Toussaint Louverture (19 page)

During Toussaint's halt at Gros Morne a large number of “citizens of all colors who had the Happiness to escape the assassinations which were being committed came to see me and gave me a recital which filled me with horror. As my Horses as well as my dragoons were tired I Gave the order to unsaddle, and to hold themselves ready, I had them given their rations … At three in the morning Jean Pierre Dumesny, having learned that I had arrived in the village of Gros Morne, came to join me and reported that he had not yet been able to find Etienne, that he had
presented himself at the appointed rendezvous but had found no trace of him … At four o'clock in the morning I gave the order to the Dragoons to Saddle, and got on the road to Port de Paix by five.”
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On such maneuvers is founded Toussaint's reputation for rapid, unpredictable movement and for indefatigability

A couple of miles outside of the town, Toussaint paused to send out a few advance messengers, Jean Pierre Dumesny among them, to try to coax Etienne Datty to meet him for an interview. Then he rode a little further, halting at Ravine Pourrie, where he “had the horses unbridled so they might graze on a little grass.” It would have been full daylight by then; dawn comes quickly so near the equator. After an hour's wait, a couple of horsemen of Datty's troop appeared, then ten armed men on foot. Toussaint notes that while he reproached them vigorously for the riots and killings that had been going on, “they all seemed very satisfied to see me.”
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Having sent these people away with new messages urging Datty to present himself, Toussaint rode on, stopping at two in the afternoon at the river of Passe Seguier for long enough to compose a letter to the recalcitrant and thus far invisible Datty. This time Toussaint ordered Datty to meet him at the nearby Andro Plantation.

“I got back on the road; at three o'clock I arrived at Habitation Andro, where I found a black citizen named Baptiste who told me that he served as a herdsman for Citizen Andro, the owner,&also Two black women citizens and an old mulatress, of whom I asked, Why all these disorders?—they replied that they did not Know the cause. As soon as I arrived I wrote to Pageot, Commandant of the Northern Province, to inform him of my arrival, and I sent the said Baptiste, with Two of my dragoons, to carry this letter. At the same moment there came to see me a large number of men and women fieldworkers, who brought me provisions, some fowls and some eggs, and testified to the pleasure they had in seeing me, and that they Hoped that I would settle all these Disorders. I Gave them the order to go find me some forage,
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which they did on the spot and seemed to do with pleasure. That seemed to me to be a Good omen and made me believe that settling these things would not be difficult.”
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In all these maneuvers one begins to sense the delicate balance with which Toussaint walked the line between French military commander and African chieftain. He had arrived in the unstable region with just a few cavalrymen at his back; if Datty's rebellion were determined, his forces would hugely outnumber Toussaint's, though probably they would be far less well trained and disciplined. In his daylong meander through the area, Toussaint was spreading the news of his presence as broadly as he could, while being careful never to remain in one spot for more than an hour: he had no intention of making himself a stationary target until he had a better sense of the local mood. His letters to Datty were written in French military style, from commander to subordinate—but the verbal messages he sent, parallel to his written communications, must have been more like invitations to a sort of clan meeting. Toussaint drew his confidence from subtle harbingers in the locals' response to him that would likely have passed unnoticed by a European officer. When the field hands brought him offerings of food and willingly followed his directions to find hay for his horses, he was reassured that they accepted the style of patriarchal authority he was trying to assert. Secure in their support, he was encouraged to remain at Andro Plantation till Etienne Datty should come; without that support he might well have been as shy of Datty as Datty was of him.

“At seven o'clock in the evening, Etienne presented himself in conformity to the order which I had Sent him, with about five hundred men of whom a great Part were armed. I had my horse saddled and Gave the order to Etienne To have all the citizens who had come with him form a circle, as well as those who had just come in with the forage.” With these directions, Toussaint managed to mingle Datty's men, whose intentions and loyalties were uncertain, with the field hands who had turned up earlier and had demonstrated their loyalty to Toussaint.

“I mounted my horse&entered into the Circle.” To address the throng from horseback increased Toussaint's air of authority; he was also ready for a swift departure if anything should go wrong.

