Read Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution Online
Authors: Laurent Dubois
did you sacrifice the Swiss? Because they were
black.
” Rigaud, he went on, refused to obey him for the same reason: “because of my color.” Once the
war began, when some free-coloreds led uprisings in the north in support
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of Rigaud, Louverture angrily accused the “men of color in general” of
conspiring to destroy Saint-Domingue.3
Rigaud denied that his resistance to Louverture was motivated by rac-
ism. It was, he insisted, simply a response to the vicious treatment he had
suffered at Louverture’s hands. “I have chiefs, but I have no master,”
Rigaud wrote, “and never did an irritated and foul-mouthed master treat
his slave in a manner as atrocious as I have been treated.” Rigaud noted
that he had been born, like “General Toussaint,” to a mother who was a
“négresse.” He had a brother who was black whom he had always “obeyed
and respected.” He had been educated by a black schoolteacher. All these
individuals had always given him orders, and he had always followed them.
“And is there, in any case,” Rigaud continued, “such a difference between
Toussaint’s color and my own?” “I am too strongly penetrated by the Rights
of Man to believe that one color is superior to another,” Rigaud declared. It was Louverture, he insisted, who was the real racist.4
Louverture also accused Rigaud of rebelling against the French govern-
ment. But the free-colored general used the letter he had received from
Hédouville to claim that it was he who was the legitimate representative of
the government, and Louverture the seditious rebel. Both sides also invig-
orated their polemics with more serious accusations. The U.S. consul Ed-
ward Stevens described how Rigaud “studiously propagated” the idea that
under Louverture the colony “was to be sold to the British government,
and once more brought under the Yoke of Slavery.” Louverture, mean-
while, claimed that it was the free-coloreds who were enemies of liberty,
and that under Rigaud’s command they intended to reestablish slavery as
soon as they were able.5
Like all enemies, Rigaud and Louverture sought obsessively to highlight
their differences. In fact, however, they resembled each other enormously.
Both of their regimes were predicated on maintaining former slaves on
plantations and on cultivating economic ties with British and U.S. mer-
chants. While free-coloreds made up a larger part of the ruling class in the
south, their interests were not substantially different from those of the new class of black property owners that had emerged in the north and west. At
base, the conflict between Louverture and Rigaud was not driven by differ-
ences in racial identity, or even differences in ideology or practice. It was a conflict over territorial and political power. Louverture was determined to
assert his control over the entire colony. But the south had, throughout the
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history of Saint-Domingue, been a region apart from the rest of the colony,
one with a particular culture sustained by its extensive contacts with other
Caribbean islands. Building on this foundation of autonomy, Rigaud and
his partisans had created a strong and independent regime. They wished,
naturally enough, to maintain control, and fought back when Louverture
threatened to destroy what they had built.6
“My apprehensions of an immediate rupture between the two rival
chiefs of this colony have been realized,” Edward Stevens wrote in late
June 1799. On June 18, 4,000 of Rigaud’s troops entered the towns of Pe-
tit- and Grand-Goâve, routing the smaller forces under the command of
Louverture’s officer Laplume. This defeat was a kind of revenge: in 1795
Laplume had brought several thousand troops under Louverture’s com-
mand rather than submit to the authority of Rigaud. It was also a direct
challenge to Louverture, who had insisted on the transfer the towns to his
command a few months earlier. Rigaud’s bold attack earned him an impor-
tant ally: the powerful free-colored officer Alexandre Pétion defected to
Rigaud’s side, swelling the ranks of his army. Composed mostly of “black
troops that have served under him since the commencement of the revolu-
tion,” along with a few “cultivators,” his infantry was “well disciplined,” and his cavalry, “composed entirely of mulattoes,” was “the best in the colony.”7
Rigaud’s partisans were not confined to the south, however. After his
victory there were revolts in Le Cap, the Artibonite plain, and, most seri-
ously, in the Môle and the region surrounding Port-de-Paix, where
Louverture had faced uprisings consistently during the previous years. The
rebels failed to take Port-de-Paix, defended by one of Louverture’s loyal
officers, but they did surround it. Louverture had enemies everywhere. In-
deed, he was the target of two assassination attempts. In the first, his per-
sonal physician was killed, and a bullet passed through Louverture’s hat.
During the second Louverture’s carriage was riddled with bullets and his
coachman killed. The general escaped “miraculously” only because he was
riding behind the carriage.8
It was the greatest political challenge Louverture had yet faced. In the
north and west he responded with swift brutality. In the months following
the uprisings, Louverture’s troops executed conspirators without mercy.
Descourtilz described Louverture publicly punishing one officer in the
town for indiscriminate killings, telling him: “I told you to clear the trees, and you uprooted them.” The officer responded by saying: “What do you
want? When it rains, everyone outside gets wet.” Descourtilz claimed that
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Louverture had hypocritically ordered the widespread executions only to
publicly disavow them. This may well have been true. But Louverture—
who had often been quite merciful to those he defeated—might well have
been disturbed by the extent of the revenge. Still, there is little doubt that the officers under his command, notably Christophe and Dessalines, committed numerous atrocities during the campaigns against Rigaud and his
partisans.9
Having crushed the uprisings in the north, Louverture invaded the
south to destroy Rigaud’s regime. He had numbers on his side. According
to Stevens, Louverture had the support of “most of the Blacks, and all of
the Whites of the colony” and was “too powerful” to be defeated.” He had
45,000 troops in his army, compared with Rigaud’s 15,000. Louverture
knew, however, that to win the war he needed to isolate Rigaud. He turned
to his new ally, the United States. Writing to John Adams in mid-August,
he announced that “in order to satisfy his pride and ambition,” Rigaud had
started a rebellion “odious” to “all the Governments on earth.” He lacked,
he explained, one “repressive measure” he needed to end this revolt—a
navy. Louverture requested that the United States use its ships to help
him “reduce” the “pirates” that were fanning out from Rigaud’s ports, at-
tacking both French and foreign ships. Edward Stevens wrote to Washing-
ton around the same time, arguing the United States should “cooperate
with the British in cutting all supplies of provision and ammunition to
Rigaud.” To do so would be in the best commercial interests of the United
States, for if Louverture should “prove unsuccessful,” then “all the ar-
rangements we have made respecting commerce must fall to the ground.”
