Toussaint Louverture

  To avoid unrest, Louverture did not inform the population of Saint-Domingue of the European peace, but word got out nonetheless. In December 1801, he had to publicly deny the “rumors that France will come with thousands of men to destroy the colony and liberty.” In an unusual rambling style that was indicative of his fretful state of mind, his proclamation then foretold this very scenario: “A child . . . must show obedience to his father and mother, but if despite his submission and obedience his father and mother are degenerate enough to try to destroy him, then the child can only do one thing, ask God for revenge. I am a soldier, I am not afraid of men, I only fear God.”17

  In this difficult hour, Louverture needed allies, but he could find none. He accused the French of planning to restore slavery, trying to win black freedmen to his side, but because of his record of labor abuse, their response was less than enthusiastic. He recruited civilians to supplement his professional army, but many refused to serve. He attempted to make amends with the “formerly free” population, but they could not forgive him for the massacres of the War of the South, and they planned to side with the French when they arrived. He reminded white planters that he had saved their lives during the Moïse uprising, but they openly rejoiced at the prospect of a restoration of slavery. Louverture sent yet another envoy to France to defend his constitution, but the odds of the envoy reaching his destination in time to make a difference were slim. Only one ally had never failed him: disease. “He trusts not a little to the climate,” noted an Englishman.18

  As rumors of an expedition spread, Louverture increased his arms purchases from US merchants. He brought his regular infantry regiments to their full complement (13 regiments of 1,500 men each, not counting cavalry and honor guards) and called on all adult men to join the national guard, meanwhile keeping close watch on the independent camps of plantation runaways that had challenged his rule for years. He then left for Santo Domingo, which he viewed as the Achilles’ heel of Hispaniola, to give personal instructions to his brother Paul, whom he had appointed commander of the province. It was there, on January 22, 1802, that he received confirmation that France was indeed preparing an expedition against him. He assumed the French would not arrive for months, leaving him plenty of time to fortify the island. He was wrong.19

  One week later, while Louverture was still visiting his brother in Santo Domingo, he learned that French ships had been sighted off Cape Samaná at the northeastern tip of Hispaniola. “Pray God for me,” he wrote his godfather with anguish. Crossing Hispaniola, he arrived just in time to witness the arrival of the main squadron from Brest. What he saw took his breath away. Napoléon had not sent a fleet: he had sent an armada. Two-thirds of the French Navy lay before his eyes, starting with the mighty Océan, a three-decker with 120 guns and the largest ship in the French Navy. “We shall perish,” he allegedly said. “All of France has come to Saint-Domingue.”20

  General Leclerc was informed of Louverture’s presence in Santo Domingo, but in violation of his instructions he chose not to send Louverture’s sons ashore to negotiate. “Such dispositions were hints that he harbored hostile views,” noted Isaac Louverture after vainly demanding to see his father. With so much firepower at his disposal, Leclerc wanted to rush to Saint-Domingue while Louverture was away and take the colony by force. Leclerc, not yet thirty, was ambitious and foolish. He saw the expedition as an easy opportunity to acquire riches and glory, in that order. Lacking any experience in the Caribbean, he expected “all the negroes to lay down their arms when they see an army.”21

  Louverture left for Cap, hoping to warn the city’s commander, Henry Christophe—whose loyalty was far from assured—about the invasion. The magnificent horseman flew over backcountry roads. During brief stops along the way, he sent urgent letters to his subordinates to warn them that “the enemy will soon appear. . . . If the enemy is superior, retreat toward my headquarters, but before leaving the town you will torch it. . . . You will be careful above all not to leave anything behind you that has a white skin.” Three months after repressing Moïse’s uprising, he had, ironically, adopted much of his agenda. After spending his entire life trying to be accepted by white planter society, only to be rejected by it, he had decided to destroy it.22