At this point the encounter (as steered by Toussaint) had become a sort of court proceeding, African style, where grievances could be aired before the assembled community and resolved by the judgment of the patriarch. “I was silent,” Toussaint wrote to Laveaux,

Here Toussaint is reinforcing a chain of command running down from Laveaux through himself to his subordinate officers and thence to individual soldiers and citizens. Though the hierarchy is orthodox, his style of asserting it is not. For the abstraction of European military
organization, where all individuals can be replaced in their ranks, is substituted an alternative where the whole apparatus is held together by Toussaint's personal, paternal relationship with all the people under his authority—though he wields his authority in the name of Laveaux and the French republic.

“They replied that all loved the Governor-General, but that it was unfortunate that everyone was not like him.” And then they got down to the real complaint:

This language, too, springs from the core rhetoric of the French Revolution, but here it has taken a peculiarly familial twist. Moreover, while these
nouveau libre
citizens of the Port de Paix region recognize Toussaint as “father of all the blacks,” they also recognize two sides, it seems: theirs and his.

“They trouble us too much,” the spokesman continued. “They don't pay us well for the harvests we make, and they force us to give our Chickens and pigs for nothing when we go to sell them in the town, and if we want to Complain they have us arrested By the police and they put us in prison without giving us anything to eat&we have to pay still more to get out again.—you can plainly see, my General, that to be dragged around like that is not to be free—but we are very sure
that you are not at all like that, from the way that we see that everyone with you is happy and loves you.'
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Once assured that the assembly had completely stated its case, Toussaint commenced his reply: “My friends—I ought not call you so, for the shame you have brought to me and all men of our color makes me see all too clearly that you are not my friends—all the reasons you give me strike me as Most Just, but although you do have a very strong case—”

But here, in the midst of reporting his own oration, Toussaint turned directly to Laveaux (whom he himself often addressed as “father”) to explain, “I used that expression To make them understand that though they might have all the good reasons that One could possibly have, that they were still wrong and that they had rendered themselves guilty in the eyes of God, of the Law, and of men.”
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It was a ticklish matter for Toussaint to convince this audience, whose members were accustomed to resort to arms to settle injustices which looked obvious to them, that in the French republic, to which Toussaint insisted they belong, Law might trump Justice, at least from time to time.

Here for the first time in public (and to the sort of audience he most needed to convince), Toussaint announced his ambition for the colony: he would manage Saint Domingue so as to prove to the whole European world that slavery was not necessary to the success of the plantation economy, that sugar and coffee production could be revived, and the Jewel of the Antilles restored to its former luster—with free labor. But for that project to succeed there was a surprisingly vast cultural rift to be bridged, and almost as soon as Toussaint had finished speaking, that rift began to widen once more.

The people whom he had addressed swore up and down to sin no more, to be good and obedient and peaceful, that they desired nothing more than to have Toussaint restore order among them. Toussaint exhorted them to prove these good intentions by returning to their plantations—and to work. Once they were gone he turned to Datty and pointed out that by no means all the inhabitants of the region had been present for this talking-to. Datty admitted that there were still three camps of rebels on the mountain above Port de Paix. Toussaint loaned Datty a secretary to draft a letter ordering those camps to report to Toussaint at Andro Plantation. That letter sent, Toussaint and Datty shared a supper. At ten thirty that night, Datty took his leave, promising to appear with the remaining rebels the next day. “I had the ration given to my dragoons,” Toussaint wrote, “who had eaten nothing all day but a few bananas which the field hands had brought me, as I said before. I told them to pay good attention to their horses, and passed that night without anything new happening.”
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By the next morning, however, it became clear that Etienne Datty had again slipped his leash. He sent emissaries but avoided appearing in person before Toussaint as he had promised, and the rest of the rebels remained where they were. Toussaint began sending letters once more.

But Toussaint's belief was disappointed: Datty did not reappear, nor did he send a direct reply. Instead Toussaint received a letter from “the Citizens in arms at Lagon,” explaining that since Datty had so often been entrapped in the past by “Beautiful Propositions” they themselves had restrained him from returning to Toussaint.