Toussaint Louverture (25 page)

Rumors of the secret treaty with Maitland soon leaked, further damaging Toussaint's shaky relationship with Hedouville. He had called on the agent at Le Cap for the first time soon after he'd taken possession of Port-au-Prince and the west from the English, but had not stayed long, preferring to retire to the security of his own base at Gonai'ves. In July, he visited Hedouville again, this time in the company of General Andre
Rigaud. The latter was technically still under order of arrest since his rebellion against Sonthonax and the Third Commission in 1796, and as wary of the new agent as Toussaint was, it seemed. A volatile character, Rigaud was irked that the British had yielded the towns of the Western Department to Toussaint rather than to him, but when the two generals met in Port-au-Prince, they manage to smooth over that difference. United by a common mistrust of Hedouville, they traveled from Port-au-Prince to Le Cap together.

But once he met Hedouville in person, Rigaud dropped his reserve, so that the agent found him a warmer and more congenial figure than the suspicious, aloof Toussaint. This development reactivated Toussaint's mistrust of Rigaud, and Hedouville, who felt that he would have better luck managing these two generals if they were at odds with each other, encouraged the breach between them by favoring Rigaud. Before he left the south, however, Rigaud had been worried that Hedouville might have him deported to France to face charges related to his 1796 rebellion against the Third Commission, so he had arranged for an insurrection to break out at Anse a Veau during his absence— one that only his return to the south could subdue. As there was no time to call it off, the insurrection began on schedule and Rigaud, now trapped by his own artifice, had to rush home to settle it, leaving Toussaint to sort out his problems with Hedouville alone.

So far as labor policy went, Toussaint's and Hedouville's ideas were not so very dissimilar. Both wanted to restore the plantation economy by sending
nouveaux libres
back to work in the cane and coffee fields. Both were inclined to bind the freedmen contractually to plantations for periods as long as three years, and often to the same plantations where they had previously been slaves. When Toussaint undertook such measures himself he thought of them as necessary for the restoration of prosperity, but when they were undertaken by Hedouville, Toussaint could easily be persuaded that the agent was a tool of Vaublanc and the faction in France that was maneuvering for the restoration of slavery in fact, if not in name. One of his letters to the agent makes much of the idea that he, Toussaint, had been set free by the principles of the postrevolutionary French Constitution—and no mention of the fact that he had been free for more than a dozen years before. Toussaint pre-
ferred to identify himself with the
nouveaux libres
as much as he could—but the stringent labor rules were hugely unpopular with that group, no matter who was pushing them.

Hedouville had brought no significant military force with him, but he did have a team of civil servants with which he intended to replace most of the men Toussaint had appointed to various civilian posts in the government. Like Idlinger, who was in charge of the government's accounting in Le Cap, many of Toussaint's appointees were white Frenchmen, and many were considered to be corrupt, but Hedouville's efforts to replace them with his own people quickly became another sore point. In an effort to interrupt Toussaint's negotiations with the British, Hedouville ordered that enemy envoys should be admitted only at Le Cap, but Toussaint paid no attention to that. When Hedouville rebuked him for his leniency toward the emigres, Toussaint wrote tartly to the Directory, “Ah, since one reproaches the blacks for throwing out their former tyrants, isn't it part of their duty to prove that they know how to forgive—to welcome the same men that persecuted them?”
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One of the French naval captains told Toussaint “how flattered he would be, after having brought General Hedouville, to return with General Toussaint Louverture, whose services would find in France all the sweetness and honor which they so richly deserve.” The shades of sarcasm and menace in this remark did not escape Toussaint, who responded darkly, “Your ship is not big enough for a man like me.”
³⁹
Officers of Hedouville's largely symbolic honor guard persisted in teasing him with the prospect of a perhaps involuntary journey to France, until Toussaint finally pointed to a nearby shrub and said that he would make the trip ‘when that is big enough to make a ship to carry me.”
⁴⁰
Toussaint wore a red head-cloth under his general's bicorne; this
mouchwa tet
had a Vodouisant significance—it represented a bond between Toussaint and the warrior spirit, Ogoun Ferraille. Hedouville's supercilious young staff officers boasted that four of them would be enough to arrest “the ragheaded old man.” Ogoun did not take the insult lightly; not very long after, a couple of these witty young blades were slain in an ambush south of Port-au-Prince.

