. The short stocky general proclaimed the island independent of France and declared it would henceforth be known by its Carib Indian name, Haiti. Then he summoned Boisrond-Tonnerre to read the Declaration of Independence.
It began with a war cry. “We must live free or we must die!” A paragraph exhorted the listeners to “look about you for your wives, husbands, brothers, sisters. Where have they gone? They have fallen prey to these vultures” (the whites). The rest of the document was a raging denunciation of France and French whites.
The mere news of this declaration inspired not a few Frenchmen to charter ships to send their families and moveable property elsewhere. But when they arrived at various ports to embark, armed soldiers blocked their paths and ordered them to return to their homes.
General Dessalines had decided Haiti must be cleansed of everyone white. On March 9 he marched into the port of Jeremie and dragged every white male in the city into the town square. Dessalines gazed contemptuously at them and snarled: “You whites of Jeremie—I know how you hate me . . . The blood of you all shall pay!”
Five doctors, an American visitor, and a few foreign merchants were shoved to the other side of the square. Next Dessalines offered amnesty to about four hundred men of property if they would pay substantial ransoms before sundown. The rest were hacked to death by ax-wielding executioners. The four hundred reprieved men paid their ransoms well before sundown. But they were not released. During the night, they were all beheaded and their bodies left in a huge pile.
Dessalines marched to other cities and repeated this gruesome performance. Some of his generals, such as Jean Christophe, tried to dissuade him. They had become friendly with many of these doomed Frenchmen. They needed their help to restore Haiti’s prosperity. But the new ruler was implacable. French men, women, and children died in the same merciless way.
In one or two ports, Dessalines’s more compassionate lieutenants allowed some Frenchmen and their families to escape to nearby ships. A few foreign merchants used bribes and persuasion to help others flee. One Scottish merchant from Baltimore was later given a gold medal by French refugees in that city to express their gratitude.
Dessalines closed his campaign with a masterful final act of treachery. He issued a proclamation, calling on whites who had remained in hiding to emerge, guaranteeing them safe conduct to departing ships. A few dozen took him at his word—and met instant death from the waiting ax-men.12
• • •
It is not hard to imagine what President Thomas Jefferson thought and felt when the story of the extermination of Haiti’s whites reached Washington, DC, and other American cities in the spring of 1804. Instead of a prosperous multiracial nation under Toussaint Louverture, Jefferson had helped to create a wrecked and desolated island in the grip of an illiterate, half-mad despot. Haiti’s blood-soaked birth made the ultimate meaning of the term race war an unforgettable nightmare. It was soon on its way to becoming a disease of the public mind in the southern states.
The horrified president could think of only one solution: Haiti had to be as isolated as possible from the United States of America. A few months after Dessalines had completed his slaughter, Jefferson’s son-in-law, Congressman John W. Eppes, rose in the House of Representatives to introduce a resolution, calling on the United States to refuse to recognize Haiti’s independence. Henceforth Americans would have no further political contact with the Republic of Haiti. Everyone knew this was a message from the president. It passed overwhelmingly.13
• • •
Why did President Jefferson manage to escape without a word of reproach or criticism, both in the North and the South, for the awful fate he had helped to visit on Haiti? Few people besides James Madison knew about the president’s approval of Napoleon’s invasion. The public blame fell on France.
Even if the whole truth were known, there is another reason why most Americans would probably have found little fault with the president: the Louisiana Purchase. This diplomatic triumph had opened virtually endless acres of fertile western land to the nation’s farmers and would-be farmers. The acquisition guaranteed Thomas Jefferson’s popularity for decades to come. In 1804, he was reelected by an overwhelming majority. His Federalist opponent carried only two states.
But in Thomas Jefferson’s troubled soul, the nightmare generated by Haiti never went away. On the contrary, it redoubled his fear that the problem of slavery in the South was insoluble and would eventually destroy the United States of America, either in a race war or in a civil war between North and South.
• • •
A few months after General Dessalines ended his blood-soaked final campaign, he wrote a letter to President Jefferson, expressing the hope that an independent Haiti could establish diplomatic relations with the United States. Here was a moment that might have altered Haiti’s tragic future.
The letter revealed that Dessalines’s rage did not extend to all white men. It was the treacherous French whom he had hated and punished. He had conspicuously spared American lives in his final rampage. The dictator and his advisors were remembering the friendly relationship that Toussaint Louverture had enjoyed with America during President John
Adams’s administration.
For President Jefferson, the letter posed a stark political danger. It could lead to the exposure of his initial encouragement of the French attempt to reconquer Haiti and reimpose slavery. Jefferson never answered Dessalines. Haiti was cut adrift to reel through decades of instability and demoralizing poverty.
Other nations treated Haiti even more deplorably. Before resuming diplomatic and commercial relations, the French insisted on a huge indemnity for property destroyed or seized in the upheavals of the 1790s. Nevertheless, America’s chance to alter Haiti’s history—and perhaps eliminate the South’s dread of a race war—was lost forever. President Thomas Jefferson’s silence is one of those hidden turning points that leave historians brooding over what might have been.
CHAPTER 7
New England Preaches—and Almost Practices—Secession
While average citizens welcomed the Louisiana Purchase with enthusiasm and began voting for Thomas Jefferson and his Republican Party (often called “Democratic-Republican” by modern historians), the leaders of the defeated Federalist Party remained unreconciled. In Boston’s Columbian Centinel, a Federalist spokesman voiced an angry fear of the future. “This unexplored empire, of the size of four or five European kingdoms,” would destroy the balance of the Union. Louisiana was currently “a great waste, unpeopled with any beings besides wolves and wandering Indians.” But in coming years it would be divided into states, all of whom would follow Virginia’s political leadership.1
When the treaty approving the purchase was submitted to Congress, Federalist representative Roger Griswold of Connecticut declared the Constitution had no provision for acquiring new territory, and Louisiana would have to be governed as a colony, the way the British ruled Jamaica. Senator Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, who had been secretary of state under President John Adams, went even further. He asserted Jefferson would need the unanimous approval of every state in the Union to sign the treaty. Senator John Breckinridge of the new state of Kentucky replied that if Congress rejected the treaty, Kentucky and Tennessee would secede from the Union and form a separate country.2
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