Louverture was also very alone. Because he continuously had to hide his innermost thoughts, even the members of his entourage could not say that they truly knew him. “He is excessively leery,” noted his secretary. “Surrounded by rebel slaves since the beginning of the revolution, double-crossed by the Spanish, fought by the French and the English, deceived by all, he understood very early that he had to make himself impenetrable.” Louverture had navigated the troubled waters of the Revolution through caution and deceit, but in the process, the people around him had concluded that they could never trust or love him. His brother Paul addressed him with the formal vous normally reserved for strangers and social superiors. Even Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whom he had known for decades, was but a lackey to him. He had close relationships only with a handful of family members, including his wife Suzanne and his godfather Pierre Baptiste, who was still alive at the venerable age of 104, and whom Louverture visited every time he passed by his old plantation in Haut-du-Cap. Among whites, the only people he seems to have genuinely appreciated were his former boss Bayon, who had helped him gain his manumission, and Laveaux, who had presided over his early career in the French Army. But Laveaux was no longer writing to him, and his brother Paul was off governing Santo Domingo; his other brother, Pierre, was long dead, as were most of his children. He was estranged from his first family; his sons Isaac and Placide might never return from France. Men who have no equal are condemned to live a lonely life.21
Louverture’s dealings with and affinity for whites provoked anger among his supporters. “A furious storm is gathering against him,” predicted the former agent Philippe Roume from his US exile at the end of September 1801. “The first officer of known merit who will put himself at the head of the malcontent will get the entire colony to rise in less than two weeks.”22
Roume’s prediction became reality a month later, when Louverture left on a tour of the southern province. Shortly after his departure, the commander of Cap, Henry Christophe, uncovered a conspiracy to kill all the whites of the town. Christophe quickly arrested the plotters, but in the ensuing days groups of cultivators revolted throughout the northern plain. They had learned that Louverture had sent an envoy to Jamaica to purchase African laborers, and that he had reestablished the chain gang as a form of punishment. Holding chains, they cried that his next step would be to restore slavery. “Death to all the white people” was their slogan. In a matter of days, they killed over three hundred planters, a death toll equivalent to that of the great revolt of August 1791, which had also begun in the region of Cap. They seemed intent on launching a colony-wide uprising. The rebels had the sympathy of some black officers, specifically Moïse and Joseph Flaville. The old Bréda attorney Bayon de Libertat was among their victims.23
Louverture rushed back from Saint-Marc, where he was attending the wedding of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, to suppress the revolt. The groom followed along. Christophe had already contained the insurgency by the time they reached Cap on November 4, 1801, but Louverture was in a foul mood. He assembled the garrison on the main square and bitterly denounced the soldiers’ sympathies for the cultivators’ cause. He then called forward the main conspirators.
Joseph Flaville was first in line. He was the commander of the nearby town of Limbé, where Bayon had once owned a plantation, so Louverture had likely known him for decades. He had personally appointed Flaville to his command early in the Revolution and then welcomed him back like a “prodigal son” every time he had rebelled. Not so this time: Louverture had him ripped to shreds by grapeshot in full view of the garrison of Cap. Flaville’s men witnessed the scene, arms in hand, but none dared challenge the formidable governor. He appeared transfixed, as if possessed by the Vodou spirit of war. “His face breaks down in an extraordinary way” when he gets angry, an observer later remarked: “When he speaks with fire about something that offends him, he looks horrible.”24
Louverture’s natural inclination was to be merciful or to ask his subordinates to do his killing for him, but the Moïse uprising so infuriated him that up to 5,000 cultivators were killed in a matter of weeks. Not even Moïse escaped Louverture’s wrath. Moïse was a relative of Suzanne Louverture (he was apparently the son of her brother Gilles), and Louverture had known him all his life. He was also a close ally who had assisted Louverture on numerous occasions, most recently during the invasion of Santo Domingo. Yet Louverture insisted that he be court-martialed and shot. Documentation of Suzanne’s reaction has not survived.
