Toussaint Louverture

by Madison Smartt Bell

  In its first weeks, the English invasion was rather successful at rather low cost. Thanks to their warm reception by royalist colonists, the English soldiers were able to occupy a lot of ground without firing a shot. Indeed it soon developed that this particular batch of redcoats preferred not to fire any shots at all if that could be avoided, but instead to win territory with bribes whenever they could. But since the British were not directly dependent on black auxiliaries, there was nothing to stop them from arming French emigres and colonists who took their part; these men formed militias who were willing and eager to fight. Thus, although the colored general Andre Rigaud held Les Cayes and the surrounding region on the southern peninsula for the French republicans, the British were able to bypass his positions and press as far north as Leogane, threatening Port-au-Prince, where Commissioner Polverel was in residence. To the north of Port-au-Prince, the British occupied Saint Marc and began building fortifications there and at Petite Riviere, a nearby town in the interior, in the foothills of the Cahos mountain range.

  Allied with Spain in the European war with France, the British were theoretically supposed to cooperate with the Spanish in Saint Domingue, but in reality the two nations were in competition for possession of the sugar colony's vast revenues—provided either one of them could ever stabilize the situation there. Nonetheless a British delegation called at Spanish-controlled Gonai'ves, where they were greeted by one “Tusan … a Negroe, who they called the Spanish general, commanding the place.”12 In the end, and despite some interesting proposals, the British and Spanish forces never managed to launch any combined operations against the French republicans; they left it at respecting each other's positions.

  In the first eight months of their effort the British managed to gain a third of French Saint Domingue while losing no more than fifty men in battle. However, the tropical climate was equally fatal to all European troops, without any prejudice as to their nation. It was not yet known that malaria and yellow fever were mosquito-borne illnesses, though there was a general awareness that newly arrived troops were healthier in the mountains than cooped up in the miasmal towns of the coast. Occupying the mountains, however, involved combat risks that the British were reluctant to run. Illness soon began to make terrible inroads into their force, though for a while they could compensate by the use of the better-acclimated French colonial militias. The Spanish, in fact, had similar difficulties maintaining European troops in the field, though they could compensate with their acclimated black auxiliaries.

  Despite these weaknesses of their adversaries, the French republicans were in a difficult spot. They too suffered from a shortage of European troops, and from the diseases to which new arrivals were prey. The strongest alliances Sonthonax had built were with the gens de couleur and the anciens libres—a significant faction but one vastly outnumbered by the huge mass of black nouveaux libres, who despite the abolition of slavery were conspicuously failing to flock to the republican banner. In April 1794, Sonthonax and Polverel were trapped under British siege at Port-au-Prince, while Laveaux was pinned down at Port de Paix. Communications between these towns and the other republican territories at Le Cap and Les Cayes were interrupted on sea by British naval power and on land by either British or Spanish occupation. Then there were sizable tracts of territory (at Gros Morne, Grande Riviere, Saltrou, and the Cul de Sac plain outside Port-au-Prince) which no one could say who controlled for certain—if anyone actually did control them.

  When he looked at the checkerboard that French Saint Domingue had become, Toussaint could see plainly that all three colonial powers were in almost equally precarious situations. The weight he himself could bring to bear might be decisive—wherever he chose to throw it.

  Did the British make him an offer? It would have been characteristic for them to have done so. At around that same time, the British made an overture to Laveaux, then in a truly difficult siege situation at Port de Paix, offering him a bribe of fifty thousand ecus to yield his position and change sides. Perhaps the British thought that Laveaux, as a hereditary nobleman serving in the republican army, would welcome the invitation to abandon the Jacobins (as a fair number of officers had already done)—but Laveaux took enormous offense. “You have sought to dishonor me in the eyes of my brothers in arms,” he wrote to the British colonel Whitelocke. “It is an outrage for which you owe me personal satisfaction; I demand it in the name of the honor which must exist among nations. In consequence, before there should be a general engagement, I offer you a single combat, up to the point that one of us falls. I leave you the choice of arms, be it on horseback or afoot.”13 Whitelocke apparently judged it impractical to accept the challenge.

