Toussaint Louverture

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Toussaint and Suzanne were rich in land, not money, or at least they had been reduced to such a situation after the French invasion and Toussaint's retirement. Their holdings were large, and probably included more than those Toussaint admitted to Caffarelli: Hericourt, the sugar plantation in the Northern Plain; three contiguous plantations at Ennery, and sizable tracts across the Spanish border on the Central Plateau, which were used for raising cattle and horses. Some of these lands Toussaint had certainly bought before the revolution; others, like Hericourt, which had been owned by the comte de Noe, and the Central Plateau ranches, which were outside French Saint Domingue's territorial limits until 1801, he must have annexed sometime after 1791. As for any liquid capital, he gave no answer to any of Caffarelli's questions but the one already recorded in his memoir: he had spent his last sou in defense of the colony. The story is likely to be true, considering the heavy traffic Toussaint had with arms merchants in the United States throughout the months preceding Leclerc's invasion.

  Napoleon was just as acutely interested in Toussaint's dealings with the English who had invaded Saint Domingue in 1793. After many extremely costly battles, most in the area of the port of Saint Marc, Toussaint had managed to engineer their final departure by diplomatic means. The fact that he had signed treaties with a foreign power without full authorization of the French government could be interpreted as treasonable—there were rumors too that the English might have lured Toussaint in the direction of independence.

  Again, Caffarelli's interrogation could get no traction on this subject. Toussaint admitted only to two treaties concluded with General Maitland, one of which simply settled the British evacuation of the couple of points on the island they still occupied at the end of 1798. The second treaty covered British trade privileges with Saint Domingue, along with the nonaggression pact: Maitland promised not to interfere with Saint Domingue's shipping in Caribbean waters, Toussaint undertook not to attack Jamaica. This last commitment was a special nuisance for Napoleon, who had been entertaining a plan to use Saint Domingue as a base for just such an attack.

  Caffarelli probed Toussaint concerning the suspicion that Toussaint had somehow “sold” himself to the English, but Toussaint insisted that he had received nothing from them other than a saddle and trappings for his horse, which he at first refused but was persuaded to accept as a personal gesture from General Maitland, and twenty barrels of gunpowder which Maitland also offered him. Otherwise he had no supplies or guns or munitions from the English; his war materiel was purchased from the United States or (quite frequently) captured from his enemies.

  Between September 15 and September 24, Caffarelli interviewed Toussaint seven times. Of their second encounter, Caffarelli reported, “I found him trembling with cold, and sick, he was suffering a lot and could hardly speak.”26 The climate of the high and frosty Jura mountains could hardly be expected to suit an elderly man with many war wounds, who had spent his whole life in the tropics. In lieu of conversation Toussaint offered Caffarelli the document he had dictated. “I shut myself up to read this memoir right away,” said the interrogator; “it was not difficult for me to recognize that the conversation of the previous day was nothing but an abridgment of this writing, on which he had built his whole defense.”27 In the subsequent interviews, Caffarelli could not get Toussaint to deviate by a hair from the defensive strategy which his memoir rehearsed. Despite his weakness, illness, and all the pressure Caffarelli could bring to bear on him, Toussaint said “nothing except what he wanted to say.”

  Caffarelli was worth his salt as an investigator, and after several days of being stonewalled he shifted his own tactics, with the idea of “exciting his amour propre … I told him that everything he had declared up to the present was beneath a man like himself, who was the first man of his color, who had won glory as a soldier, who had governed for a long time, who actually fallen low, unfortunate, and without hope of raising himself back up, he could win a kind of glory heretofore unknown to him, but which could be useful to him, and which would consist of having the courage to break out of the circle of denial in which he had shut himself, to declare nobly that he had driven off the agents of the Republic, because they were an obstacle to his designs, that he had organized an army, an administration, had accumulated treasuries, filled the arsenals and warehouses to assure his independence. That by going in this direction he would win the kind of glory which suited his real courage, and could get himself pardoned for many faults.”28

  This gambit was a cunning one, and suggests that Caffarelli had been able to discern aspects of Toussaint's character (pride in his achievements, outrage at the sorry way they'd been received) which Toussaint during their interviews was doing his best to conceal. If Toussaint had taken the bait, Caffarelli might have tempted him to confess a plan to make Saint Domingue independent of France— a fault which certainly would not have been pardoned. Toussaint was impressed, but only into silence. When he spoke again, it was on the same lines as before.

