To Christophe, whom he thought likely to prove loyal to France when the chips came down, he wrote: “We count very much on your Help, my dear General, for the success of this great enterprise,”43 and exhorted him particularly to guarantee the security of Cap Francais for the French. To Leclerc, Vincent mentioned that Christophe would probably be forced to show any letters he received to both Toussaint and Moyse. In his checklist Vincent described Moyse as “a wicked young man … and infinitely dangerous,”44 but in his letter to him he said, “Let the brave men of Saint Domingue look with pleasure on the arrival of those who have only been sent to assure the rights of all … you can do a great deal, Citizen General, with the Spirit of your brothers, and my hope has always been that your conduct will assure the motherland of your obedience.”45 As it happened, Moyse was executed soon after Vincent wrote this letter, and long before it could reach him.
There was no letter for Dessalines, but in his notes Vincent observed that while the extent of that general's power should be greatly reduced, there was no one as efficient as he in getting work out of the blacks, so he ought, one way or another, to be retained in that role. To Pascal, now at the top of Toussaint's secretarial pool, he wrote, “It's up to you, who have the confidence of the General in Chief, to unite yourself with the Citizen Allier, whom I salute, to prevent Toussaint from straying.”46 At around the same time, Allier (another of Toussaint's white secretaries) wrote to his family in France that he was throwing in his lot with Toussaint forever and so must bid them forever adieu.
Because he had so staunchly defended Toussaint's loyalty to France, Vincent had a major personal interest in Toussaint's reaction to the expedition. “Through you,” he wrote to the general in chief, “I may become the happiest or most unhappy of men.” Before he left Saint Domingue, Vincent had perceived Toussaint to be in the grip of an “occult force”; now he tried addressing himself directly to Toussaint's guardian angel. “Let not your good (but always too defiant) Spirit conceive any anxiety over these great dispositions—they spring from the vast genius of the great man [Napoleon] who is directing everything. His character is to love everything that is great; I am sure that no one esteems you so much as he; he knows that you have done great things, that you have been humane and Generous; the Restorer of a France made larger by his works will never lose sight of one who, without (so to speak) receiving any help from the metropole, has nonetheless known how to chase her most dangerous enemies out of the Colony, and to conserve it for France; he could give you no more certain proof than to send the distinguished General who will command in Saint Domingue; he seems to have sought the surest way to reconcile himself with you in sending General Leclerc to the colony, who brings with him his young Wife, sister of the First Consul.”47
These assurances were fundamentally false, though Vincent doubtless wanted to believe them. Most likely Toussaint never received this letter.
News of France's maritime peace with England unnerved Toussaint considerably, since it was certain to rattle his delicate balance among England, the United States, and France. When Bunel returned from Jamaica with news of the peace negotiations between France and England, Toussaint stopped Santo Domingo's press from publishing it, on the grounds that the news had not come through official channels. But the rumor spread all over the colony, particularly within the white planter class.
“Ill-wishers are spreading the noise that France is coming with thousands of men to annihilate the colony and liberty,” Toussaint announced, rebuking those “who lend to the French government liber-ticide intentions, who claim that it doesn't want to send me my children because it wants to hold them as hostages.” Toussaint refused to believe the rumors, or so he claimed, “but in the case that this injustice should be real, it suffices for me to tell you that there is only one thing left to do for a child whose father and mother are so unnatural as to want to destroy him, and that is to place his vengeance in the hands of God. I am a soldier, I don't fear men, I only fear God—if it is necessary to die, I will die as a soldier of honor who has nothing to reproach himself.”48 His mind was deeply divided in those days, between fading hopes for conciliation and the increasing probability of war.