  Kerverseau claims that Toussaint turned down a similar offer from the British, for no reason of honor but because the price was too low— yet that may have been a simple slander. If the British did try to approach Toussaint, no document of the effort has survived. It is possible that they did not yet understand his importance, for at this stage of the game they seemed to have only a vague idea of the “Negroe, Tusan.” On the other hand, Toussaint himself was extremely secretive and seldom left any trace of unconsummated negotiations behind him.

  Sonthonax, of course, and then the more reluctant Polverel had meant for their abolition of slavery to win the nouveau libre rebel slaves to their side. As of April 1794, little had happened to justify this hope. A few bands of maroons here and there, notably the one led by Halaou in the region surrounding Leogane, formed queasy alliances with the commissioners. But most such bands were simply out for themselves, roaming mountainous areas which none of the three colonial powers could honestly claim to control, while the vast majority of nouveaux libres were opposing the republican French as Spanish auxiliaries. When General Laveaux tried to persuade Jean-François to embrace the republican cause in the fall of 1794, his reply was fully as contemptuous as the one Laveaux made to the British envoy—and was also keenly perceptive: “Although I might very well reply to all the chapters of your letter, I omit them because they are almost all detailed in a manifesto which I have circulated among my compatriots in which, without artifice, I let them know the fate which awaits them if they let themselves be seduced by your beautiful words … Equality, Liberty, &c &c &c … and I will only believe in all that when I see that Monsieur Laveaux and other French gentlemen of his quality give their daughters in marriage to negroes. Then I will be able to believe in the pretended equality.”14

  The question put so sharply in this letter was whether the French Revolution really meant to put its money where its mouth was with regard to freedom and equality for the blacks. Toussaint was certainly considering this same question closely by April 1794.

  At the same time he had several pragmatic, not to say Machiavellian, reasons to switch sides. Hindsight shows that his chances for advancement in military rank were better with the French than with the Spanish. Toussaint (who didn't take up arms until he was over fifty) had discovered a surprising tactical ability and no doubt wanted to see it recognized and rewarded. Certainly he knew that in the Spanish military he had hit an impenetrable ceiling. But though in the end he would emerge as the highest-ranking French officer in Saint Domingue, in the beginning he accepted a lower rank in the French service than he'd had in the Spanish.

  His brother Pierre had just been killed by his ostensible allies, and given his frosty relationship with the Spanish command, his wife and sons were no longer safe in their haven on the Central Plateau. Toussaint seems to have moved them briefly to the area of Trou du Nord on the Northern Plain, but this location was not very secure either. An alliance with the French republicans would include the mulatto commanders at Le Cap, whose power did reach into the Northern Plain.

  From a distance, the British looked strong in the areas they occupied. They had several thousand redcoats on the ground, and the grand b fane—mulatto confederations of the west and the south were operating on behalf of the British invasion with some success. But Toussaint knew the v
alue of intelligence, and he probably had intelligence of the weakening of the British force by disease. Also, the British positions were far distant from Toussaint's own areas of strength. The British were strongest on the southern peninsula, and at Mole Saint-Nicolas. They had occupied Saint Marc, the next important port down the coast from Gona'ives, and in April 1794 they looked likely to capture Port-au-Prince. All these areas, except for Saint Marc, were well away from Toussaint's current sphere of influence. Meanwhile, the Cordon de l'Ouest, which he personally controlled, formed a perimeter around the French republicans in the north, and Toussaint considered the string of posts from Limbe through Port Margot to Borgne to be a logical extension of this line. To unite these positions with those currently in the hands of the French republicans would be a strategic thunderbolt. From the British post at Mole to Spanish-occupied Fort Dauphin, the whole north Atlantic coast would become, without interruption, French republican. Thanks to the Cordon de l'Ouest, the republicans could then secure the Northern Plain and practically all of the Northern Department except for a few points on the periphery. Suddenly they would become a serious threat to the British in the south and the west.