  Louverture reached Cap around February 5. Leclerc’s fleet was already in the harbor, but Louverture arrived in time to ensure the loyalty of Christophe, who had initially made preparations to welcome the French. On Louverture’s orders, Christophe stalled for two days, pretending that his governor was not yet in town. Leclerc finally ran out of patience and landed his troops. Louverture and Christophe had time to burn the city to the ground before retreating into the interior. This was the second time Cap had experienced such a trauma. “A large fleet has reached Cap and has landed troops, but the town is thoroughly burned, as is the plain,” Louverture noted. “It seems that we are facing a coalition against liberty, so no half-measures. . . . We must die or live free.”23

  Louverture stopped in Haut-du-Cap to seek some advice from his godfather and to recruit new troops. Although he was native to the area, local cultivators rejected his pleas for assistance. “When we took up arms with Moïse against the whites, didn’t the governor exterminate us?” exclaimed a cultivator. “Why doesn’t he resuscitate Moïse, if he wants to fight the whites!” Not far from one of the former Bréda plantations, Louverture came upon a French detachment led by General Jean Hardÿ and was almost shot dead in the ensuing skirmish. He had to retreat once again.24

  Presenting himself as a son of the French Revolution, Leclerc distributed proclamations in which he and Napoléon promised to keep emancipation in place. This came as news to Saint-Domingue’s freedmen, since Louverture had led them to believe over the past two years that Napoléon intended to restore slavery. From Louverture’s point of view, the key to victory was to convince the black population that Napoléon was lying and that he was the only true defender of abolition. “The whites from France and Saint-Domingue want to take away your liberty,” he insisted. “Cultivators must be wary of people who are secretly passing around the proclamations of the whites from France.” Louverture secured the colony’s printing presses. The written word, which had done so much for him in the past, might save him yet.25

  The news over the following days was generally bad. In Santo Domingo, Paul Louverture chose to negotiate rather than fight and was eventually tricked into surrendering. The generals commanding Santiago and Cayes capitulated without a shot fired. The commanders of Fort-Liberté, Léogane, and Port-Républicain at least tried to oppose the French landings, but they lost the towns in a matter of hours. The commander of Port-de-Paix, Jacques Maurepas, was the only one who managed to repulse French troops—twice—but even he eventually had to retreat. Port-de-Paix and Léogane were torched, in keeping with Louverture’s strategy. All major towns must burn, he instructed his subordinate Jean-Jacques Dessalines. “Don’t forget that until the rainy season [yellow fever] rids us of our enemies our only resources are destruction and fire.”26

  Angling for a negotiated settlement, Louverture stopped short of declaring independence. His men fought in the French uniform and under the French tricolor, and they sang French revolutionary songs to publicize that they, not Napoléon’s lackeys, were the true heirs to the French Revolution. This tactic confounded their French foes, who half expected to fight naked African savages. Louverture offered to resume negotiations with General Leclerc.

  Still awaiting the balance of his troops, Leclerc assented. One week after landing in Cap, he sent Louverture’s sons to his plantation in Ennery, where they were to hand-deliver a letter in which Napoléon promised financial rewards if Louverture agreed to step down. After an overnight trek over the mountains of central Saint-Domingue, which they had crossed with their father during the early years of the Revolution, the sons reunited with their mother. She had not embraced them since 1796 and had feared never seeing them again.

  A messenger left at once to notify Louverture. The
following night, the sound of the trumpet and the rumble of horse and carriage announced his arrival. Isaac and Placide threw themselves into their father’s arms. “He held them tightly for a long time and his paternal love manifested itself in the tears that streamed from his eyes,” Isaac later wrote. Then, abruptly shifting back to his other lifelong love, politics, he demanded to see Napoléon’s letter. He held it tightly for a long time, evidently pleased to finally receive a personal note from the first consul. He did not read it on the spot, probably because his reading was laborious and he did not want to be humiliated in front of his sons, but he immediately saw Napoléon and Leclerc’s friendly overtures for what they were. Leclerc was evidently trying to take his place as captain general of Saint-Domingue.27

  As the negotiations failed and a broader war became inevitable, Louverture gathered his sons and asked them on which side they would fight: “their fatherland or their father?” His biological son, Isaac, chose France. Placide chose his adopted father. His family, like his colony, was torn in half.28

  The negotiations over, Leclerc declared Louverture an outlaw, a measure that allowed anyone to kill him with impunity, and annulled all his plantation leases. His all-out campaign began on February 17, 1802. Dividing his forces into five columns, Leclerc instructed each of them to converge on the central part of the colony, where they would surround Louverture’s army, pin it down, and destroy it. The main column, led by General Hardÿ, advanced rapidly from Cap. In Ennery, for the second time since the landing, Hardÿ met and defeated Louverture, who again had to move farther into the interior.

