Toussaint, who was not quite yet Toussaint Louverture, remained nominally subordinate to Biassou, but quietly began to develop a certain autonomy. Not only did he command at La Tannerie, he was also involved in the western end of Biassou's line, and he took a particular interest in maintaining a string of small posts called the Cordon de l'Ouest, which ran from Gonai'ves on the west coast across the mountains through Plaisance and Marmelade to Dondon, at the pass to the Central Plateau. Upon the first outbreak of rebellion in the north, Governor Blanchelande had tried to occupy this line and use it as a cordon sanitaire to keep the insurrection from spilling over into the west. This measure was roughly half-successful, though white occupation of these mountain posts was always hotly contested by the rebel blacks.
Gonai'ves, though smaller than Cap Francais or Port-au-Prince, ‘was a significant seaport. Toussaint understood its strategic worth very'well, and he also grasped the importance of the line through the mountains that connected Gonai'ves to the island's inaccessible interior—and also to the town of Saint Raphael on the Central Plateau, where he had stationed his wife and children, just across the Spanish frontier from Dondon. When he joined the Spanish army in 1793, Toussaint had already begun to accumulate troops who really were answerable only to him; they were attracted because Toussaint ran a more orderly camp than Jean-François or Biassou. A few French regular army officers, unhappy with the revolutionary trends in their barracks, had drifted into Toussaint's region, and he used them to train his black soldiers in European military discipline and in the European style of war. Most likely based at La Tannerie, these troops also patrolled the Cordon de l'Ouest and sometimes ranged as far as Port Francais.
On September 18, 1792, a new civil commission had arrived in Cap Francais. Again, there were three commissioners: Jean-Antoine Ailhaud, Etienne Polverel, and Leger Felicite Sonthonax. Their mission was to enforce the law of April 4, ‘which not only gave the right to vote to all free persons of whatever race but required that all elected bodies in Saint Domingue be dissolved and replaced by new ones chosen by this racially expanded electorate. The new commissioners were empowered to overrule and even disband any and all colonial assemblies, and to deport anyone who disputed their authority for trial and judgment in France. Sonthonax, especially, would make heavy use of the power of deportation.
Both Sonthonax (a lawyer by profession) and Polverel were proteges of Jacques Brissot, a rising power in the French Revolutionary government who was also a fervent abolitionist and member of Les Amis des Noirs. Brissot had sponsored Sonthonax and Polverel in the Jacobin Club of Paris. The commissioners soon started similar clubs in the towns of Saint Domingue, where they proved to be magnetically attractive to the petits blancs. The overthrow of the hereditary French nobility was well under way by the time the Second Commission set sail from Rochefort; Sonthonax soon began to denounce the grands blancs of Saint Domingue as aristocrats de la peau, or aristocrats of the skin. During Sonthonax's first tour of duty in the colony, many in this class ‘would be deported, including Governor Blanchelande and his replacement, General Desparbes.
Though abolitionist in their personal sentiments, Sonthonax and Polverel had no authority to abolish slavery in Saint Domingue, and the home government did not intend them to do any such thing. Moreover, they brought no significant military force to back up any of their policies, and most of the army units already in the colony were of a much more conservative, if not outright royalist, disposition. The commissioners' official policy was to recognize no race or class differences in the colony other than the difference between free men and slaves. In the beginning, Sonthonax was in no rush to end slavery. He believed, and wrote to Brissot, that to free the slaves abruptly would “undoubtedly lead to the massacre of all the whites.”21 But leveling social differences between blancs and gens de couleur turned out to be a very stormy business.
In October 1792, Polverel went to Port-au-Prince to supervise the Western Department. Ailhaud, who had failed to adapt to either the meteorological or the political climate of Saint Domingue, started on a similar mission to the Southern Department but somehow ended up back in France. Thanks to the slow communications in the colony, Sonthonax was left to act unilaterally in Cap Francais. His pressure to integrate colored officers into the all-white Regiment du Cap provoked a firefight between the two groups on the main parade ground of the town, but with the help of a more progressive officer, Etienne Laveaux, Sonthonax won back enough military support to regain control.
Laveaux turned out to be a very capable commander. Under his leadership, French troops began to take back segments of the devastated Northern Plain, driving the insurgent blacks into the mountains. But in 1793, when the rebel slaves became Spanish auxiliaries, these gains began to be eroded. Moreover, the presence of a Spanish-sponsored black army along the Cordon de l'Ouest interfered with communications between Cap Francais and the north of Saint Domingue with Port-au-Prince and the Western and Southern departments. To further worry the beleaguered commissioners, a British invasion of the colony, abetted and encouraged by grand blancs plantation owners, was looking more and more likely.