Louverture, nearing sixty in a colony where few men reached that age, had recently begun to plan for his own death, writing the name of his successor in a sealed envelope to be opened after his passing. No one knew the identity of the heir-to-be, but the three most frequently cited names were those of Moïse, Christophe, and Dessalines, which would explain why Christophe and Dessalines so eagerly contributed to the crushing of the Moïse uprising.25
The ultimate goal of the Moïse uprising was to dismantle the plantation system in favor of subsistence farming—in other words, to shatter Louverture’s master plan for the colony’s future. This enraged him as much as Moïse’s betrayal. After three weeks of repression, he delivered a violent and bitter speech to the population of Cap in which he criticized the followers of Vodou as incessant troublemakers. He also accused parents of not properly educating their children, who turned to vagrancy, theft, and prostitution as a result, and he attacked cultivators for not working as hard as they should. A set of punitive measures followed. Those who opposed plantation agriculture would be subjected to the severest of penalties, including death. As for those who merely made comments “that may alter public tranquility,” they would be “sent to the fields, with a chain attached to the foot, for six months.”26
The year ended on a bittersweet note. Louverture was the unchallenged master of all of Hispaniola, but he had lost two close partners, Moïse and Bayon, whom he had known since the prerevolutionary era. The Moïse uprising had also made clear the depth of his unpopularity with the black population. Although Louverture had saved the lives of the whites of the Cap region, he was unsure whether they would repay him the favor in the event of a French invasion. He had effectively excluded France from the management of the colony, but he did not yet know how Napoléon would react to his constitution. Politically, his position was at once formidable and fragile.
Unbeknownst to Louverture, just as he was suppressing the Moïse uprising in a last bid to gain the support of France and the planter class, Napoléon was about to dispatch an expedition to unseat him. Three months later, Louverture would be fighting for his survival.
NINETEEN
RENEGADE
Early 1802
WAVE BY WAVE, the Enfant Prodigue plowed her way from the warm waters of the Caribbean to the wintry shores of western France. She was an aviso, a swift and graceful vessel used to transport time-sensitive mail. Initially known as the Marie-Antoinette after the queen of France, then renamed Convention Nationale during the Revolution, then lost to and recaptured from the British, she had been rechristened one last time in 1797, her name a reference to the biblical parable of the prodigal son. It was now February 1801.1
The Enfant Prodigue had traveled between France and Saint-Domingue many times during the Revolution, most recently to order Louverture not to proceed with the takeover of Santo Domingo. But Louverture was now sending the boat back with letters informing Napoléon that he had disobeyed him—and deposed the agent Roume—and summoned a constitutional assembly. March came and went until, in the first days of April 1801, the Enfant Prodigue cast anchor in Brest, the main military port in France. Brest is four hundred miles from Paris, but during the Revolution the French had built an ingenious network of land semaphores that could display symbols visible from miles away, and it only took an hour before the news reached the capital.2
Louverture’s letters came as a shock to Napoléon. After years of indecision about what policy to adopt in Saint-Domingue, he had just set his mi
nd on moral suasion. He hoped that by remaining faithful to emancipation he could convince grateful freedmen like Louverture to attack British colonies. “They will produce less sugar, maybe, than they did as slaves,” Napoléon reasoned. “But they will produce it for us, and will serve us, if we need them, as soldiers. We will have one less sugar mill, but we will have one more citadel filled with friendly soldiers.”3
With this reasoning in mind, Napoléon had decided to employ “softness and conciliation” to channel Louverture’s ambition. This meant promoting him to the rank of captain general and finally writing him the personal note he had so often requested. “The government could give you no greater sign of its confidence in you,” Napoléon explained in a beautifully penned letter that bore his personal seal. In exchange, he hoped that Louverture would “promote agriculture” and “enlarge the glory and possessions of the Republic.”4