  Isaac and Placide Louverture reunited with their parents in Saint-Domingue (they were actually teenagers at the time). Their teacher, Jean-Baptiste Coisnon, is to the left. [François Grenier?], Le Gal Toussaint Louverture, à qui le Gal Leclerc . . . (c. 1821), courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

  Pursued by the division of General Rochambeau (son of the general who headed French forces during the US War of Independence), Louverture made a stand in a steep valley known as Ravine-à-Couleuvres. After dispersing armed cultivators throughout the woods to harass French soldiers as they marched up a single trail, he positioned his professional troops at the valley’s exit. For hours, brutal hand-to-hand combat raged as the French division made its way up the ravine. Louverture was almost killed in the engagement and again had to pull back, but he could find some comfort in the knowledge that for the first time he had inflicted significant losses on the French.

  Feeling abandoned by the European God he had worshiped all his life, Louverture personally saw to it that the church of Gonaïves, his next stop, was set on fire. For a man who had served and used the Catholic Church all his life, the act was indicative of a crisis of faith; for the rest of his life, he rarely referred to God, and he never again called for the spiritual assistance of priests. With regard to civilians, Louverture gave his subordinates “carte blanche,” which implicitly authorized them to kill whites, but did not compromise a future reconciliation with France. Dessalines acted upon the hint with his usual diligence.29

  Louverture then made his way to Crête-à-Pierrot, a fort located near the Artibonite River in central Saint-Domingue. After inspecting the position, he left Dessalines in command of the fort, where the various French columns eventually converged. The bulk of the French Army laid siege to a mere 1,200 rebels. But these were no longer the inexperienced slaves of 1791, who did not even know how to load a cannon: they were now battle-hardened veterans.

  The siege of Crête-à-Pierrot, the signature engagement of the spring campaign, lasted weeks and cost the French 2,000 men. Half the garrison managed to slip through French lines before the fort fell. After celebrating his thirtieth birthday among the dead and the dying strewn at the foot of the fort, Leclerc, who was wounded in the engagement, lost his enthusiasm for Caribbean warfare. “When I am done restoring order here, I will ask to be sent back to France because my health has suffered a lot,” he informed Napoléon. This was the first of many gloomy letters he would send to his brother-in-law that year.30

  War is waged in three dimensions: strategy (the general conduct of a war, including diplomacy and logistics), grand maneuvers (positioning one’s forces on a map), and field tactics (leading troops into battle). The last was not Louverture’s forte, but he realized that he could make up for his tactical limitations by staying on the move long enough for his long-term strategy to work: let yellow fever ravage Leclerc’s army. Louverture asked his nephew Bernard Chancy, a southern native, to incite southerners to revolt, and he sent General Christophe north to threaten Cap. He personally headed to Port-de-Paix to retake that town, but the black commander of Port-de-Paix, General Maurepas, had already defected to the French side. Louverture was almost killed yet again when some of his former troops, now fighting with the French Army, opened fire on him.

  Like Maurepas, many of Louverture’s men deserted him as the campaign progressed, until he was left with fewer black troops under his command than Leclerc. His son Isaac and his brother Paul had forsaken him. The French took his youngest son, Saint-Jean, into custody. He even lost his favorite horse, Bel Argent, now in the hands of General Hardÿ.