Since putting down the Moyse rebellion, Toussaint had redoubled his measures to enforce internal security. He ordered investigations of all officers who had seemed sluggish in responding to the revolt. In Toussaint's view, idleness was the mother of rebellious tendencies; thus his work regulations became ever more strict. “As soon as a child is able to walk,” he proclaimed, “he should be applied to some useful work proportionate to his strength.” Dissipation, too, might foster rebelliousness, and in the same proclamation Toussaint insisted again that “marriage is the most holy of social institutions”49 and promised to purge the military and civil service of all those who lived with concubines or with more than one woman at the same time. Women were no longer to be permitted in military barracks—a most unpopular edict. In Toussaint's mind, idleness, loose morals, and insubordination were all of a piece. These were the germs of the Moyse rebellion and he was determined to stamp them out.
Despite the catastrophic failure of that rebellion, small revolts continued to crop up among the African-born segment of the nouveaux libres. Lamour Derance, a maroon leader who had never accepted the new national authority Toussaint was constructing, raided the town of Marigot on the south coast, and briefly threatened Jacmel, until Dessalines marched against him from Leogane. Lamour Derance was driven back to the mountains, but Dessalines failed to capture him or destroy his forces.
On December 8, Toussaint ordered the public execution of twenty-three blacks who had been captured in the midst of Vbdou ceremonies; these were always instrumental in stirring up revolutionary sentiment, especially among the African-born. The houngans and mambos who died had names like Saint Jean Pere l'Eternite and Sainte Jesus Maman Bondieu. Dessalines had pushed for the executions, as away of intimidating the cultivators of the Cul de Sac plain, and he was the one to carry them out. The victims were shot, then decapitated, to make doubly sure they were dead. One Jean Pimon died like a soldier who had nothing with which to reproach himself, remarking to Dessalines as he faced the guns: “Blan wete, Mulatre wete, si lautre wete, patat va abi.”50 This cryptic statement was understood to mean that if everyone turned on the ordinary blacks, the goose of general liberty would be cooked.
With the news of a French-English treaty on the wind, Toussaint was rushing to bring the thirteen demibrigades of his army to full strength at fifteen hundred each. With the addition of his honor guard, his force would reach twenty-five thousand; the military budget was 35 million livres. More field hands were drafted into the army, and some of the guns that had been distributed to civilians were now appropriated for use by the military. Recruits now included boys between the ages of eight and twelve. At Saint Marc, Dessalines shot two children, eight and nine years old, when they resisted this draft.
Toussaint's strategy involved the fortification of the most inaccessible points of the mountainous interior, where European troops would be most challenged, exhausted, and bewildered, and where Toussaint's fusion of conventional European tactics with African-style guerrilla warfare would work to best advantage. He closed off most of the roads and passes into the interior to all but the military, in part to block random migration of fugitive field hands into the formerly Spanish territory but still more to conceal his war preparations from all but his own soldiers. The area of the Cordon de l'Ouest, now reorganized as the Canton Louverture and embracing Toussaint's personal stronghold at Ennery was sealed in this way, along with another region further to the south, at the end of the Cahos mountain range overlooking the Artibonite River.
Unfortunately for the secrecy of Toussaint's war plan, Colonel Vincent had personally supervised most of the fortifications all over the colony, was well acquainted with the black army's various headquarters and habits of moving between them, and knew Toussaint well enough that he could predict preparations and
maneuvers he had not seen with his own eyes. Much of the information he furnished Leclerc was based on direct observation, but a lot of his guesswork also proved accurate.
Vincent foresaw that the most dangerous theater of war would be a very sizable region of the interior whose limits were, to the north, the mountain towns of Valliere, Dondon, and Marmelade; to the east, Hinche on the Central Plateau; to the southeast, Mirebalais; with a line west of Mirebalais along the Artibonite River to the region of Petite Riviere at the westernmost extension of the Cahos mountain range. He knew that Toussaint had secretly built a road for supply wagons from Dondon to several of these other interior points, many of which lay along the original frontier between the French and Spanish colonies. He knew that Toussaint had long maintained a headquarters at Boche Plantation just outside Marmelade, and he expected—correctly, as it turned out—that the blacks would have cached much of their ammunition there and also along the Ravine a Couleuvre, a long, deep defile which provided a route from Hinche and the Central Plateau to the main road a few miles south of Gonai'ves.
