A Disease in the Public Mind (12 page)

President John Adams and his secretary of state, Timothy Pickering, saw Louverture as an opportunity to frustrate British and French imperialism in the Caribbean and maintain America's lucrative trade with Saint-Domingue. They shipped supplies and ammunition to Louverture's army, and at Alexander Hamilton's suggestion they sent his boyhood friend Edward Stevens, born on the Danish island of St. Croix, to Saint-Domingue's major port, Cap Francois, where he became Louverture's trusted friend and advisor. The Adams administration even ordered the small American fleet in the Caribbean to show the flag at Cap Francois. Without quite saying it, they urged Louverture to declare independence.

Louverture routed the British army and became the de facto ruler of Saint-Domingue. His troops quickly conquered the Spanish part of the island as well. Edward Stevens asked Alexander Hamilton to advise the black leader on a constitution. True to his authoritarian instincts, Hamilton told Louverture to appoint himself governor general for life—and enroll every able-bodied man in the militia. An assembly was also added to the government's structure, but it had no power to initiate legislation.
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With driving energy, Louverture invited whites, blacks, and mulattoes to join him in restoring a semblance of prosperity to Saint-Domingue. He banned slavery forever but persuaded most of the former slaves to return to the plantations to work as paid draftees in the service of the state. Unfortunately, he never trusted the slave-owning Americans enough to declare independence. He retained a frequently expressed loyalty to Revolutionary France, which had given his race their freedom.

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In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in Paris. One of his many careening ambitions was the restoration of France's colonial empire. This was the reason why Pichon visited President Jefferson to ask about Saint-Domingue. Jefferson's reply exceeded Pichon's most sanguine hopes. The new president urged Pichon to tell his government that America was eager to help restore French rule in Saint-Domingue. He welcomed France's proposal to send an army to crush the black rebels. “Nothing will be easier than [for us] to furnish your army and fleet with everything and to reduce Toussaint to starvation,” Jefferson said.
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There was a reason for the urgency that Jefferson concealed in his reply. During the 1790s, the upheaval on Saint-Domingue had prompted more than a few white French planters to flee the island for the comparative safety of the United States, where they talked of their often harrowing experiences. Inevitably, American slaves overheard some of these stories and wondered if this triumph over slave owners might be repeated in America. As early as 1793, Virginian John Randolph claimed to have caught two slaves discussing plans for an uprising that would massacre the whites “as the blacks had
killed the whites in the French islands.” Other rumors and reports of black plots and threats had swirled through Virginia and other Southern states in succeeding years.
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In 1800, while Jefferson was running against incumbent John Adams for president, Virginia had been shaken by a slave revolt led by a twenty-five-year-old black preacher named Gabriel. Obviously inspired by events on Saint-Domingue, Gabriel had recruited over a thousand fellow slaves to march on Richmond on the night of August 30. There they planned to seize the state arsenal, arm themselves, and kill all the whites in the state except a handful of Quakers and Methodists who were “friendly to liberty.”

Gabriel and his men had gathered at the appointed hour in woods about six miles from Richmond. Before they could march, a violent rainstorm pelted down, washing out bridges and submerging roads. The storm lasted most of the night, forcing the plotters to return to their plantations. The next day, a slave who had refused to join the conspiracy told his master what had almost happened. Governor James Monroe called out hundreds of well-armed state militia with orders to shoot to kill if necessary. Gabriel, his brother, and about thirty others were seized and sentenced to death.
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Governor Monroe wrote a full report on Virginia's narrow escape and sent a copy to Thomas Jefferson. Telling the grisly news to a Philadelphia friend, the presidential candidate said: “We are truly to be pitied.”

Those anguished words reveal Jefferson's inner struggle over slavery, and his growing conviction that blacks and whites could never be reconciled. That ambivalence had made him ignore—or dismiss—Toussaint Louverture's attempt to create a multiracial society. Jefferson considered this an impossibility, and he was eager to see Louverture removed from power before his example inspired more Gabriels to rise in Virginia and other southern states.
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In Europe, Jefferson's election as president had coincided with the mutual exhaustion of France and Britain after eight years of global warfare. As peace negotiations began in November 1801, Napoleon shipped a 20,000-man
army to Saint-Domingue, commanded by his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc.

Unknown to Jefferson, this expedition had another larger purpose. In March 1801, the “Man of Destiny,” as Napoleon liked to be called, had browbeaten the reluctant Spanish king into retroceding the immense territory of Louisiana to France. It had been given to Spain in 1763 as compensation for her losses in the Seven Years' War. In secret orders, Bonaparte told Leclerc to transfer the bulk of his army to New Orleans as soon as he restored French supremacy in Saint-Domingue, a task that Bonaparte estimated would take only six weeks. The goal was the creation of a self-sufficient overseas empire.

Louisiana would supply Saint-Domingue and the other French West Indian islands with food at cut-rate prices, eliminating the need to buy from the Americans. The islands would continue to produce sugar, coffee, and indigo to swell France's depleted exchequer. Ships of other nations would be excluded from carrying this lucrative cargo.

A confident Leclerc arrived off the port of Cap Francois in February 1802 and promptly went to work on “the gilded Africans,” as Napoleon contemptuously called the black rebels. The size of the French fleet and army made Louverture and his generals more than a little suspicious. It was much too large to be the escort of a delegation from Paris, reaffirming France's theoretical sovereignty. The French had sent several of these ambassadors during the previous tumultuous decade.

When Leclerc called on Jean Christophe, one of Louverture's best generals, to surrender the port city, he declined. Leclerc promptly attacked from land and sea. Christophe responded by burning Cap Francois and retreating into the countryside.