Adams was convinced, and soon the U.S. Navy was blockading the south-
ern ports.10
Having secured such support and suppressed the uprisings against him
in the north and west, Louverture was all but assured of victory. Still, as his army, under the command of Dessalines, marched into the south, the
fighting was brutal. The leaders on both sides had demonized their ene-
mies, and the fighting descended into a “delirium” in which neither side
showed any mercy. “It never entered anyone’s mind to take prisoners.” The
land, too, suffered; as Rigaud retreated, he commanded his troops to cre-
ate a “desert of fire,” making sure they left behind only trees with their
roots in the air. Rigaud lost crucial allies, most devastatingly his longtime comrade Louis-Jacques Bauvais, who, having maintained a tenuous neutrality at the beginning of the conflict, abandoned the colony rather than
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fight on one side or another. (He died soon after when the ship he was on
sank in the Atlantic.) Rigaud also found little support among the cultivators in the Southern Province. Louverture, meanwhile, sought with some success to draw cultivators to his side, sending ex-slave officers, including
one named Gilles Bambara, who was probably African-born, to do the re-
cruiting. When Rigaud retreated to Les Cayes, he “rang the tocsins as a
signal and call to arms,” hoping the cultivators in the surrounding plains
would come to his defense. “No one came forward to answer the call.”
Their refusal to support Rigaud, probably to some extent simply a prag-
matic choice, was also a sign of the hostility many felt toward the labor re-
gime to which they had been subjected during the past years. If they
hoped for better under Louverture’s rule, however, they were to be disap-
pointed.11
In June 1800 an emissary from France arrived in Saint-Domingue, car-
rying a series of proclamations from First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte.
One of these confirmed that Louverture was still the “general-in-chief” of
the army of Saint-Domingue. Since Rigaud had justified his revolt in part
by declaring Louverture’s authority illegitimate, this news undermined his
position substantially. Sensing that the momentum of the war was on his
side, Louverture soon declared a general amnesty for all those who surren-
dered. In late July, Rigaud fled the colony with his family, and soon after-
ward Louverture entered Les Cayes. He reiterated his declaration of a
general amnesty. Nevertheless, in the wake of the defeat there were repri-
sals committed against many prisoners. Some have asserted that
Louverture ordered these massacres but had his generals do the dirty work
so that he could deny knowledge of what was being done in his name.
Dessalines’s role in this period, in particular, remains controversial. Many
see him as the driving force of the brutal reprisals against Rigaud’s parti-
sans, though one historian has also noted that he made an effort to pre-
serve the lives of several prisoners. A few years later, some of those who
had fought with Rigaud would in fact rally to Dessalines’s side as he battled for independence from the French.12
Louverture had consolidated his control over all of Saint-Domingue.
But his territorial expansion was not over. As he fought against Rigaud,
he set his sights beyond the south, looking east. Spanish Santo Domingo
had been ceded to France in 1795, but despite the presence of a few
French officials the Spanish administration continued to control the col-
ony. Louverture’s reasons for wanting to control Santo Domingo were, at
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least initially, tied to the war against Rigaud. Edward Stevens attributed
Louverture’s decision to invade to a curious rumor that ships carrying
15,000 troops and the Abbé Grégoire had landed in Guadeloupe and were
heading for Santo Domingo. Those who spread this rumor perhaps raised
the threat of Grégoire because he was seen as a friend of free-coloreds,
and therefore of Rigaud. Although it is doubtful that Louverture trembled
at the thought of the arrival of the French priest (who in any case was
safely across the Atlantic), he understood the need to prevent Rigaud from
receiving any support from the east. To secure his position he needed to
control all the ports in the colony. Santo Domingo was an ideal place for
hostile new arrivals from Europe to land, as Hédouville had done in 1798,
in order to sidestep Louverture’s control of Le Cap.13
Louverture explained his desire to conquer Santo Domingo, however,
in a different way: he claimed that men, women, and children who were
“French citizens” were being kidnapped to Santo Domingo and sold as
slaves. In April 1800 he announced to the agent Roume that he was deter-
mined to end this abuse by sending his troops across the border into
the Spanish colony. Convinced that the occupation order had to come from
Paris, Roume hesitated to lend his approval to the project, but Louverture
simply locked him up. In late December, after defeating Rigaud, he or-
dered Moïse to lead troops across the border. They were virtually unop-
posed, and a month later the governor of the Spanish colony capitulated—
he and his entourage soon left for Spain—and Louverture’s army occu-
pied the capital city, Santo Domingo. Accounts of his army’s reign in the
colony vary widely. One contemporary presented it in the manner of many
imperial apologists, describing how the “principles of French administra-
tion” brought “new industry and activity” to the Spanish colony, along with
“magnificent” new roads and a new economic prosperity. Others have de-
scribed a regime in which Louverture’s black officers enriched themselves