The black army would certainly have placed cannon in the forts of this broad area, but Vincent was confident that the cannon would not be very well positioned and that the skills of the artillerymen would be poor. He recommended that the French land in force on the Spanish side of the island, secure Hinche, and use that town as a base for attacking the rest of Toussaint's positions in the interior from the rear. At the same time it would of course be necessary to take the significant ports on the coast, Le Cap, Port-au-Prince, and Gonai'ves—but Vincent believed it essential to have a substantial French force already present on the Central Plateau, threatening the whole mountainous region along the old frontier, where Toussaint's army would have planned its retreat from the coasts.
All these measures were to be undertaken if, and only if, diplomacy failed. Vincent had put as much energy into the diplomatic strategy as into the military one.
Toussaint had his own informants in France, and he knew that a fleet was being outfitted for a vast expedition. Even to the last minute he may have hoped that this operation was another decoy, for the last fleet that had set out with published orders for Saint Domingue had sailed instead, on secret orders, for Egypt. It was still just barely possible that the French would accept the nice carrot he was offering, and spare him the necessity of using his stick. Once the fleet had left port, Toussaint had no reliable news of it during the several weeks it took to cross the Atlantic.
Though he had now taken control of Spanish Santo Domingo, his troops there were thinly spread, and this eastern area of Hispaniola remained the most likely point for an invasion. Toussaint embarked on a tour of his positions there, but he had not gone very far before he was overtaken by messengers from General Christophe, warning him that French warships had been sighted. He hastened to Point Samana, the easternmost extremity of the island, expecting that the fleet would make its first landfall there.
There were sixty-seven ships in all, and when Toussaint got his first sight of them from the rocky heights of Point Samana, he quailed for an instant. “We'll all have to die,” he told his officers. “All France has come to Saint Domingue.51 He may have meant the last part literally. French Saint Domingue was approximately the size of Vermont, and Toussaint, who had spent his whole life on the island, had no way of conceiving just how big France really was. But he had known that the fleet was almost certain to come, and for months he had been making ready to meet it. Within minutes he had recovered his fortitude and was dispatching messengers to activate the defense.
During the Atlantic crossing, the squadrons of the French fleet had been scattered by storms. A couple of these were waiting off Point Samana by the time Leclerc himself arrived there. Though other ships were yet to come, the captain general knew that he must have been observed and did not want to give Toussaint too long to prepare his response. The fleet moved clockwise around the island, detaching forces to occupy various points along the way.
Vincents extremely detailed campaign plan had less influence than the grand strategy which had been designed in advance by Napoleon: General Kerverseau was to land at Ciudad Santo Domingo, General Darbois on the south coast of the Grande Anse, and General Boudet at Port-au-Prince. On February 2, Leclerc's own squadron appeared at the mouth of the Cap Francais harbor. A smaller squadron carrying General Donatien Rochambeau and the troops of his command sailed on to Fort Liberte.
Notwithstanding their reputations for military success, both Napoleon Bonaparte and Toussaint Louverture preferred to settle conflicts by diplomacy if possible; neither liked to spend men and materiel for nothing, and both preached against useless bloodshed (with some real sincerity). Leclerc's instructions were to try the diplomatic route first. He had been furnished with proclamations from Napoleon insist-ing that the French army had arrived to defend and guarantee the freedom of the blacks—not, as everyone suspected, to restore slavery.