  Louverture’s abiding goal while in power had been to disarm black laborers and send them back to the fields while concentrating military power in the hands of his professional army. As his regular units deserted him, he reverted back to the guerrilla tactics that had proven so successful during the early months of the Revolution. He hastily armed plantation workers. He appealed to the maroon leaders, who had been a thorn in his side for years, by reminding them that the future of abolition was at stake. It was with this motley group that he headed for the Dondon-Marmelade area in the northern province and decimated a unit led by General Hardÿ in a series of ambushes.

  Both camps were thoroughly exhausted by the end of April. In just three months, Leclerc had lost 10,000 dead and wounded to disease and combat. Desertion and combat had also stripped Louverture’s army bare. Louverture lost a further 5,500 soldiers and armed cultivators when General Christophe, growing tired of the “nomadic existence of the guerrillas,” gave up the fight and joined the French. Abandoned by all but Dessalines, Louverture went to seek his advice. Dessalines insisted on keeping up the fight and even threatened to kill Louverture if he ever surrendered. Louverture concurred—and then immediately opened negotiations with the French. On April 29, he agreed to a ceasefire.31

  A week later, Louverture traveled to Cap to meet Leclerc in person. Sensing a trap, he arrived unannounced one day ahead of schedule. A heavily armed personal guard rode by his side. White civilians, who could not forgive him for ordering the massacre of planters during the campaign, heckled him along the route. “This is the way men are,” Louverture told his former adversary General Hardÿ, who had come to greet him. “I saw them groveling at my feet, these people who are now insulting me; but it will not be long before they long for my return.” He was right: in ensuing months, white colonists grew so exasperated by the French officers’ covetousness that they began to yearn for the days when Louverture had governed the colony. His ruthless efficiency had often been in their interests.32

  As he reached the government house of Cap, where he had once reigned supreme, Louverture left his horse in the courtyard and entered the building with his aides-de-camp. French officers thronged inside to catch a glimpse of the famous Toussaint Louverture. One of them snickered that it was impossible “to obtain white flour from a sack of coal.” Louverture stopped for a second, glanced at the officers assembled before him, and replied with a bon mot of his own: “Perhaps, but a sack of coal is enough to melt bronze.”33

  After a long and unpleasant conference in which both men accused each other of being responsible for the war, Leclerc and Louverture broke bread. A meal was served, but Louverture was in a sour mood and refused to eat or drink anything. Only at the end of the meal did he accept a piece of Gruyère cheese, the edges of which he cut of
f for fear that the French had poisoned his food. His brother attended the dinner, too, but Louverture refused to address him, still furious at him for losing Santo Domingo without a fight. The campaign of spring 1802 ended on this acrimonious note.

  As part of the cease-fire, Louverture stepped down as governor, but he insisted that his generals be reincorporated into the French Army along with their black regiments. Some of Louverture’s own men joined Leclerc’s personal guard, which allowed him to keep a close eye on his rival’s whereabouts. With time, he hoped to regain the upper hand.

  For now, Louverture was allowed to reunite with his sons Saint-Jean and Isaac and return to his plantations in Ennery. Once there, he spent time with his family and resumed a role he had always enjoyed, that of overseer of his estates. It was a return to earlier and simpler times. Though he did not know it, these few quiet weeks were the last happy period of his existence.

  Leclerc asked Louverture to help him oversee the return of the cultivators to the fields, but Louverture, in his new incarnation as an enemy of forced labor, refused to collaborate. Leclerc had to draft a new labor code on his own. Carefully balancing the interests of the French planters and the aspirations of the black working class, it was remarkably similar to Louverture’s. This was no coincidence. “I will more or less follow Toussaint’s labor code, which is very good,” Leclerc explained. In fact, Louverture’s code was “so strict,” he said, “that I would never have dared to propose one like this on my own.”34

  On April 20, 1802, the HMS Cerberus left Kingston for Cap to gather intelligence on the massive force that France had sent to Saint-Domingue. The British crew was eager to leave Jamaica, where another long summer of disease and death loomed. They were happy to learn upon reaching Cap that Saint-Domingue was still free of yellow fever. The respite did not last long. The first cases were diagnosed a few days after the crew’s arrival, most likely because the crew of the Cerberus had brought the disease with them.