Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (57 page)

lic. May he never see Saint-Domingue again.” “You cannot hold Toussaint

far enough from the ocean or put him in a prison that is too strong,”

Leclerc reiterated a month later. He seemed to fear that the deported man

might suddenly reappear. His very presence in the colony, he warned,

would once again set it alight. By spiriting Louverture out of the colony,

Leclerc felt he had won a great victory. “I have taken away the gathering

point of the blacks,” he announced to the minister in mid-June. “The

blacks have lost their compass,” he wrote to Bonaparte the same day; “they

are all divided amongst themselves.” A few troops rebelled—Leclerc wrote

in early July that “after the embarkation of Toussaint some men tried to stir up trouble,” and that he had had them “shot or deported”—but for the

time it seemed the French were in control.63

In July 1802, from Le Cap, Marie-Rose Masson wrote to her former

master the marquis de Gallifet, the onetime owner of the richest planta-

tions in the colony. Masson had purchased her freedom from Gallifet’s

manager, Odeluc, but the transaction was not made official before he was

killed in the 1791 insurrection. Masson feared that if the old order re-

turned, she would again be a slave. She pleaded with Gallifet to acknowl-

edge the freedom she had gained before emancipation. “The time of error

is finished,” she announced, and those with “bad intentions” would no

longer be able to “anchor their destructive influence” in Saint-Domingue,

for a “protective government” was “working to reestablish order.” Soon,

she promised Gallifet, “the arms among your property that still exist will,

voluntarily or by force, have to return to their useful work.” In her bid to

preserve her own freedom, Masson used a language similar to that of many

French officials, suggesting that the time of freedom had been an aberra-

tion, a period of tumult and violence that was best left behind. The same

was true of another writer, the representative of Madame de Mauger in

Saint-Domingue, who in October 1802 sent news to her of her plantations

in the Artibonite region, and of her ever-rebellious former slave, Philipeau.

The latter, who after emancipation had continued on as the manager of

her indigo plantations, had by 1802 purchased some land in the area where

he had once been a slave. He had settled his wife and children there and

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no longer worked on the plantations. But it would be possible to “remove

them,” Mauger’s representative noted, “when a certain order has been re-

established in this country.”64

Elsewhere in the colony French officers had already begun doing their

best to erase what they saw as the perversions of this time of liberty. Soon

after the French took Port-au-Prince, Lacroix and another general had

found among Louverture’s papers a box with a “false bottom.” Underneath

they found “locks of hair of all colors, rings, golden hearts punctured with

arrows, little keys,” along with an “infinity of sweet notes,” all of which “left no doubt about the success the old Toussaint Louverture had achieved in

love!” “He was black, and physically repulsive,” wrote Lacroix, “but he had

made himself the dispenser of all fortunes, and his power could alter any

condition when it wished.” Besides shocking the two generals, the discov-

ery frightened them in its implications. For in Bonaparte’s instructions to

Leclerc he had declared that “white women who have prostituted them-

selves to negroes, whatever their rank, will be sent back to France.” The

archive they had found could have been turned into a list of the guilty. So

the two men decided to do a noble thing: before looking too closely at what

they had found, they decided to “lose every trace of these shameful memo-

ries,” and burned much of what could “remind us of our painful discovery,”

throwing the rest into the ocean.65

A few years before, Laveaux had celebrated Louverture in Paris by de-

scribing his kindness to white women in the colony, who had called him

“father.” Now such connections as might have existed between the general

and such women were interpreted as a shameful past whose very memory

should be destroyed. What did the letters Louverture had collected ac-

tually say? What was the meaning of the objects he had received? The

French generals made sure there would never be any way to find out,

sending the archive’s mysteries into the graveyard of fire and water.

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c h a p t e r t h i r t e e n

Those Who Die

It“appearedsuddenly,causingsharppainsintheeyesockets,

feet, loins and stomach . . . The patient’s face became flushed, tears

flowed from his glazed eyes.” The afflicted found it so difficult to

breathe that they were “afraid of suffocation.” “A thick, whitish-yellow

fluid covered the parched tongue, then the teeth, and soon changed into a

black encrustation.” The vomit was “yellow from bile,” and the “feces and

urine red.” In the “next phase,” the patient could not drink. “Wounds

opened up, often with inflamed edges.” Then the patient began to heal and

feel rejuvenated. This improvement, however, only “signaled the end.” The

nervous system collapsed, causing “cramps” and nosebleeds, while the

pulse “feebled.” By then the patient “was already a corpse, putrid and hor-

rible from the blood’s decomposition.” This, in the words of a French doc-

tor writing in 1806, was what happened to a victim of yellow fever.1

Even as they secured victory over Louverture in 1802, French troops

increasingly fell prey to another daunting enemy: disease. Watching their

troops die around them, bewildered officers counted and reported the

dead. Some cast about for an explanation for the virulence of the fever.