Events in France and Saint-Domingue moved rapidly in opposite directions and timing was essential. Had Napoléon sent his flattering letter in time, it would have gone a long way toward soothing Louverture’s bruised feelings and keeping him within the sphere of the French empire. But Napoléon dallied, and Louverture, convinced that Napoléon was actually preparing to overthrow him, invaded Santo Domingo instead. When the Enfant Prodigue reached Brest, a furious Napoléon sacked Louverture and abandoned his strategy of moral suasion. The letter that Louverture had so often dreamt of receiving never left France. (In one final twist of fate, it was later stolen from the French naval archives, and then recovered in 2012 just before it could be sold by Sotheby’s in New York.)5
Napoléon began assembling an expedition in the port of Brest in May 1801. Events in the following months only hardened his resolve. One after the other, the rivals Louverture had expelled during his final rise to power landed in France. André Rigaud reached Paris in April 1801 after losing the War of the South. He was followed by François de Kerversau and Antoine Chanlatte, who had served as French agents in Santo Domingo until the invasion. Kerversau was particularly well informed and was able to provide many details about Louverture’s clandestine diplomacy with Britain.6
For years, the naval war with Britain and the British blockades had made it virtually impossible for large fleets to embark from French ports, until, in May 1801, Britain sent out the first feelers in nearly a decade. Napoléon responded positively, and five months later treaty preliminaries were signed in London, reopening France’s sea-lanes. Napoléon asked that preparations for the expedition be finalized at once. Peace with Britain had come; war in Saint-Domingue could begin.7
In August 1801, Charles de Vincent reached Alexandria, Virginia, on the brig Neptune after a sixteen-day crossing from Cap. Saint-Domingue’s director of fortifications carried with him a copy of Louverture’s constitution, which Louverture had asked him to convey to Napoléon. Vincent, a French patriot, was deeply troubled by his mission. After spending his time at sea reading the text at leisure, he concluded that Louverture would be “the most culpable and ungrateful of men” if he persisted with his project. People in the United States had nicknamed him the “king of Saint-Domingue.” Vincent wrote a strongly worded letter to urge Louverture to revoke the constitution. Louverture did not comply, but he was sufficiently concerned by Vincent’s wavering that he sent a second envoy to Napoléon to “destroy in your mind the calumnies of my enemies.”8
After a circuitous journey that took him through Philadelphia and San Sebastián in Spain, Vincent finally reached Paris in October 1801. In a series of personal meetings with the first consul, he did his best to dissuade Napoléon from resorting to force, but to no avail: the expedition was almost ready, and the recent cease-fire with Britain had opened a window of opportunity that Napoléon was eager to exploit. Reading the constitution only fueled his ire. “There was no longer room for deliberation,” Napoléon later wrote. “The black chiefs were ungrateful and rebellious Africans.”9
Vincent’s briefings helped Napoléon realize the magnitude of what he was trying to accomplish. Louverture was no ordinary man: his army of 20,000 had successively defeated Saint-Domingue’s planters, Spain, and Britain. “Saint-Domingue cannot be conquered,” Vincent explained. Louverture’s soldiers could hide in ambush for long periods of time without resupply, so they were “an enemy one cannot see, who lives off nothing, sleeps where he wants, is full of strength.” He also warned of Saint-Domingue’s “destructive climate” and difficult conditions, saying, “The army will die of hunger and thirst after landing.” More encouragingly, Napoléon learned that Louverture had so angered his black supporters that several of his generals (notably Henry Christophe in Cap) were ready to abandon him.10
Napoléon responded to the latest news with more carrot and more stick. The expeditionary army expanded to 21,000 soldiers; Napoléon would end up sending a total of 43,000 soldiers to Saint-Domingue in 1802–1803, not counting sailors. He sent the best regiments in France and put them under the command of his own brother-in-law, a dashing twenty-nine-year-old general named Victoire (“Victory”) Leclerc. Napoléon’s favorite sister, Pauline (Leclerc’s wife), and his brother Jérôme also sailed with the expedition. This was the largest expedition of the Consulate.11