  Then there was the question of general liberty. Toussaint claimed it had always been dear to his heart. Politically, it was now essential that he embrace it wholeheartedly whatever he may have thought before. There was no other way to assure the loyalty of the great majority of nouveaux libres, who would henceforth be his power base.

  Toussaint knew enough of European politics to doubt whether Sonthonax's proclamation of emancipation would prove durable. He knew that what really counted was the abolition of slavery by the National Convention in France. In fact, Sonthonax's proclamation had been ratified months before, in an ecstatic session of the legislature and in the presence of a delegation from Saint Domingue which included the white Louis Dufay, the mulatto Jean-Baptiste Mills, and a full-blooded African, Jean-Baptiste Belley who like Toussaint had earned his own freedom from slavery under the ancien regime. On February 4, 1794, the convention passed, with no opposition, a law which “declares that slavery is abolished throughout the territory of the Republic; in consequence, all men, without distinction of color, will enjoy the rights of French citizens.”15 With that, the French Revolution had put its money where its mouth was. The decree did away not only with slavery but also with the whole structure of institutionalized racial discrimination that had plagued free blacks and free men of color until 1791.

  However, the convention's decree was not officially proclaimed in Saint Domingue until June 8,1794. The usual interpretation is that no news of this momentous event had reached the colony before this date, but such a long delay seems highly unlikely. The transatlantic voyage from France to the Caribbean took more or less six weeks, depending on wind and ‘weather. Thus it is probable that rumors of the national decree ‘would have begun to seep into Saint Domingue and the other French colonies no later than the end of March.

  Officially, Toussaint Louverture is not supposed to have known of the decree until June. Yet in his letter to Chanlatte almost a year earlier, he boasted of the quality of the information he got directly from France. It is possible that he had his first inkling of the emancipation decree by the last days of March 1794, just as he was coming to blows with Jean-François, Biassou, and the Spanish military commanders.

  On May 5, the emancipation decree was proclaimed in Guadeloupe—a negligible distance from Saint Domingue. On the same date, General Laveaux wrote Toussaint to acknowledge receiving an emissary who “announced to me that the national flag is flying in these two places [Terre Neuve and Port a Piment], and moreover he announced to me the return that you have just made, and that you have declared yourself Republican, and that for the triumph of Republican arms, you have raised the tricolor flag at Gona'ives.”16

  Toussaint had finally made his move, probably—as in the case of most successful politicians—for a melange of pragmatic and idealistic motives. Whether he was influenced by the National Conventions abolition of slavery can never be known for certain. Chances are that at least a rumor of the decree had reached him. Sonthonax had gone so far as to announce it as early as February 27, but that was pure bluff and Toussaint probably would have recognized it as such. Laveaux's May 5 letter makes no mention of the convention's decree, referring instead to the advisability of “following the proclamation of the Civil Commissioners.” Toussaint mentions having actually seen the convention's emancipation decree for the first time in a letter to Laveaux dated July 7.

  Laveaux's May 5 letter describes Toussaints move as a “return,” and Toussaint's first reply, dated May 18, mentions that at some earlier point “the ways of reconciliation proposed by me were rejected.” Some circumstantial evidence suggests that Toussaint and the republicans had tried for a rapprochement the year before, in the summer of 1793, before the catastrophic burning of Le Cap at the end of June. On June 4, the black leader Pierrot wrote to Governor Galbaud requesting written confirmation of a rumor he claimed to have heard that the French meant to declare the abolition of slavery. Since Toussaint was encamped with Pierrot at this time (a stone's throw from Le Cap, at Port Francais), he was more than likely a silent partner in this probe. Toussaint was certainly aware of the trouble brewing between Galbaud and the Jacobin commissioners and must have been wondering which faction to back. Galbaud had roots in the grand blanc world to which Bayon de Libertat belonged; Toussaint was not necessarily convinced that even conservative royalists of this stripe would be absolutely attached to maintaining slavery.