All-out war erupted throughout Saint-Domingue. At first it seemed to go well for the French. The Spanish section of the island was quickly occupied with the help of the resident white and mulatto population. Black garrisons in other ports surrendered to oncoming French brigades. In ten days Leclerc captured all the key ports and coastal forts and was preparing an offensive into the interior. But Toussaint Louverture remained beyond
his grasp, and another black general, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, rampaged through the countryside, slaughtering every white person he found—and any black who tried to help them.

An attempt at negotiations failed, and on February 18, 1802, Leclerc launched an offensive against Louverture's interior stronghold, Gonaives. Advancing in four columns, the French discovered they had to wade through “fire and bayonets” for every foot of ground. Losses were heavy on both sides, but the offensive paid off when several black generals switched sides. Leclerc combined force with lavish offers of money and power to those who joined him in a pacified Saint-Domingue.

General Leclerc discovered a strange illness was creeping through the French part of his army. Soldiers weakened without warning; in a day they were too sick to walk. Then came black vomit, yellowing skin, convulsions, and death. The disease was yellow fever, inflicted by the bite of the female mosquito,
Aedes aegypti
. But the French commander, as determined and as ruthless as his imperious brother-in-law, pressed his offensive, and soon more black generals—notably the gifted Jean Christophe—switched sides.

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On May 1, Toussaint Louverture suddenly agreed to peace terms. He would give up power and retire with a moderate-sized bodyguard to a plantation in the interior. His generals and officers would receive equivalent ranks in the French army, which became 50 percent black. Toussaint had learned that Napoleon had signed a definitive treaty of peace with the British at Amiens. This left him and his army at the mercy of Bonaparte's vastly superior numbers and weaponry. The black leader capitulated, hoping to get the best possible deal from Leclerc. Louverture's murderous second in command, Dessalines, sullenly accepted similar terms on May 6.
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The war was far from over. Guerilla resistance continued to flare throughout the interior of the island. Leclerc also confronted problems beyond Saint-Domingue's horizon. In the first months of 1802, Jefferson and his secretary of state, James Madison, learned that the French now owned Louisiana. Next, the American ambassador in London warned them of
Napoleon's plan to make Saint-Domingue a mere way station on Leclerc's voyage to New Orleans.

Jefferson's love affair with the French Revolution came to an abrupt halt under the influence of the cooler, more suspicious Madison. On Saint-Domingue,
Aedes aegypti
was still hard at work, decimating the French regiments. Noting Leclerc's growing weakness, a watchful Louverture began intriguing for a comeback.

Leclerc was watching him, too. Lured to a nearby plantation without his usual armed escort, the black leader was seized, thrown on a ship, and deported to France as a common criminal. There, Napoleon deposited him in a freezing fortress in the Jura Mountains, where Louverture would die a year later.

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At this point Bonaparte made a ruinous blunder. Pressured by refugee planters from Saint-Domingue and by numerous merchants in Le Havre and other French ports who had grown rich on the slave trade, he decided to reimpose slavery on Saint-Domingue and other French islands. When word of this decision reached Saint-Domingue in June 1802, the black masses rose in fury against the French and the black soldiers allied with them. Captain-General Leclerc was stunned by the ferocity of the blacks' resistance. “These men die with an incredible fanaticism; they laugh at death; it is the same with the women,” he said.

General Leclerc ordered Chargé Louis Pichon to obtain food and war materiel from America. He was even more eager for Jefferson and Madison to make good on their promise to starve the blacks into submission. The president and secretary of state informed the dismayed Pichon that they would not be able to starve the rebels after all. An agitated Pichon reported that he had found President Jefferson “very reserved and cold.”
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Badly weakened by a growing food shortage and a lack of medical supplies, the French were unable to sustain their counteroffensive. Whole regiments began succumbing to yellow fever. Soon an appalling 60 percent of General Leclerc's staff was dead. On November 2, 1802, the French commander himself succumbed.

A grimly determined Napoleon poured in 15,000 replacements and continued the struggle. For a while the fresh troops seemed on the way to restoring French control of the island. But in Europe events were unfolding that soon turned these victories into hollow triumphs. The British decided that their experiment with a purportedly peace-loving Napoleon was not working. It soon became obvious that the war for world supremacy was about to resume.
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With that near certainty in mind, Napoleon rethought his plans for Louisiana. Bonaparte badly needed money for his war machine. When Ambassador Robert R. Livingston visited him in early 1803, Napoleon asked him how much he would be willing to pay for all of Louisiana. The amazed ambassador was soon joined by special envoy James Monroe, who could speak for President Jefferson. By July 1803, they had bought 868,000 square miles of North America—a third of the continent—for $15 million.

Napoleon continued the struggle to subdue Saint-Domingue, stirring fears that he might repudiate the Louisiana deal. But the moment news of the declaration of renewed war reached the Caribbean, the British West Indies fleet made Saint-Domingue target number one. The royal navy bombarded French-held seaports and smuggled guns and encouragement to the rebels. In November 1803, their army reduced to eight thousand men, the French retreated to Cap Francois and surrendered to a British fleet cruising offshore.

While France's hopes of colonial wealth and power vanished forever, triumph was the order of the day in Washington, DC. A special session of Congress confirmed President Jefferson's decision to pay Napoleon's price for New Orleans and the Louisiana Territory, doubling the size of the United States. Jefferson, with his gift for the electrifying phrase, declared the entire North American continent would soon become an “Empire of Liberty.”
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General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who had long since switched back to the rebel side, became the ruler of Saint-Domingue. He decided to begin the
new year (1804) with a declaration of independence. A brigadier who acted as his secretary, Louis Felix Boisrond-Tonnerre, eagerly seconded the idea. What they needed in order to make the declaration authentic, Boisrond-Tonnerre roared, was “the skin of a white for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen!”