Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (42 page)

tion of all men of color” were judging him according to their “own hateful

and vindictive heart.” “It is not color that I am fighting; it is crime,” he declared. While he had indeed warned some of his officers to beware of the

“men of color” who were “preaching disobedience,” he did not confuse

the “innocent” with the “guilty.” He was not “prejudiced against any partic-

ular class” and had men of color whom he admired and respected among

his officers. “I cherish all virtuous men,” he announced. And he had not

hesitated to strike out against “black men” when they were “committing

murders.”22

The question at the heart of the Villatte affair was not racial but politi-

cal: What role would metropolitan authorities have in Saint-Domingue?

Villatte and other free-colored leaders, educated and wealthy, saw them-

selves as the logical inheritors of colonial power. They were capable of

commanding the army, of overseeing the administration, and of rebuild-

ing the plantations. They were frustrated in their ambitions by the actions

of Laveaux and Perroud and ultimately turned against them, seeking a big-

ger political and economic role in the colony. Louverture’s intervention,

meanwhile, was also an expression of his broader ambitions. His rescue of

Laveaux was a strategic move that both ridded him of a political competi-

tor who had undermined his authority, and indebted the governor to him.

But his actions were also part of a broader political approach to securing

and consolidating emancipation. He considered the link to metropolitan

power—particularly to the version of this power embodied in the devot-

edly egalitarian Laveaux—vital to the survival of emancipation in Saint-

Domingue. If he saw a threat to his authority in Villatte, he also saw a

threat to the delicate balance of power he believed was necessary to sustain

emancipation within the French Republic.23

202

av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

Louverture declared that he would crush all disobedience to the mother

country, threatening those who stood in his way with an apocalyptic curse:

“let them fall alone into the abyss which they have dug under their Feet;

the hand of God, the Avenger, is going to weigh down upon them, for one

does not always defy the Supreme Being with impunity.” The Bible, he

continued, was full of “terrible examples of Divine Justice against Great

Criminals.”24

In the meantime, those whom he had saved embraced Louverture as

an avenging angel. A grateful Laveaux declared him the “adjunct to the

governor” and described him as “the Spartacus predicted by Raynal, whose

destiny was to avenge all the outrages committed against his race.” Several

years later one visitor in Saint-Domingue would describe how Toussaint

Louverture “revered the memory” of Raynal, whom he considered his

“precursor.” A bust of Raynal, the traveler wrote, was “respectfully con-

served” in all the various offices Louverture used throughout the colony.

But the task of avenging—and burying—the past turned out to be in-

finitely more complicated than Raynal had predicted: not an affair of tor-

rents of blood and dancing skeletons, but one of the intricacies of power

and politics.25

Soon after Villatte’s attempted coup was defeated, the new commissioners

named by the Directory arrived in Saint-Domingue. In addition to the

new French constitution, they carried tens of thousands of guns for the

colony’s army. Sonthonax’s return was celebrated in Le Cap, where the

streets were packed with “good citizens” and “lined with flowers.” The

great emancipator had returned. Curiously, though, some spread the ru-

mor—which had become, and would remain, the standard method for

discrediting one’s enemies in Saint-Domingue—that he had come to rees-

tablish slavery. The commissioner did everything he could to dispel this

impression as he sought to complete what he had begun in 1793, suspend-

ing all ongoing litigation involving the sale of slaves, outlawing racial in-

sults, and threatening those who criticized emancipation with deportation.

He announced that former slaves in the army were to have the right to

proportional representation on military councils. Working with Julien

Raimond, he established schools in Le Cap to teach former slaves to read

and write. Meanwhile, although he freed many of those who had joined in

the uprising against Laveaux, he quickly deported Villatte and his com-

rades to be put on trial in France.26

p o w e r

203

Welcomed in Le Cap, the commissioners were less warmly received in

other parts of the colony. Suspecting Rigaud of a role in encouraging the

Villatte conspiracy, and wishing to bring the south more firmly under his

command, Sonthonax sent several delegates to the region. Following his

orders, they sought to loosen Rigaud’s hold on power by turning planta-

tion workers against him. They criticized his plantation regime as tyranni-

cal and publicly destroyed
cachots
(prisons)—which were still used to punish recalcitrant workers on plantations—promising that the commissioners

would bring them a truer freedom. In Les Cayes they sought to take con-

trol of the administration and the army. Not surprisingly, their actions—

coupled with their inept and provocative behavior toward local leaders—

incited a hostile reaction. Rigaud and his partisans turned the tables on the delegates, mobilizing plantation workers by spreading the rumor that they

had come to restore slavery. Soon an uprising was under way against the

delegates, who fled for their lives. Rigaud had preserved his control over

the south, and although his actions enraged the commissioners in Le Cap,

they could do little to resist him. A second mission in 1797, during which

the commissioners sought to use the “African eloquence” of one former

slave to gain converts among the workers of the south, made no headway.