From the first, Sonthonax and Polverel were regarded with the deepest suspicion by grand blancs landowners and members of the government. After all, the new commissioners had a mandate to dissolve any colonial assemblies elected before the law of April 4 was enacted, and they were prompt in carrying it out. The ensuing power vacuum in the structure of government lent credence to a charge made against the commissioners in a letter that circulated among conservative colonists in 1792:
Do not doubt it, Gentlemen, I am sure of it, the work has all been readied in the National Assembly, and it will be proclaimed as soon as the commissioners have seized control of all the authorities … The scheme of this assembly is to free all the negroes in all the French colonies, then to use these first freedmen to pursue the freeing [of all the slaves] in all the foreign colonies, and so to carry revolt, followed by independence, all over the New World … Repel, Gentlemen, repel these blood-drunk tigers!22
Though this message was false in its details, its gist was not without a certain plausibility. The French Revolution was very much interested in propagating itself outside the borders of France, and for that reason it was on the brink of war with most of the rest of Europe. Radical extremism in France had already become unnerving to the United States; the French Revolution could no longer be understood as a reen-actment of the American Revolution on European soil.
The notion of using the black revolutionaries of Saint Domingue to overthrow slavery in other West Indian colonies and even on the North American continent would become significant later, but if it had already occurred to the members of the French National Assembly it was nowhere near being part of their program. At this point, the majority in the assembly was too pragmatic to consider disrupting the slave system of its colonies, for the economic price would have been too great. Given the revolutionary turmoil at home, the West Indian colonies in general and Saint Domingue in particular were practically the last functioning elements in the economy of the whole French empire (provided that healthy economic function could be restored in Saint Domingue). It is not cheap for a nation to wage war on all its borders at once. Far from abolishing slavery, the object of the Second Commission was to bring an end to the slave rebellion and put the insurgent blacks back to work. That was easier said than done.
Sonthonax, especially, seems to have been an ambitious man, but although technically the commissioners could “seize control of all the authorities,” their grasp on real power was very weak. In theory the commission was the highest civil authority in the colony, and the deportation of men like Desparbes and Blanchelande left them without a competitive leader on the military side, but with the Colonial assemblies abolished by the law of April 4 and following the precipitous departure of Ailhaud, the commission amounted to just two men, widely separated by geography and out of communication for long periods.
The mil
itary forces in the colony were a threadbare patchwork of militias and regular army units which included, for example, a sizable contingent of Irish mercenaries stationed at the tip of the northwest peninsula, at Mole Saint-Nicolas. The military had been strained by armed rebellions all over the colony, not only the huge one in the north, and their loyalty to representatives of the French Revolutionary government was questionable. The petits blancs who'd taken control of many of the bigger towns like Port-au-Prince had been quick to declare for the revolution and to join the Jacobin clubs—maneuvers which got them out from under the heel of the grands blancs. But the petits blancs hated the gens de couleur even worse than they hated the grands blancs, so the commissioners' program of appointing colored men to public posts and inserting them into the officer corps (in the case of Sonthonax a very aggressive program) soon eroded the popularity they had enjoyed when they first arrived. Both commissioners knew they were walking on eggshells with every step they took.
In their regions divided from each other by the Cordon de l'Ouest, Polverel and Sonthonax were so busy trying to manage the volatile tensions among the grands blancs, the petits blancs, and the gens de couleur in the urban centers that they had little time or opportunity to do much about the masses of insurgent slaves in the countryside. Operations led by Laveaux on the Northern Plain had at first been successful. The huge but ill-disciplined bands of Jean-François and Biassou folded quickly before organized European assault—the blacks had learned that they would lose confrontations with massed troops in open country. For a short time the French military had hopes that these two insurgent chiefs might be captured.
Tougher resistance came in the mountainous terrain between the lowlands and Dondon, and Laveaux had a couple of very hard battles to fight at Morne Pelee and La Tannerie. Toussaint commanded the insurgent blacks in these two engagements, making himself known to the French for the first time as a significant military leader. He had spent much time and energy on the fortification of La Tannerie, and was not dislodged from it easily. When Laveaux finally won the position in January 1793, he found seventeen cannon there, including a couple of twenty-four-pounders.
By mid-February Sonthonax had begun to suspect that military force would not be sufficient to solve the problem of the slave insurrection, but large areas of the Northern Plain had been secured by Laveaux's campaign, and some colonists felt safe enough to return to the cinders of their plantations. Sonthonax decided to rejoin Polverel in the Western Department. His brother commissioner had been grievously overloaded since Ailhaud's departure, trying to govern the west and the south at the same time, across unmanageable distances.
During the commissioners' joint tour, the petits blancs of Port-au-Prince started an open rebellion against them; the preference the commissioners showed the gens de couleurhad moved this faction toward the counterrevolutionary camp. On April 12, 1793, Sonthonax and Polverel (who had established their base at Saint Marc, the next significant port up the coast) launched a combined assault by land and sea to subdue the revolt. The ship from which they directed the attack was hit several times by cannon on shore; a fire that resulted was finally put out. Since war had been declared between England and France as of February 1, the commissioners also feared that the arrival of a British fleet might interrupt their conquest of the colonial capital, but it did not come.
Following the success of their operation at Port-au-Prince, the commissioners were able to regain control of the Western Department and most of the Southern. On May 15, the town of Jacmel on the southern coast admitted them without much struggle. But counterrevolutionary activity held out at Jeremie, on the tip of the southern peninsula otherwise known as the Grande Anse. An expedition against Jeremie led by Andre Rigaud, a colored goldsmith and experienced militiaman whom the commissioners had promoted to the rank of general, failed to subdue the rebellion there. In fact the counterrevolutionaries on the Grande Anse had now opened communications with sympathizers in Cap Francais. Sonthonax and Polverel rushed back there, arriving on the 10th of June.