If Hedouville was playing Rigaud against Toussaint, Toussaint was not much troubled by his game. “Let Monsieur Rigaud go take his
instructions from the Agent of the Directory,” he said, in a moment of unusual frankness, to one of the French colonists he had amnestied in the region of Port-au-Prince. “I could very well have him arrested, but God forbid—I need Monsieur Rigaud … the caste of Mulattoes is superior to mine …; if I were to remove Monsieur Rigaud, they would perhaps find a leader worth more than he … I know Monsieur Rigaud …; he loses control of his horse when he gallops …; when he strikes, he shows his arm … Me, I know how to gallop too, but I know how to stop on a dime, and when I strike, you feel me but you don't see me.
⁴¹

Hedouville's efforts to contain and limit Toussaint's power, via Rigaud or any other counterweight, were rapidly coming to nothing. After the British withdrawal he wanted to reduce the size of the black army, but could do nothing toward this end. He mistrusted Toussaint's cadre of black officers, many of whom were illiterate and thus in Hedouville's view too easily led, or misled, by their white secretaries— who were apt to belong to the suspicious
grand
^Zawc/emigre class. And despite all Hedouville's remonstrations and proclamations to the contrary, Toussaint persisted in favoring this latter group, which was not only protected by his agreements with Maitland but also had an important role in his own project for rebuilding the economy of the colony. Most of the civilian bureaucracy was reporting to Toussaint's officer cadre, and the military had infiltrated most branches of administration. Hedouville's struggle to reassert civilian control created still more friction.

When Hedouville urged him to cut the number of his troops, Toussaint told him, “Ah well, if you are able, you can do it yourself.” The reaction of Toussaint's adoptive nephew Moyse, who then commanded at Fort Liberte, was still more pointed: “That agent wants to diminish the troops, and I want to increase my regiment. If there are no soldiers, there won't be any more general.”
⁴²
Moyse was also more and more openly hostile to labor policies which would attach former slaves to their former plantations, regardless of their source.

In the fall of 1798, rumors began to spread that a massacre of the whites was in the offing. The French Revolutionary calendar's New Year came
in late September, and the
nouveaux libres
circulated more widely and generally than usual during this period, holding dances and assemblies which fed the fear among the whites that an insurrection was being planned. Toussaint sought to scotch the rumor, telling his officers: “Show how absurd is the intention they have imputed to the blacks, and don't allow any assembly to take place.”
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In this tense atmosphere, quarreling broke out between soldiers of the Fifth Regiment, commanded by Moyse at Fort Liberte, and planters in the area. Hedouville was alarmed enough by that situation to order Moyse replaced by Manigat, a black magistrate in the town backed by some of the few white troops at the agent's disposal. Moyse was away on a tour of inspection of the countryside when Manigat took over, and when he returned, Manigat declared him a rebel. After an exchange of gunfire between Manigat's supporters and his own, Moyse left town with many men of the Fifth Regiment and began raising the field workers of the Northern Plain in an insurrection against Hedouville. By some accounts, Toussaint met Moyse at Hericourt Plantation and helped coordinate the rising.