Rigaud remained loyal to the French Republic and continued fighting the

British, but he had secured his autonomy from the rest of the colony.27

Although the commissioners had as a political tactic criticized Rigaud’s

plantation regime, they, too, started to rent plantations to private individuals. Understanding the advantages of this policy—revenue and privately

driven development—they stipulated that renters had to pay for repairs,

and in so doing ultimately profited the state, which maintained official

ownership over the plantations.28

Sonthonax imagined that plantation workers might band together to

rent their properties—a solution he saw as the “best alternative.” In fact, of course, if such groups of plantation workers did seek to rent properties

at the public auctions at which they were distributed, they were inevita-

bly outbid by wealthier residents. Wealthy whites and free people of color

(notably Julien Raimond) gained control of many plantations, and there-

fore of the men and women who were required to work there. But the

new elites of Saint-Domingue—the military officers, many of them ex-

slaves, who had risen to prominence during the war against the British—

also took advantage of the new policy. Some ex-slaves, notably Jean-

Jacques Dessalines, used their power to amass a bewildering number of

204

av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

plantations. The renting of abandoned plantations therefore incited the

“transfer of colonial property” and began a “radical social revolution”: it

“gave birth to a new property-owning class, and therefore a new manage-

rial class” made up of individuals of African descent. The conflict over

plantation labor thus grew more complicated, for it now often involved a

struggle between ex-slave workers and ex-slave managers and owners. The

seeds of new kinds of social conflict that would haunt postindependence

Haiti had been planted.29

The new commission also organized elections for new colonial repre-

sentatives. France’s constitution required voters to make an “electoral con-

tribution,” a stipulation that excluded most ex-slaves from participation;

only 5 to 10 percent of the residents voted. When the electors met in

September 1796, the representatives still sitting in Paris—including Jean-

Baptiste Belley—were reelected. But a number of new representatives

were also chosen. Among them were the two most powerful Frenchmen in

the colony: Laveaux and Sonthonax.30

In August 1796 Louverture had written to Laveaux, whom he addressed

(as he often did) as “my father,” that he worried that some “unfortunate

event” might befall the Frenchman and his family in the “unhappy land” of

Saint-Domingue. He suggested a solution: Laveaux could be elected as a

deputy for the colony and return to his “true homeland.” Louverture and

“all his brothers” would have a “zealous defender” of their cause in Paris,

since, among France’s many men, Laveaux was the most steadfast “friend

of the blacks.” Laveaux agreed, and Louverture announced that he would

send “trustworthy men” to convince the electors that Laveaux’s election

would assure the “happiness of the blacks,” though he did not specify

which methods of pressure they would use. “You will be elected,”

Louverture announced confidently, and correctly. Laveaux soon left for

Paris. Most have interpreted Louverture’s support of Laveaux’s candidacy

as a cynical ploy to rid the colony of a political competitor. Although this

may be true, it is worth noting that Laveaux never complained about

Louverture’s actions and that, once in Paris, he did precisely what he had

been asked to do, mounting a spirited—and necessary—defense of eman-

cipation.31

Sonthonax’s election was more divisive. Just after the elections a new re-

volt broke out among the plantation workers of the Port-de-Paix region,

led once again by Etienne Datty. There were local grievances behind the

uprising, notably anger at a recent decision to pay cultivators in paper

p o w e r

205

money when they preferred being paid in commodities, whose value was

more dependable. But there are also hints that rebels were responding

to the news of Sonthonax’s potential departure; some rebels reportedly

shouted “Long live Sonthonax!” as they attacked plantations. Datty was ex-

ecuted, and Louverture crushed the remnants of the uprising. But the inci-

dent contributed to a feeling among the commissioners that Sonthonax

should stay in the colony to use the “talisman of his name and his past ac-

tions” to keep order. In fact Raimond declared that if Sonthonax left, he

would too. Sonthonax decided to remain at least until March or April of the

following year.32

During the next months Sonthonax and Louverture came into increas-

ing conflict. The reasons for the tensions were complex. Both men were

committed to emancipation, and Louverture seems to have trusted

Sonthonax, at least at first. (Indeed, the commissioner took charge of send-

ing Louverture’s two sons to study in Paris, placing them on a well-armed

ship to make sure that “the sons of one of the greatest defenders of liberty”

would not be in danger of “falling back into slavery.”) But they had several

differences. Sonthonax encouraged Louverture to demobilize some of his

troops so that they could return to plantation work, but also requested

more troops from France. Louverture probably knew this and was angered

by the racism and hypocrisy of this act. Sonthonax, meanwhile, was dis-

mayed by the welcome Louverture gave to returning French planters,

many of whom had fled from Sonthonax’s previous regime. (Among

those Louverture greeted at this time was Bayon de Libertat, the manager

who had freed him many decades before.) The two men were also, on an-

other level, competing for the loyalty of the ex-slave population, and for

the political power that came from their support. Many cultivators called

Sonthonax their “father”; the historian Thomas Madiou, writing in the

nineteenth century, remarked on the “enthusiasm” with which many of the

old men who had lived through the period spoke of Sonthonax’s love for

the blacks. He was the only political figure who could compete in popular-

ity with Louverture.33

Eventually, in August 1797, Louverture, along with several of his gener-

als—notably Moïse and Henri Christophe—wrote a letter that essentially

commanded Sonthonax to leave. There had been good reasons for him to

stay, the generals noted, but since “peace, zeal for work, and the reestab-

lishment of culture” had been achieved, he could now go “tell France

what you have seen” and defend the cause for which they themselves

206

av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

would be “eternal soldiers.” Rightly sensing the best moment to exit the

stage, Sonthonax packed up quickly and left a few days later.34

His departure did not mark his complete withdrawal from the fray,

however. Over the next two years the two men traded accusations. Once

in Paris, Sonthonax steadfastly defended emancipation. He was proud, he

declared in 1798, to have “contributed” to “the greatest revolution ever ex-