Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (51 page)

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a kind of delirium, perhaps driven by the horror of what had just hap-

pened. Louverture railed against Moïse, complaining that for years he had

explained to him how to be a virtuous soldier, disciplined and obedient,

and a virtuous man. But instead of listening to the “advice of a father” and

to the orders of a “chief devoted to the happiness of the colony,” Moïse had

let himself be guided “only by his passions.” The result: “he has perished

miserably!” “This will be the fate of all who imitate him,” Louverture

warned ominously. “The justice of heaven is slow, but it is infallible, and

sooner or later it strikes the wicked and crushes them like thunder.”36

Louverture did not content himself with fulminating against the de-

parted Moïse. He struck out at seemingly the entire population he was

governing. He lashed out against the men “without religion” who had

caused disorders in the colony. He blamed such disorders on bad

parenting, the “negligence with which fathers and mothers raise their chil-

dren, shirking religion, obedience, and love of work and instead passing on

a disdain for cultivation.” Since “bad impressions are difficult to get rid of,”

the result was the proliferation of “bad citizens, vagabonds, and thieves.”

The girls became prostitutes, always ready to “follow the urgings of the first conspirator who preaches disorder, assassination, and pillage.” Indeed, because the war had killed “many more men than women,” the towns were

full of women whose “existence is based wholly on libertinage,” and who

incited others to “banditry.” The police and officers of the colony must con-

stantly keep their eyes open and be ready to punish all such “vile” and

“dangerous” individuals. Louverture also declared that any married of-

ficers or administrators who accepted “concubines” in their houses or who

were unmarried but “lived publicly with several women” would be fired.37

The plantations were also full of dangerous men and women. “Since the

revolution,” Louverture claimed, “perverse men” had declared that “lib-

erty was the right to remain idle, to do bad with impunity, to disdain the

laws and follow only their whims.” Such a “doctrine” was of course ac-

cepted happily by “bad subjects, thieves, and assassins.” “It is time to strike out against the hardened men who persist in these ideas; all must know

that there is no way to live peacefully and respectfully except through

work, assiduous work.” “As soon as a child can walk,” Louverture declared,

“he must be put to work on the plantations doing some useful task.” “In a

well-ordered state,” he explained, “idleness is the source of all disorders.”

Domestics, too, needed stricter surveillance by those they worked for, who

should “treat them with justice” but also “force them” to their duty. For

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since “in the new regime all work deserves a salary, each salary demands

work.” Louverture’s proclamation demanded the strict enforcement of his

October 1800 regulations on cultivation. It ratcheted up the threats issued

against those officers and administrators—like Moïse—who refused to en-

force this decree assiduously. Any officer who tolerated laziness or va-

grancy was an “enemy of the government”; any who “tolerated pillage and

assassination” was to be executed; any individual who encouraged sedition

would also be punished with death.38

Louverture ordered the creation of a new system of surveillance. He or-

dered managers and owners to draw up lists of the laborers on their prop-

erty to be used for “fixing cultivators on the plantations.” “Security cards”

listing each individual’s name, address, employment, age, and sex were to

be issued by local officials. A fee would be charged, and they would be

given only to those who had a job and demonstrated “irreproachable con-

duct.” Domestics had to present a “certificate of good conduct” from their

employers to get their cards. Those who could not present them on de-

mand would be punished. “Foreigners,” especially “metropolitans,” that is,

European-born Frenchmen, without documents would be deported. “Cre-

oles” would be sent to a plantation. A note at the end of the decree ex-

plained that by “creole” the government meant “any individual born in the

colony or in Africa.” This was a departure from the traditional use of the

term, generally used to refer only to American-born and slaves. It was an

important step, for it in essence identified the majority in the colony who

had come from Africa as natives of Saint-Domingue. It did so, however,

not to grant them rights as citizens but to limit those rights.39

The November proclamation was a crushing condemnation of the social

world of Saint-Domingue, and a charter for a new police state in which the

duty of all citizens to work for the state would be strictly enforced. It was a remarkable blend of moralism—indeed, Louverture ordered the decree

be read after mass by all the priests in the colony—and bureaucratic inno-

vation. In one way, the draconian regime whose consolidation it articulated

turned out to be quite a success: Louverture oversaw a remarkable revival

of the shattered plantation economy in Saint-Domingue. By 1801, accord-

ing to official reports, coffee exports had risen from almost nothing to two-

thirds of their level in 1789. Improvements in the sugar industry, where

damages were more difficult to repair, were smaller, and included little of

the more profitable refined sugar, but by 1802 exports were at one-third

those of 1789. These official figures did not include a significant amount of t e r r i t o r y