  “I saw him show spirit,” Caffarelli concluded, “on just two occasions.

  “The one, when they brought him the clothing and underwear which they had prepared for him.” According to the program of small deprivations and humiliations designed by Napoleon for his prisoner, Toussaint was divested of his uniform and given clothing such as an ordinary peasant would wear; he was not insensible to the insult.

  “The second, when they asked him to give up his razor. He said that the men who took that instrument from him must be very small-minded, since they suspected he lacked the necessary courage to bear his misfortune, that he had a family and that moreover his religion forbade him any attempt on his own life.”29

  There for once, however briefly Toussaint did show a flash of his true colors, those which Caffarelli had tried unsuccessfully to expose. Caffarelli, though frustrated as ever, was also grudgingly impressed. “He seemed to me, in his prison, patient, resigned, and expecting from the First Consul all the justice which he believes he deserves.” It's not far to the very last line of Caffarelli's report: “His prison is cold, sound, and very secure. He communicates with no one.”30

  Caffarelli's report does not go into Toussaint's “political views” in very general terms, though some specifics of his political dealings with the English are covered, and Toussaint gave the interrogator a fairly detailed report on the capacities and sentiments of many men in his officer corps who were still in Saint Domingue. So his overall political attitude must be deduced from what he said, and what he wrote, and from his actions. These show that he believed in the Rights of Man and of Citizen, as the French Revolution had proclaimed them not so very long before. And that he himself, regardless of race, was entitled to the rights and prerogatives of a French citizen and to those of a high-ranking officer in the French army. Therefore he believed with his whole being that he was entitled to his day in court. He could not have been fool enough to be certain that a trial would vindicate him, but he believed that a trial would give him a fair chance. He had composed the best defense he could, and he believed that he had an absolute right to present it, whatever the outcome might be.

  In the silence following Caffarelli's departure, winter settled over the Fort de Joux. Naturally, Toussaints health began to worsen, in that extreme cold and at that unaccustomed altitude; no one could have expected any different. No word came of any trial; no reply to Toussaints memoir arrived from the first consul. In the last weeks and months of 1802, Toussaint must have begun to suspect that Napoleon did intend to bury him alive.

  *November 9, 1799, by the French Revolutionary calendar, the date of the bloodless coup that elevated Napoleon to the consulate.

  SEVEN

  Scattering the Bones

  Written without benefit of a secretary, and thus in a roughly phonetic French, Toussaints last letters to Napoleon strike a note of pathos: “I beg you in the name of God in the name of humanity to cast a favorable glance upon my claim, on my position and my family … I hav
e worked for a long time to acquire honor and glory from my government and to attract the esteem of my fellow citizens, and I am today crowned with thorns and with the most marked ingratitude for recompense.”1

  As for his position in his prison, he had described it earlier in his official memoir: “Is it not to cut off someone's legs and order him to walk? Is it not to cut out his tongue and tell him to talk? Is it not to bury a man alive?”2 A draft of these poignant lines, written in Toussaints phonetic French, was found after his death in the folds of the head cloth he always wore as a talisman of the spirits that walked with him. The last document he was able to conceal from his jailers, it meant so much to him that during the last days of his life he kept it bound to the bones of his head. To place it so was a magical act: a plea to the unseen world for justice.