For decades, the home government in France had intentionally divided the administration of Saint Domingue against itself. Power was shared, or contested, between a military governor and a civilian intendant. From the point of view of average white colonists, the main activity of the governor was to inconvenience them with militia service requirements, while the only thing the intendant did was burden them with taxes and obnoxious restraints on trade. Therefore both officials were normally detested by the citizens they governed, and since their spheres of authority were apt to collide, they did not like each other much either. Paris fostered animosity between governor and intendant, with the thought that so long as they were at odds, each would prevent the other from nurturing any sort of independence movement of the sort that had recently cost England its American colonies.
The powers of the Second Commission superseded those of the intendant, and soon after his arrival Sonthonax had deported Governor Blanchelande. But on May 7, while the commissioners were frantically trying to restore their authority in the west and the south, a new governor landed at Cap Francais: Thomas François Galbaud. Sent out from France to replace Blanchelande, Galbaud was himself a Creole, born in Port-au-Prince, and he owned property in the colony. He had achieved the rank of general in the regular French army, and he was thought to be loyal to the revolution; however, counterrevolutionary colonists in Paris believed that he would take their part in Saint Domingue, and had lobbied for his appointment to the governor's post. Though Galbaud's orders subordinated him to the authority of the commissioners, his status as the colony's military commander in chief allowed the owners of plantations and slaves to hope that he would become a rallying point for their interests.23 In the volatile situation of Saint Domingue in 1793, the tension which the home government had long nurtured between the civil and military powers in the colony proved a recipe for disaster.
Galbaud found the city government of Le Cap in the hands of the gens de couleur Sonthonax had appointed, and he was not pleased. The governor's presence and the commissioners' absence brought white counterrevolutionaries flocking to the town. By the time Sonthonax and Polverel arrived on June 10, tension between mulattoes and whites was close to a flash point. Between the commissioners and the new governor, whatever diplomacy was attempted failed. On June 13, Polverel and Sonthonax ordered Galbaud and his party aboard the Normandy for deportation to France.
The move turned out to be a rash one. The many deportations already ordered by Sonthonax had roused resentment of the commission at all levels of white society. The ships in Le Cap harbor were packed with deportees who had not yet set sail, and crewed by sailors who sympathized with the petit blancs class that had so recently been in rebellion. Confined on board the anchored ships were some five hundred planters who in the words of one observer “had done no wrong except to be white and above all to be landowners.” To add injury to insult, the commissioners had just confiscated their harvests of sugar and coffee to pay for foodstuffs imported from the United States and England. The sailors in the fleet, meanwhile, were irked by the commissioners' order that none of them could be on shore after nightfall. Sometime during the evening of June 19, a delegation from these two groups approached Galbaud and suggested he do something about it.
On the morning of June 20, Galbaud led two thousand of these men in a landing by force. Colored troops defended the commissioners with real fervor, but on the second day of fighting, Sonthonax and Polverel were forced to flee to Haut du Cap; by coincidence they established a headquarters at Breda Plantation, where Toussaint Louverture had been a slave.
That same day, as a last resort, the commissioners released a proclamation which read, in part: “We declare that the will of the French Republic and of its delegates is to give freedom to all the Negro warriors who will fight for the Republic under the orders of the civil commissioners, against Spain or other enemies, whether internal or external … All the slaves declared free by the delegates o
f the Republic will be equal to all free men—they will enjoy all the rights belonging to French citizens.”24
This message was carried to the rebel slaves camped outside Le Cap by the mulatto officer Antoine Chanlatte, accompanied by Ginioux and Galineux Degusy “two white adventurers still more frenzied than he.”25 The first to receive it were Pierrot and Macaya, whose bands of insurgents occupied the territory beyond Haut du Cap and also had encampments on the heights of Morne du Cap, the steep mountain which dominated Cap Francais. Toussaint himself was camped near Pierrots band, at Port Francais on the far side of the mountain from the town; it is likely he received the same proffer as the other two leaders but if so he took no overt action.
It was the bands of Pierrot and Macaya, ten thousand strong, who stormed Le Cap late in the day of June 21. Galbaud and his faction fled to their ships. When they sailed they brought with them most of the whites who had taken their part—the remnants of the grand blancs landowners and the petit blancs counterrevolutionaries (including Procurator Gros); this huge flotilla of refugees eventually landed in Baltimore. Though ready enough to sack the town, the rebel slaves did not seem particularly responsive to the orders of the civil commissioners or anyone else. Some fires had apparently already started while Galbaud was nominally in charge of the town. During the huge onslaught of the insurgent slaves, the fires spread uncontrollably. By the time the ten thousand blacks had carried their loot back into the hills, and Sonthonax and Polverel reoccupied Cap Francais, five-sixths of the Jewel of the Antilles had been destroyed.
Toussaint Louverture Page 6