Coisnon, with Isaac and Placide Louverture, was supposed to have been transferred to a small, fast boat that would have put him in Saint Domingue several days ahead of the main fleet. He would have delivered reassuring communications from Napoleon, including a letter from the first consul to Toussaint. Vincent wrote a letter of introduction intended to serve as a safe-conduct for Coisnon anywhere in the colony, addressed to whomever it might concern but full of beguiling references to the general in chief (for Vincent suspected that Coisnon would have trouble meeting in person with Toussaint, who might prefer to deal with him through cat's-paws like Christophe). If possible, the priest was also meant to deliver Vincent's letters to Toussaint, Christophe, Moyse, and the Frenchmen in Toussaint's inner circle. Coisnon had the most delicate task of persuading Toussaint to accept the arrival of Captain General Leclerc without a struggle. In this scenario, Leclerc's role was simply to take over Toussaint's command.
But Toussaint had had no military superior in the colony since Laveaux. Sonthonax, Hedouville, and the almost completely disem-powered Roume had played the part of the civilian intendant established in the prerevolutionary colonial structure. Toussaint had known how to outmaneuver all of them. By the end of 1801, the military had completely usurped civilian power in Saint Domingue. The shoes that Toussaint was filling had been left vacant by Galbaud and then by Laveaux. France had given him the rank of general in chief. His own constitution proclaimed him governor for life, and the citizens of Saint Domingue had begun to address him as such (reminded, sometimes, by the flats of his honor guard's swords). Still, it was not much more than a year since he had told Laveaux of his wish for a single European chief in the colony. There was just a chance that he might be persuaded to accept Leclerc as such.
Coisnon had a tricky and dangerous mission, as Vincent could testify from his own recent experience. His best protection would have been the trust and affection of his students, Isaac and Placide, and Toussaint's presumed happiness in seeing his sons again. But as it hap-pened, Coisnon and the young men were not sent in advance of the fleet after all, whether because the rough weather during the crossing prevented it, or because Leclerc was too proud to temporize with the black rebels. The priest and Toussaint's sons were still with Leclerc's squadron when it hove to at the mouth of the Cap Francais harbor, and Leclerc seemed in no hurry to send them ashore.
The buoys marking the safe channel through the reefs into the harbor had been removed. Leclerc's admiral, Villaret-Joyeuse, could not bring his warships into port without the help of local pilots. Emissaries landed in a small boat, requesting that the town's commander, General Christophe, assist their landing.
Christophe, like Toussaint, had been a free man before 1791. In his early days he had seen something of the world as the slave of an English sea captain, and he had attended the battle of Savannah with the other French colonial forces there. He had been an important commander in the civil war with Rigaud and the mulattoes, though not quite so important as Dessalines. So long as Moyse enjoyed Toussaint's favor, Christophe's comm
and was limited to the immediate area of Le Cap, but Moyse's death had expanded his power all over the north of the colony.
Both Vincent and Roume (who had recently arrived in the United States and was filing his reports from there) believed that Christophe would be loyal to France rather than Toussaint if it came to a choice between them. According to Roume, Christophe had told him that Toussaint would have to be “not only an atrocious scoundrel, but also stupid or out of his mind if he wanted to betray France to ally himself with England and make himself independent.'52 Roume claimed that Christophe had accepted from Toussaint his promotion to brigadier general only because he thought he would be shot if he refused. To Forfait, the minister of marine, Roume offered to use his own influence to get Christophe to betray Toussaint. Vincent, meanwhile, wrote to Leclerc that “we can count on Christophe at least at the moment of the appearance of our forces; I worked toward that idea for a year before my departure.'53 Apparently Vincent believed he had a secret understanding with Christophe that he would preserve Le Cap and turn it over to the French, if it should come to that. If Coisnon's effort to persuade Toussaint failed, phase two of his mission (more hazardous still) was to turn other black leaders against Toussaint, especially Christophe and perhaps Dessalines.
Coisnon, however, remained shipboard. When other messengers from the fleet reached him, Christophe stalled, replying to Leclerc that he could not receive the French army without instruction from Governor General Toussaint Louverture—who supposedly was nowhere to be found.
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