  To bury Toussaint Louverture alive seems to have been Napoleon Bonaparte's exact intention. To make a martyr of the black leader would be as dangerous as to allow him to return to Saint Domingue. There had never been any intention to offer him the stage which a military trial would have afforded. He remained in his dungeon—in the innermost circle of five enclosures, defended by its rings of moats and drawbridges. As the winter months wore on, a series of small humiliations, all ordered from Paris, harried him in the direction of anonymity. His watch was taken from him, and his last correspondence, including the letters from Leclerc and Brunet which had betrayed him into arrest. For his general's uniform had been substituted the rough woolen clothing of an ordinary French mountain peasant. “I presume,” wrote the minister of marine, “that you have removed from him everything that might have any rapport with a uniform, Toussaint is his name; that is the sole appellation which should be given him.”3

  The minister ordered that Toussaint should receive “appropriate treatment, that he should be sufficiently clothed and warmed.”4 Exactly what that meant in practice can be deduced from the result. Although the records of the fortress show that more was spent on Toussaint's maintenance than on many other prisoners there, his situation was not a healthy one for an elderly man who had never before left the tropics, and it was not intended to be. Though Toussaint was not absolutely starved to death, his rations left him undernourished. Though he was not absolutely left to die of exposure, he was given meager fuel for his fire.

  At the end of January 1803, he began to complain of illness, but was never treated by a doctor. On April 7, he was found dead in his chair by the hearth of his cell. An autopsy revealed signs of a fatal respiratory infection, encouraged by malnutrition and the bitter mountain cold, and probably given an initial foothold by the old wounds to his head. His body was interred in an unmarked grave in a sort of potter's field for old soldiers at the Fort de Joux. There was to be no martyrdom for Toussaint Louverture, and there would be no relics either.

  These very systematic efforts to erase the existence of Toussaint Louverture proved to be completely futile. Months before Toussaint drew his last breath, Captain General Leclerc expired in Saint Domingue of yellow fever. Most of his enormous army followed him into the grave, casualties of either disease or the combat which had reopened on a grand scale in July 1802, when news arrived in Saint Domingue of the restoration of slavery in Guadeloupe. What Toussaint had predicted on the deck of L'Heros about the depth, extension, and tenacity of the roots of the tree of black liberty in Saint Domingue proved to be absolutely true. It was not enough to have removed Toussaint, as Leclerc had woefully reported. To regain mastery of Saint Domingue really would have required the extermination of most of the black population, and if the French were willing to undertake just that, in the end they were not able.

  Certainly Toussaint had foreseen this outcome, and it is possible that in permitting himself to be arrested, he had intentionally sacrificed his personal career to it. That argument is undermined by all the evidence of intelligent self-interest throughout Toussaint's history—but in the end one can hardly dispute Aime Cesaire's contention that “Toussaint had the tragic sense of life: on the one hand he was a Christian, sincerely and not as a feint as some have insinuated; and on the other hand, a contemporary of the French Revolution, he saw, like so many others among its contemporaries, the modern form of destiny. To die like Brissot. Like Robespierre. For a long time, he had prepared himself for that eventuality. Still more, he knew it was inevitable.'5

  During this time, Napoleon Bonaparte also seemed to be governed by a strange fatality. On May 20,1802, he had proclaimed a law which made his intentions regarding slavery quite unmistakable: according to Article 3, “The trade in blacks and their importation into the said colonies will take place in conformity with the law and rules existing before the said epoque of 1789.”6 By this clause the status quo before the French Revolution was to be restored, so far as the colonies were concerned.

  Resistance had never completely stopped among leaders like Sylla and Sans-Souci, but when news of the restoration of slavery in Guadeloupe reached Saint Domingue, the rest of the officer cadre built by Toussaint began to desert French ranks and raise rebellion: Charles Belair, Clervaux, Christophe, and finally Dessalines. The blow to the French, already drastically weakened by the fever season and further compromised by near-total dependence on “colonial troops” (that is to say the black troops of Toussaint's army), was fatal. A couple of weeks after Dessalines turned on him, Leclerc was dead of the fever.

