Read Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution Online
Authors: Laurent Dubois
from Laveaux in Le Cap, he did so independently, forging an autonomous
regime.
Rigaud’s administration resembled that in place in the north in many
ways. It pursued the goal of maintaining the plantation economy, building
upon Polverel’s regulations. But Rigaud introduced an innovative approach
to managing abandoned plantations. Seeking alternatives to direct man-
agement by the state, he began to rent them out to private citizens. The
policy had two major advantages: the administration gained badly needed
revenue, and the work of reconstruction and production on the plantations
was placed in the hands of individuals working for their own profit. It also, of course, had a potential political liability: many of those who had the
money to take advantage of this policy were members of the wealthy class
of people of color who had once been slave masters in the region. Those
who had owned nothing in the old order—not even their bodies—found
few opportunities to do anything but remain on the plantations, as they
were ordered to do, and serve as laborers to these new masters. The plac-
ing of abandoned plantations in private hands represented another step
away from the thrilling promise, made by Polverel in August 1793, that this
land would be distributed to the ex-slaves. Disappointed ex-slaves in the
south, as in the north, saw the ghosts of slavery in the new order.9
There were also tensions between ex-slaves and ex-masters in the
p o w e r
197
military. Before the commissioners had left, they had ordered Rigaud to
“lead and coordinate the insurgent bands of Africans” in the region. But
the leaders of these powerful and independent bands—particularly a
Kongolese-born man named Dieudonné, who commanded 3,000 soldiers
camped in the mountains above Port-au-Prince—cherished their indepen-
dence and did not wish to submit to the authority of Rigaud and Bauvais.
Ex-slave troops and their officers had good reason to be suspicious. In
1792, after all, the Swiss—slaves who fought on the side of the free
coloreds—had been sold out by their erstwhile allies, and most paid with
their lives. In early 1793 the insurgent leader Alaou, soon after his trium-
phant meeting with Sonthonax in Port-au-Prince, was assassinated by
troops loyal to Bauvais in what they presented as a preemptive strike
meant to stop a planned assassination of their leader. Sonthonax himself
had contributed to Dieudonné’s hostility to the colored leaders: in June
1794 he had placed his commissioner’s medallion around Dieudonné’s
neck, warning him that the free coloreds were a threat to freedom.10
In late 1795 the tensions between Dieudonné and Rigaud and Bauvais
reached a breaking point. Dieudonné complained of their discrimination
against black officers, pointing out that there were none in the towns under
their command. Fed up, he opened negotiations with the British in Port-
au-Prince. During the previous years his army had besieged the city by
damming up the streams that brought water from the mountains to the
city. Now, as a goodwill gesture, his troops let the water flow down once
again. Dieudonné requested that a market be opened where his followers
could sell the harvests from their mountain plots, and in early January his
soldiers, “armed and defiant,” sold poultry and vegetables to the hungry
residents of Port-au-Prince.11
It was at this point that Louverture, who commanded stretches of the
Western province bordering those held by Dieudonné and was worried
that the Republic might soon lose several thousand fighters to the British,
intervened. “Although I have not had the pleasure of meeting you,” he
wrote to Dieudonné in February, “I know that, like me, you are in arms for
the defense of our rights, and for general liberty, and that our friends
Polverel and Sonthonax had the greatest confidence in you, because you
were a true Republican.” Why, just as France had granted them “all the
rights we are fighting for,” was Dieudonné allowing himself to be tricked
by the Republic’s enemies? “The Spanish had, for a time, dazzled me,”
Louverture admitted, but he had seen the error of his ways. “I encourage
198
av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d
you, my brother, to follow my example.” Even if Dieudonné had “little
problems” with Rigaud and Bauvais, he could trust General Laveaux, “who
is a good father to us all.” And he could trust Louverture, who was “black
like him.” The only path to happiness, Louverture insisted, was in “serving
the French Republic.” “It is under its flags that we are truly free and
equal.”12
Louverture sent two emissaries to carry this letter to Dieudonné. He
also gave them secret instructions: if Dieudonné was unwilling to come
over to their side, they should encourage his followers to rise up against
him. As Louverture reported with satisfaction to Laveaux days later, his
plan worked beautifully. Dieudonné refused Louverture’s entreaty, but one
of his lieutenants, Laplume, led an uprising that brought the several thou-
sand troops who followed him to the Republican side. Dieudonné was im-
prisoned and died soon afterward. Laplume’s troops, however, did not sub-
mit to Bauvais and Rigaud, but instead put themselves under Louverture’s
protection. Laveaux promoted Laplume to the rank of general. The ten-
sions that had been smoldering between the colored officers and the lead-
ers of the “African bands” were not resolved, just transferred into the be-
ginnings of a conflict between Rigaud and Louverture.13
In the Northern province, meanwhile, Louverture was increasingly at
odds with another officer of color, Villatte, who controlled the area around
Le Cap. As Louverture and Villatte fought alongside each other against the
Spanish, there were conflicts over the ill-defined borders between their
zones of command. In January 1795, 180 of Louverture’s troops defected
and placed themselves under Villatte’s command. Louverture wrote to
Laveaux in April that he was willing to forgive Villatte for encouraging this defection—Catholicism, he wrote, taught men to forgive those who had
“offended them”—but complained that the action put him in a difficult po-
sition. In June Louverture suffered a greater blow when, in the midst of a
revolt in Acul, Louverture’s commander in the area, Joseph Flaville, put
himself under Villatte’s command, bringing a substantial number of troops
with him.14
Such insubordination, Louverture wrote to Laveaux, was like a river
overflowing its banks, “ravaging” all in its path, and stopping the torrents in one place would only give them more force elsewhere. Laveaux intervened
and removed Flaville from the area, but Louverture’s resentment against
Villatte continued. In January 1796 he complained that “men from Le
Cap” were circulating among his troops trying to recruit them to join
p o w e r
199
Villatte’s forces. “They say that the troops are well paid and taken care of in Le Cap,” while those under Louverture’s command lacked pay and food.15
Villatte had good reasons to be suspicious of Louverture, a man he had
fought against during 1793 and early 1794, before his late rallying to the
Republic, and whose power was increasingly in competition with his own.
