Toussaint Louverture (33 page)

The notion of leadership for life was not so out of tune ‘with the times as it might seem. In France, Napoleon was on a similar course, though he had not yet declared it. It was not so long since the United States had considered crowning George Washington its king. The American Federalist Alexander Hamilton suggested to Toussaint directly that he create “a life-long executive.”
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The civilized world had been deeply dismayed by the catastrophic instability of the various governments-by-committee spawned by the French Revolution; nostalgia for monarchy and/or military dictatorship was in the ‘wind.

But proclaiming the constitution was an exceedingly dangerous move insofar as it concerned Toussaint's relations ‘with France. Colonel Vincent, described by Pamphile de Lacroix as “one of the small number of Frenchmen who, ‘while always faithful to the interests of the nation, had conserved the credibility and capacity to say everything to Toussaint Louverture,” tried mightily to dissuade him. “Toussaint Louverture admitted to him that he was not able to reduce the gigantic momentum that had taken him over. A tremendous force seemed to be dragging him, and that force was occult.’
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Vincent argued that, despite its protestations of fealty to France, the constitution drained all practical authority over Saint Domingue out of the French government. “He replied that the government would send commissioners to confer with him.” At this, Vincent burst out, “Say rather that you want them to send you charges d'affaires and ambassadors, as the Americans, the Spanish and the English ‘will not
fail to do.” But what truly horrified Vincent was the discovery that Toussaint had already ordered the constitution to be printed and promulgated (according to Article
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and evidently meant to present it to the French government as a fait accompli. “This conduct is terrible!” Vincent snapped
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—a bold thing to say to a man who, despite their long friendship, had had him very roughly arrested on occasion and once subjected him to a mock execution.

Whatever spirit possessed Toussaint would not be gainsaid. He appointed Vincent as emissary to present his constitution to France— Vincent reluctantly accepted the mission. From the United States, where he stopped first, Vincent wrote a long letter to Toussaint, repeating several points from their earlier argument. Again he objected to “the proposed mode of government, which gives you for life an indefinite power—power which, contrary to all the principles most recognized by the French, is in some way hereditary in your hands. The choice of a government confided to the colony alone and to its Military officers, the nomination of all posts, civil and Military, given to the General-in-Chief, remain incomprehensible novelties which affect me most painfully; but when after careful study of every article of this astonishing production, I was able to convince myself that there exists for France no advantage over the other maritime nations.” Here Vincent came to the point of Toussaint's own dilemma—how to maintain his complex trade agreements with Britain and the United States without fatally offending France by making it appear that France no longer had its customary trade rights in the colony it had created. “So then, Citizen General, you may be able to conceive as a possible thing that the Colony of Saint Domingue will be nothing more today than a colonial market where all the nations, with equal advantage, would exchange the objects of their industry! So then, the Commerce of France, to which immense sums are owed, would see the guarantee of its debt carried off by the Foreigner.”

Vincent still hoped to dissuade Toussaint from what he believed to be a suicidal course, and writing from Virginia, he could probably speak more freely than when in Toussaint's presence in Le Cap. “No, Citizen General, you cannot think this way: the abyss which opens in front of you must frighten you; the good and estimable Toussaint,
whom I have always cited as such, and who I want still to believe to be so, could never stray so far. He will not make himself the most guilty and ungrateful of men … How great and how worthy you still appear to me, my dear General! How much you may still be able to add to your glory! Continue to love your country and to serve it well; you have so often told me that you have no other ambition; it is effectively the only ambition you should have: your country is France, and not the isolated colony of Saint Domingue.” In their last interview, Toussaint had reassured Vincent that independence was not his goal, but now Vincent had to warn him that he was making a very different impression in the United States: “They speak of nothing here but your declared independence. They call you, loudly, King of Saint Domingue.”