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underground and contraband trade, much of it carried out with the sup-

port of the regime. Under Louverture’s control, the rebuilding of many

sectors of Saint-Domingue’s plantation economy was well under way.40

Louverture would later claim that in early 1802 the colony was “enjoy-

ing the greatest tranquility” and that “commerce and cultivation” were

flourishing; the island had reached “a degree of splendor that had never

been seen before.” He had been accused of treating the cultivators as

“slaves,” but all he was trying to do was to increase the “general happiness

of the island” by making the people of Saint-Domingue “taste liberty with-

out license.” He had, he added, succeeded, to the point that “you could

not see a single idle man in the colony” and the “number of beggars had

decreased.” “Never have order and tranquility reigned so widely in Saint-

Domingue,” concurred a French officer in January 1802. And General

Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, who arrived in Saint-Domingue soon

afterward with decidedly hostile intentions toward Louverture, noted that

agriculture in the colony was at a “very high level.” In fact he claimed that on the plantations under the command of Louverture’s officers, the

“blacks” were being worked harder than they ever had been under the

whites. He found, furthermore, that he could fulfill the strict orders he

had been given to restore order on the plantations and make sure the ex-

slaves were working assiduously by using Louverture’s regulations, which

he deemed were “very good.” They were, he noted, so “strong” that he

would not have dared propose them himself.41

But the strictness of Louverture’s November 1801 decree highlighted

the strain of the balancing act he had been sustaining for years. Committed

to defending liberty at all costs, Louverture had turned himself into a dic-

tator, and the colony he ruled over into a society based on social hierarchy, forced labor, and violent repression. The proclamation was a measure of

Louverture’s failure to find a middle way by which a true liberty could co-

exist with the plantation economy. When, a few months later, ships arrived

from France to crush Louverture, he would find that among his officers

and soldiers, not to mention the cultivators and city-dwellers of Saint-

Domingue, there were many who were unwilling to fight to save him. But

those French who confused Louverture’s regime with slavery were also in

for a rude awakening. Despite the many limits he had placed on freedom,

the ex-slaves clearly saw the difference between the present and the past.

And they were willing to lay down their lives rather than go back.

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c h a p t e r t w e l v e

The Tree of Liberty

Forthirty-sevendaysinlate1801,thewindsblewrelent-

lessly off the Atlantic into the French port of Brest. Pinned in the

harbor was a fleet of ships packed with some 7,000 troops waiting

to sail. “Never have the western winds blown so persistently,” complained

the naval commander, while the general in charge of the troops, Charles

Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, wrote to Napoleon Bonaparte that for days the

wind had not paused for even “one hour” to allow the convoy to set out

to sea.1

Leclerc had been by Bonaparte’s side for many years. They had fought

together against the British at Toulon in 1793, and then a few years later

in the conquest of Italy, where Leclerc met and married Napoleon’s sister,

Pauline. Leclerc had led the troops that dispersed the Parlement dur-

ing the 1799 coup that made Bonaparte first consul. Now Leclerc was

being sent on a mission of crucial importance: wresting control of Saint-

Domingue from Toussaint Louverture.2

In the end the wind let up, and the Leclerc expedition sailed into the

Atlantic. The ships from Brest were joined by convoys from other ports;

once united, the expedition consisted of fifty ships—about half of France’s

larger naval vessels—carrying almost 22,000 soldiers, along with approxi-

mately 20,000 sailors. Reinforcements followed during the next year; ulti-

mately upward of 80,000 fighting men were sent to Saint-Domingue.3

“All of France is coming to Saint-Domingue,” Louverture reportedly

exclaimed when he saw part of the armada hovering off the shores of

the colony weeks later. Though he did not yet know it, among its passen-

gers were his two sons, Isaac and Placide, whom he had sent to study

in Paris a few years before. Bonaparte had met with them before their de-

parture, telling them that their father was “a great man.” The army he

was sending to Saint-Domingue, he assured them, was meant only to

strengthen the military forces there. Wishing to see the extent of the edu-

cation of Louverture’s sons, Bonaparte quizzed them on their mathemati-

cal skills. Finding them satisfactory, he entrusted them with a letter for

their father asking him to submit to the authority of General Leclerc.

Within a few months Isaac and Placide would be heading back across the

Atlantic, this time as prisoners.4

“What are presumably the objects of the French West India expedition?”

the British abolitionist James Stephen wondered in early 1802. The ques-

tion was an important one not only for France but for Britain and its Carib-

bean colonies. In late 1801 the British government signed the preliminar-

ies of a peace treaty with France that would be finalized as the Treaty of

Amiens in March 1802. Although the period of peace between the two em-

pires would be short-lived, it was to have a profound impact in Saint-

Domingue, for it made the Leclerc expedition possible.5

Emancipation had been decreed in 1793 in large part to secure Saint-

Domingue from British occupation, and in the intervening years war had

made Louverture and his army necessary allies for the French govern-

ment. Laveaux and others had celebrated the military services rendered by

the ex-slaves in order to mitigate concerns in France about the economic

disruption caused by emancipation. With peace, however, military neces-

sity could no longer be used against those clamoring for a reconstruction of

the plantation economy. Consistently attacked during the previous years in

Paris, Louverture came to be seen in government circles less as a valuable

ally than as an obstacle to Bonaparte’s new colonial plans. Peace made the

Leclerc expedition both politically expedient and militarily possible. The

end of the global struggle with the British freed up French forces that had