His conflict with Louverture put him also at odds with Governor Laveaux,
who was already unpopular with many in Le Cap. Under Villatte’s regime,
free coloreds had taken up places in the town’s administration, but some
resented the fact that they were still under the orders of Laveaux. They
were disappointed when he named a white officer, rather than Villatte,
general of the army of the Northern province. As Laveaux wrote in January
1796, some free coloreds despaired that it was not “one of them” who was
governor of Saint-Domingue in his place. “It is my country and not his,”
they said. “Why send us whites to govern and administer our country?”
They also had more immediate grievances. Since the fires and mass exodus
of 1793, many people of color had occupied and rebuilt abandoned houses
in Le Cap. They saw the ownership of these houses as recompense for
the service they had rendered the Republic, as well as a contribution to
the restoration of the shattered city. But one of Laveaux’s administrators,
a local merchant named Henry Perroud, insisted that since these aban-
doned houses were the property of the Republic, those who occupied
them should pay rent to the state.16
These grievances eventually boiled over in late March 1796. On the
morning of the twentieth a group of “citizens of color” entered Laveaux’s
house and announced that they were arresting him “in the name of the
people.” He was dragged to prison and found Perroud already there.
The municipal government issued a decree declaring that the governor
had “lost the confidence” of the people and had therefore been replaced
by Villatte. But some resisted the coup. One of Villatte’s officers, Pierre
Léveillé, circulated throughout Le Cap speaking out against Laveaux’s ar-
rest. The governor, he declared, was the “protector of the blacks,” and if
he died the free coloreds would turn over the colony to the English, and
slavery would be reestablished. Léveillé was stopped by Villatte’s follow-
ers, but not before he sent a message to the officer Pierre Michel, who
commanded outside Le Cap, asking him to help. Michel rallied together
his officers—including Pierrot, Sonthonax’s first recruit in 1793—and de-
manded that Laveaux and Perroud be released.17
Michel also sent word to Louverture. “He who attacks Governor
200
av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d
Laveaux attacks the mother country and all of us,” Louverture wrote back
to Michel. He issued a proclamation to the inhabitants of Le Cap, criticiz-
ing them for sowing conflicts in the midst of war. “You asked for liberty and equality, and France gave it to you.” Why didn’t they wish to follow the
governor whom France had given them? “What will the mother country
say,” he asked, when she learned of their treasonous actions? She would
treat them all as “barbarians.” “Blindly obey the laws,” Louverture com-
manded sternly, “and those nominated to execute them.” Meanwhile he
wrote to the closest French authority—the consul in Philadelphia—to de-
scribe what had happened.18
The combined threat of Pierre Michel’s nearby troops and the immi-
nent arrival of Louverture sowed fear among the rebels in Le Cap. On
March 22 they released Laveaux and Perroud, and Villatte fled. Six days
later Louverture marched into Le Cap at the head of a large troop. He
found that many townspeople remained wary of Laveaux because of a
rumor circulating that two recently arrived ships had brought to Le Cap
hundreds of chains that were to be used to reenslave the population.
Louverture opened the doors of the administration building to prove that
Laveaux was not hiding any chains, and calmed the crowds in the town.
Laveaux again took up his post as governor. Louverture had saved the Re-
public’s representative in the colony, and in the process asserted his mili-
tary and political power in Le Cap.19
The Villatte affair has traditionally been interpreted as racial conflict
pitting mulattoes against blacks. Laveaux supported such an interpreta-
tion and was seconded by Henry Perroud, who wrote indignantly that the
men of color to whom France had given so much had turned against the
metropole, while the “African chiefs” had “respected the representatives of
the Republic.” The Africans—“those men who appeared ferocious only so
that they could win their liberty”—had in fact saved the governor from the
scheming “mulattoes,” who were “enemies of the French nation.”20
While it is tempting to explain the conflict in such terms, and to natural-
ize the differences between Africans and mulattoes, the reality was more
complex. Laveaux listed among Villatte’s fellow conspirators several men
who were not mulattoes, including several leading black officers and one
officer who declared that his “only regret was that he had been born
white.” The Kongolese Macaya, for example, who had switched sides be-
tween Sonthonax and the Spanish auxiliaries in 1793, and who had later
been imprisoned by Louverture, put himself under the protection of
p o w e r
201
Villatte in early 1796. “Every day he organizes dances and assemblies with
the Africans of his nation and gives them bad advice,” Louverture com-
plained of Macaya at the time. Louverture, meanwhile, had more in com-
mon with men like Villatte than with the ex-slave, often African-born,
troops he led to the rescue of Laveaux. Indeed his policies toward ex-slaves
were in line with those of colored leaders such as Rigaud, who probably
had a hand in encouraging the Villatte conspiracy.21
Even if it was a simplification of the situation, the accusation that
Louverture was an enemy of the colored community was a dangerous one,
and he actively sought to dispel it. Those who had tried “by a few quota-
tions from my letters” to convince others that he had “sworn the Destruc-