Meanwhile, Napoléon devised a strategy that might make the use of force unnecessary. To convince Saint-Domingue’s population of color to join the French side, he enrolled black and mixed-race officers in the expedition and reiterated his promise not to restore slavery. “Whatever your origins and your color you are all free and equal before God and the Republic,” he explained in a proclamation in French and Kreyòl addressed to black cultivators. “If you are told: these forces have come to ravish our liberty, answer: the Republic gave us our liberty, the Republic will not accept that it be taken away from us.” The promise was apparently truthful, since Napoléon privately instructed Leclerc to continue the cultivator system. At the same time, Napoléon planned to keep slavery in French colonies where it had never been abolished, such as Santo Domingo and Martinique, and to restore it wherever it was militarily feasible, such as Guadeloupe and French Guiana. Pragmatism was the order of the day.12
Just before the expedition departed, Napoléon summoned Isaac and Placide Louverture to his palace, assured them that he harbored no ill will against their father, and informed them that they would leave with the fleet. He hoped that their long-awaited return would mollify their father. Placide saw through the ruse, but Isaac, who was just seventeen, was so flattered that he composed a poem in the first consul’s honor. It showcased a mastery of the French language that would have made his father proud, but a political naïveté that would have horrified him. “Young and valiant hero,” Isaac intoned in Napoléon’s honor, “your grandeur / Of the shining day, increases the splendor.”13
Napoléon ordered the expedition to depart just one month after France signed the preliminaries with Britain, before a comprehensive peace treaty was even negotiated. General Leclerc and Louverture’s sons made their way to Brest, where the largest squadron of the expeditionary fleet had been gathering strength since May. Awaiting them there were twenty-six warships, including fifteen ships-of-the-line, each of them armed with seventy-four long-range guns and manned by six hundred sailors. The Louvertures embarked on the frigate La Sirène.
Contrary winds delayed the fleet’s departure for weeks, but in December 1801, three large naval squadrons left the ports of Brest, Lorient, and Rochefort in western France. Others set sail in ensuing weeks from the French ports of Toulon and Le Havre as well as Cádiz in Spain and Flushing (Vlissingen) in the Netherlands.
In the first days of December 1801, a boat crossed the channel separating Jamaica from Saint-Domingue and dropped anchor in Port-Républicain, where Louverture was finishing off the last supporters of the Moïse uprising. It brought a letter from the new governor of Jamaica, George Nugent. Louverture had reason to be optimistic about its contents. His envoy Joseph Bunel had been in Jamaica for months to negotiate a treaty of alliance, and
Bunel’s last reports had indicated that a formal agreement was imminent. Louverture would then be able to purchase African laborers from British traders and count on the support of the British Navy in case France ever turned against him. For the past year he had also been purchasing massive quantities of gunpowder from US merchants and updating Hispaniola’s coastal fortifications. The island would soon be an impregnable fortress.14
The boat from Jamaica was actually bringing most unwelcome news: France and Britain had reconciled. Jamaica immediately broke off diplomatic negotiations. Louverture understood what it meant: Napoléon, who had not informed him of the European peace, was free to attack him with Britain’s blessing. “He appeared exceedingly depressed,” a British envoy reported before departing.15
News of the peace left Louverture feeling resentful and betrayed. He had spent years cultivating the goodwill of his British allies, but they were now conspiring with Napoléon to restore white rule in the French Caribbean. He had repulsed Spanish and British invasions in 1794–1798, but Napoléon was now ready to discard him. “All of this was well thought out to lose me, to annihilate me, and to destroy me” he later noted with much bitterness. He was right: “Toussaint’s black empire,” the British government instructed the governor of Jamaica, “is one amongst many evils that have grown out of the war—and it is by no means our interest to prevent its annihilation.”16
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