  After the conflict exploded and Galbaud's supporters had driven Sonthonax and Polverel out of Le Cap, the commissioners proposed freedom for any men among the black rebels who would fight for their cause against Galbaud. That offer was good enough for Macaya and Pierrot, but apparently not for Toussaint, who chose to withdraw, watch the battle from a safe distance, and then consider dealing with the victor. Toussaint always preferred to stand clear of any battle he didn't absolutely have to fight.

  Once the Jacobin commissioners had emerged (however shakily) in the ascendancy, Toussaint reopened a line of communication with them, this time via Laveaux, who used Antoine Chanlatte as his emissary. Chanlatte was harassing several of Toussaint's posts along the Cordon de l'Ouest at this time, but also trying diplomacy in between skirmishes. His letter to Laveaux of August 10, 1793, reporting several scuffles and parleys in the area of Marmelade, Plaisance, and Ennery ends with the startlingly offhand remark that Toussaint is in Le Cap and will soon be calling on Laveaux in person. Strange, since earlier in the same letter Chanlatte describes how “Toussaint a Breda” had already rejected the republican overture. There was more than one man named Toussaint among the rebel slaves in the north of the colony, so perhaps it was a different Toussaint who meant to visit Laveaux.

  Still, the idea that a clandestine meeting between General Laveaux and Toussaint Louverture might have taken place—just a couple of weeks before Sonthonax's announcement of abolition and Toussaint's proclamation from Camp Turel—is intriguing. If the encounter did happen, how did it go wrong? If it never happened, what was Toussaint doing in those two weeks, and whom was he talking to? At the time that Laveaux and Toussaint might have met, Sonthonaxs proclamation of abolition was in the offing but had not yet come to shore. Toussaint's communications at the end of August suggest that he knew Sonthonaxs proclamation was on the way—and that he meant to beat the French commissioner to that particular punch.

  On August 25, Toussaint sent an open letter to a camp of free mulattoes fighting for the French republic from their base in Le Cap— Chanlatte and also Villatte were part of his intended audience. Not long before, Chanlatte had tried to win Toussaint over to the republican cause. In the August 25 letter Toussaint tried to persuade Chanlatte's troops to leave the republic and join him.

  “The idea of this general liberty for whose cause you do battle against your friends, by whom was its basis first formed? Were we not ourselves its
first authors?”17 (This last sentence may be the only case where Toussaint identified himself, in writing, with the relatively small population of affranchis who had gained freedom under the old colonial system, rather than with the great mass of slaves in the process of freeing themselves.) He exhorted the mulatto troops to shake free of those who had hypnotized them with “a host of very vague promises”— Sonthonax and Polverel, that is, “two individuals charged with the title of Delegates of the Republic, which itself is not holding up.”

  Here, at the end of August 1793, Toussaint put plainly his belief that the French republic would not endure, that the monarchy would return, and that the rebel slaves must look to the restored French monarchy for ratification of the liberty they had claimed for themselves. In the next breath, however, he invoked the most famous passage of French Revolutionary rhetoric, albeit with a particular interpretation of his own: “Recall the sentiments to which your General Chanlatte bears witness, in favor of liberty and equality; liberty is a right given by Nature; equality is a consequence of that liberty, granted and maintained by this National Assembly.”

  Like so many of his generation, whether at first or second hand, Toussaint seems to have imbibed the idea of liberty as a natural right from Rousseau. Equality, in his view of things, may be more of a legal matter (and one which had for a long time preoccupied the free gens de couleuf). If liberty is a right to be claimed, equality must then be socially constructed. Toussaint ‘was for both, and by any means necessary: “It's for me to work toward them as the first to be swayed by a cause which I have always supported; I cannot give way; having begun, I will finish. Unite yourselves with me and you will enjoy your rights all the sooner.”18

  The colored troops were no more moved by this call than Toussaint had been a fortnight before by Chanlatte's appeal to join the republic. The reference to Chanlatte in Toussaint's August 25 letter is civil, at least, but perhaps Chanlatte sent a testy reply, for by August 27 Toussaint was denouncing Chanlatte in foot-high letters of flame as a “scoundrel, perfidious deceiver,” and so on. No longer temporizing, he was again at all-out war with the forces of the French republic. “The ways of reconciliation” had failed.