Descourtilz claimed that he had discovered an old black man who was

grinding up the intestines of hastily buried fever victims to make sausages,

and in so doing purposely spread the contagion to those who remained

healthy. The reality was more banal. Troops arriving in the Caribbean

had always been vulnerable to such outbreaks, and many had forewarned

Bonaparte of the dangers the scourge might pose to his mission to Saint-

Domingue. Aware of the danger, the consul had hoped to avoid the worst

by sending his troops early enough in the year to avoid the hot months

when the plague was at its worst. He also mistakenly assumed that his

troops would accomplish their mission quickly. Instead, the war against

Louverture took many months of hard campaigning. By then the season of

fever had begun, and the disease showed a rare virulence, spreading rap-

idly as it fed off the large numbers of unacclimated troops on the island.

As 1802 wore on, the reinforcements that arrived to shore up Leclerc’s

mission were rapidly reduced by the plague. In mid-1803 two regiments of

Polish troops disembarked in the town of Tiburon; ten days later more

than half were dead of fever. “They fell down as they walked,” a planter

noted, “the blood rushing out of their nostrils, mouths, eyes.” By late 1802,

“an average of one hundred men a day died.” The disease killed the entire

crew of a Swedish ship harbored in Le Cap, with the single exception of a

young cabin boy, and the empty ship was put up for sale.2

“If the first consul wants to have an army in Saint-Domingue in the

month of October,” Leclerc wrote to the colonial minister, Denis Decrès,

in June 1802, “he must send one from the ports of France, for the ravages

of the sickness here are beyond telling.” He had lost 1,200 men during his

first month in the colony, 1,800 in the next, and feared that he would lose

2,000 in the coming month. Of the tens of thousands who had arrived a few

months before, there were only 10,000 European troops left who could

still fight. “Half of the officers in this army are dead” from either battle or disease, he announced weeks later. “Men passed through and disappeared

like shadows,” Lacroix recalled; “you developed a stoic indifference, and

separated yourself from those with whom you lived with less regret than

you suffered in Europe when you learned of the light sickness of a friend.”

In one list of dead officers, Leclerc noted simply of one of them: “I didn’t

have time to get to know him.”3

The deadly combination of “yellow fever and an enemy who gave no

quarter” steadily undermined Bonaparte’s plans for Saint-Domingue. As

Leclerc wrote in early June, “the blacks” still fighting against him were “increasingly audacious.” In mid-July there were “nighttime meetings” in

the northern plain and even in Le Cap itself, animated by conspirators

planning “the massacre of the Europeans.” With resistance continuing, he

found himself in a bind: in order to keep his mission afloat he had to defer, and indeed contradict, its ultimate goal: the destruction of the black army.

With his own army becoming smaller and weaker, Leclerc had to depend

on officers like Dessalines and Christophe and the colonial troops they

commanded to fight the insurgents in the colony. “You order me to send

the black generals to Europe,” he wrote to Bonaparte in late August, but

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this was impossible, as he was using them to “stop the revolts” that in some

areas had reached “alarming” proportions. His dependence on them was a

financial drain—Leclerc complained to Bonaparte that he had to pay the

salaries of 3,000 such officers, and 12,000 colonial troops—but it was also a political liability. The more Leclerc depended on the colonial troops, the

more he broadcast his weakness. And the loyalty of these troops was, as

the general understood, quite fragile. He reported in July that, suspecting

a revolt brewing among “some colonial troops,” he had shot “several of

the leaders.” And although he claimed to be the “master” of Dessalines’s

“spirit,” he realized that Dessalines and other black officers were watching

for an opportunity to turn against him. He comforted himself with the

conclusion that they would not have the courage to do so. They “all hate

one another,” Leclerc claimed, and “know I will destroy them one by

one.” They were, furthermore, afraid “to measure themselves against the

man who destroyed their chief”—Louverture. “The blacks are not brave,”

Leclerc concluded, “and this war has scared them.”4

In fact the black officers serving Leclerc were the main reason his army

survived as long as it did. Dessalines was as fearsome an enemy of his for-

mer comrades as he had once been of the French. In early August he led a

successful attack against the insurgent band led by Macaya and brought

back “women and children and prisoners.” “I had a few hung, and others

shot,” Dessalines reported. He hoped that “in ten years” the people of the

region would still remember the “lesson.” In another letter Dessalines con-

gratulated himself on the “desolation and terror” he had wrought. One

French officer noted the “marvels” the black general had performed in

capturing hundreds of guns from the insurgents and ridding “the country

of more than a hundred incorrigible rascals.” Leclerc similarly praised

Dessalines as the “butcher of the blacks,” noting that he was using him

to execute all the most “odious measures” he was enforcing. Another white

officer went so far as to call him “a god.” As he had been under Louverture,

Dessalines held the position of “inspector of agriculture,” and punished

rebellious plantation workers in the areas under his control swiftly and

fiercely. Even if his exemplary justice was part of a broader ploy to trick the French into trusting him so that he could ultimately win the final battle for independence, this was certainly no consolation for those who were his victims during this period.5

Finding it impossible to fulfill Bonaparte’s orders to dismantle the colo-

nial army, Leclerc sought to carry out another aspect of the first consul’s

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plan: the disarmament of the general population. He initiated the process

in the west in June 1802, placing it in Dessalines’s able hands, and soon ex-

tended the project to the south and eventually the north, collecting hun-