Hedouville sent for help from Toussaint at Gonai'ves, but Toussaint would not receive the messengers, though one was his close friend Colonel Vincent and the other his sometime confessor, the Catholic priest Antheaume. Instead, Toussaint had them briefly imprisoned in the Gonai'ves fort. When Hedouville learned what had happened to them, he resigned himself to leave Saint Domingue. In an address to the citizens of Le Cap, Hedouville blamed the trouble on an emigre plot to make the colony independent of France. By then the population of the Artibonite Valley had joined the insurrection, and Dessalines was marching north from Saint Marc at the head of the Fourth Regiment, with an order in Toussaint's own handwriting and phonetic spelling (which meant that it must have been composed in great haste): “I spoke to you yesterday about Fort Liberte—well, it is now in the power of the white troops by the order of Hedouville … Hurry up and get twelve hundred men ready to march against Le Cap and arrest him before he embarks.”
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By the time Toussaint and Dessalines reached Le Cap, riding the
wave of the huge popular insurrection, Hedouville was already on shipboard, with his honor guard and a handful of local sympathizers, including the mulatto commissioner Julien Raimond and Belley, the retired black delegate to the French National Convention. He sent ashore a few of Moyse's officers whom he had with him in exchange for an assurance that the harbor forts would not fire on his vessel as it departed. Toussaint promptly wrote to the Directory, denying any ambition for independence and blaming the trouble on Hedouville. Though the church of Le Cap had not yet been fully reconstructed since the fire of 1793, Toussaint had aTe Deum sung on the site to celebrate the departure of all enemies from the colony; the French agent was apparently lumped into this category, along with the British troops and navy.

Hedouville sailed for France on October 22,1798. He had lasted for less than one year in Saint Domingue. As a parting shot, he transferred all his authority as representative of the French government to General Andre Rigaud. It remained to be seen whether this gesture would be as ineffectual as Sonthonax's similar appointment of Dieudonne a few years previously.

Ignoring Hedouville's promotion of Rigaud, Toussaint invited Roume (who, since his experience began in the early 1790s, was probably the most seasoned French diplomat still in Saint Domingue) to return from the Spanish side of the island and replace Hedouville. Roume had been authorized by the home government to take over as agent if Hedouville died, and Toussaint now invoked this clause, despite a slight difference of circumstances. Leery of this proposition at first, Roume eventually accepted it, arriving at Port-au-Prince in January 1799. Perhaps he could serve as the sole European chief that Toussaint had been longing for. On his way into French Saint Domingue from the Spanish side of the island, Roume ran into several intimidating demonstrations by large mobs of blacks, whipped up by Toussaint to remind the Frenchman just how real power was balanced. A delegation met Roume at Croix des Bouquets just outside Port-au-Prince and warned him that his authority would be recognized only if he acted in concert with
Toussaint—perhaps a deliberate echo of the similar promise Laveaux had made to the citizens of Le Cap when he appointed Toussaint lieutenant governor in 1796.

Despite the color of French authority that Roume's presence could provide, recent developments, especially the imperfectly kept secret treaty with Maitland, gave rise to suspicion that Toussaint meant to make the colony independent, if he had not, for most practical purposes, already done so. There were leaks of the Toussaint-Maitland accord in the correspondence of English merchants and even American newspapers like the
Baltimore Telegraph,
where English agents were wont to plant propaganda stories from time to time. The
Telegraph
also reported that Toussaint expelled Hedouville because the agent was planning to invade the United States. In December 1798, a London newspaper put it in the plainest English: “With this treaty, the independence of this important island has, in fact, been recognized and guaranteed against any efforts the French might make to recover it.”
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Yet this sally might have been more a taunt of the French than a description of the actual situation in Saint Domingue.

Toussaint, meanwhile, continued to make substantial gestures of loyalty to France. With a series of local proclamations, letters to Laveaux, and reports to French official entities like the Ministry of Marine, he built a case for Hedouville's misconduct, analogous (in his representation) to that of Sonthonax. The foundation of these arguments was the old, prerevolutionary competition which the home government had intentionally fostered between the military governor of the colony and the civil intendant (Thomas Maitland had known how to play on this built-in fissure). Thus the civil chief, Sonthonax, with right and the law on his side, had in 1793 emerged bloody but more or less victorious over the military governor, Galbaud. Toussaint, as military governor with right on his side, had righteously deported the civil chief Sonthonax in 1797. The abrupt departure of Hedouville was explained in a similar manner. In his letter to the Directory, Toussaint accused the agent's entourage of counterrevolutionary dress and demeanor coupled with “the most liberticide propositions, the same that Vaublanc proclaimed.”
⁴⁶
A work policy announced by the agent, which required field hands to engage themselves to their plantations for
three years, smacked altogether too much of slavery, Toussaint claimed (though his own labor policy was not much different).