  The extravagant cruelties of his successor in command, General Donatien Rochambeau, were futile, except to inspire reprisals in kind. Rochambeau had black prisoners torn apart by dogs in the public squares, as if in a Roman amphitheater, and held a macabre ball for the femmes de couleur, at whose climax the fresh-slain corpses of their male relations were unveiled to them. If this kind of atrocity was meant to terrify the black and colored revolutionaries into submission, it had the opposite effect. In May 1803, when England declared war on France again, the position of the French in Saint Domingue became absolutely hopeless. Once it was clear that Dessalines would capture Cap Francais, Rochambeau wisely put to sea, with the last remnant of an army that had once numbered eighty thousand, and let himself be captured by the British fleet.

  On January 1, 1804, the independence of Haiti was declared. Later in 1804, Dessalines became emperor of Haiti. During the same year, on Dessalines's order, and mostly under his personal supervision, the slaughter of the surviving grands blancs of the old colony began.

  A French survivor, Pierre Chazotte, describes Dessalines's tour of the killing grounds at Jeremie: “When they entered the prisons, they viewed many corpses, besmeared with gore; in every apartment the floor was two inches deep, encrusted with coagulated blood; the walls were dark crimsoned with the gushes of human blood, suddenly rushing from inflicted wounds. Having viewed this slaughterhouse of human bodies, they again mounted their horses, and rode to the place on the Western road, where upwards of 1,400 corpses lay, heaped one upon another, and formed two very high mounts. The blood flowing beneath had made an issue crossing the road, and formed a bar of coagulated blood 40 feet wide. The negroes from the country would not stamp their feet on that blood; they had practised a bypath, reaching the blockhouses on the southern hill, and thereby manifested their horror at Dessalines's deeds.'7

  Two hundred years later a Haitian friend told me, with a matter-of-fact solemnity, that there are certain injuries—it was understood that the abuse of slavery was definitely among them—which can be washed away only by blood.

  Appalling as it may have been, Dessalines's course of action was nothing if not logical. When Toussaint had tried to incorporate the white property owners into his vision of a new reformed society founded on universal recognition of the Rights of Man, the whites had done nothing but betray him. By comparison with Toussaint, Dessalines has often been denounced as a savage. Where the conciliatory Toussaint liked to say, “Dousman ale Iwen, “(The gentlest way goes furthest), Dessalines snarled a harsher order: “Koupe tet, boule kay! “ (Cut off their heads and burn their houses!).

&nbs
p; Severe as it was, Dessalines's consolidation of power contained an extraordinary progressive element. The massacres of 1804 were atrocious, but in fact not all the whites were slaughtered. The death sentence was mainly restricted to those associated with the old grand blanc slave-owning class. Others who Dessalines thought might be useful to a new Haitian society—doctors, clerks, merchants, a whole Polish regiment that had switched from the French to the Haitian side—he preserved by the simple expedient of redefining them as black. Henceforward, Haiti would be an independent black nation, and to be both white and Haitian would be a contradiction in terms. This radical measure became a matter of law in the constitution of 1805, whereby all citizens of Haiti, regardless of their pigmentation, are defined as neg. To this day, all foreigners in Haiti, regardless of their pigmentation, are called blancs.

  On the road from Port-au-Prince to Leogane there is a hounfor, or Vodou temple, arranged as many of them are to confront the outside world with the powers of both the right and the left hand. As in many spiritual traditions, in Vbdou the work of the left hand is considered to be sinister, while the work of the right is beneficent and healing. The average houngan, or Vbdou priest, is obliged, for the usual reasons, to “work with both hands.”

  In this particular hounfor, if one stands in the center and faces the courtyard, the road, and the world to which the road leads, one has the Chanm Ginen (chamber of the pacific mysteries of Africa) on one's right hand. The motto above the door reads Dieu qui donne et Dieu qui fait (God who gives and God who makes), a phrase which recalls Toussaints favorite proverb, Dousman ale Iwen. On the left hand is a more dangerous room with the motto Fok nan pwen, which means “There would have not to be any for me not to get some.”