Moreover, Vincent cautioned, the status Toussaint had given to British diplomats in the colony looked very bad from France, especially when Toussaint favored them over the French agent Roume (who at this time was confined in that Dondon chicken house): “Today the most terrible enemies of the Rights of Man and of France have their representatives, under the government of Toussaint, in the French colony where we have established liberty and equality for all men, principles against which they fight before your eyes, right next to you. Today the representative of France, the warmest friend of your rights, is disrespected under the government of Toussaint—what am I saying, ‘disrespected’—it's apparent to all that he is under arrest!” If Toussaint was not seeking independence, that point would be difficult to prove, for those who accused him of that ambition could “produce to their advantage the greater part of your proclamations, where France is almost always forgotten; they will produce the greater part of your deeds, which too often disregard the interests of France; finally they will produce this constitution which will have been distributed everywhere … before my arrival, and which will be the despair of all those who have loved and courageously defended the oppressed men of Saint Domingue.”
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Despite all this fervent pleading, Toussaint was set on his course. Instead of countermanding the constitution, he sent a second envoy to France to reinforce it, in case Vincent gave it an unfavorable presenta-
tion. If Vincent disliked Toussaint's drift toward military dictatorship, he probably didn't like the military dictatorship forming under Napoleon in France any better. Certainly it made an unfavorable climate for his mission—yet Vincent apparently did his best to put Toussaint's constitution in a positive light. Napoleon heard him out, then exiled him, though briefly to Elba.

The constitution was a heavy weight to throw into the delicate balance of Napoleon's decision about how to handle the situation in Saint Domingue. By 1801, it was obvious to everyone that Napoleon and Toussaint had become military dictators of their respective countries, and surely they recognized each other as such. If Toussaint hoped that recognition would bring endorsement and support, he was to be disappointed.

Napoleon Bonaparte had come to power at the head of a conservative, though not explicitly royalist, backlash against the most radical extremes of the French Revolution. As a young officer, Napoleon was wont to absent himself without leave from the French army in order to participate in bootless rebellions in his native Corsica. In calmer times he might have been court-martialed and possibly shot for these derelictions, but revolutionary France, at war on practically all of its borders, was in desperate need of capable commanders, and Napoleon was certainly one of the best available. His ambition was also nakedly apparent: in 1791, War Commissioner Simon-Antoine Sucy commented, “I do not see him stopping short of either the throne or the scaffold.”
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In 1791 the French throne was in serious jeopardy, though it had not yet been abolished. Louis XVI and his family, arrested in their attempt to flee France at Varennes, were now more or less prisoners of the National Assembly, and the cause of a constitutional monarchy was weakened. Napoleon Bonaparte threw his lot in with the republican side, with such fervor that people began to call him “the little Jacobin.” The controversy over the fate of the king finally ended with his execution on January 21, 1793; the following month France, already at war with royalist regimes in Austria and Prussia, went to war with England, Holland, and Spain. In Paris, meanwhile, the National Convention (the legislative body which succeeded the National Assembly in Sep-
tember 1792) was in the final throes of a struggle between the comparatively moderate Girondins and the far left Montagnards. In June 1793 the Montagnards, under the leadership of Georges-Jacques Danton and Maximilien de Robespierre, purged the Girondins from the convention. Two months later the Reign of Terror was proclaimed, and the dread Committee of Public Safety, chaired by Robespierre, began sending a stream of suspect civilians to the guillotine.

The Terror was bloody but relatively short-lived; on July 27, 1794, Robespierre himself fell victim to the death machine he had designed. The Committee of Public Safety collapsed, along with the rest of the Terror's apparatus. During this same period, Napoleon Bonaparte, just twenty-five years old in 1794, had advanced in rank from captain to brigadier general. The new constitution of September 1795 replaced the Committee of Public Safety—which had turned into the chief executive organ of government—with a five-member Executive Directory, complemented by the 750-member legislature. On October 3, General Danican attempted a military coup against this fragile new government. General Napoleon Bonaparte, who happened to be in Paris at the time, put himself at the head of troops loyal to the government and repelled the coup. From this event he emerged a hero and won command of the Army of the Interior.

From 1795 to 1799 he led large-scale campaigns outside French borders, first in Italy, then in Egypt. In October 1799 he left his army in Egypt and returned to France. Fresh from a major victory at Aboukir, he was received with huge popular enthusiasm, but his reception by the increasingly shaky Directory was comparatively cool. The French economy was exhausted by a decade of war all over Europe, and the country was being strangled by a British naval blockade. A coalition of six nations threatened the French republic from without, and within there was a plot to overthrow the Directory and restore Louis XVIII to the throne.

In 1791, war minister La Tour du Pin, alarmed by a series of mutinies in the army, had warned against the threat of “this military democracy, a type of political monster that has always devoured the empires that created it.” Eight years later, many had begun to believe that a military dictatorship offered the best chance of saving the repub-
lie. Napoleon's brother Lucien was a player in the conspiracy that put one in place. On November 9, 1799, Napoleon commenced what turned out to be an essentially bloodless coup (despite a good deal of scuffling and shots fired in the air) by announcing the dissolution of the Directory. The next day, the legislature appointed him as first among a three-member consulate in charge of the provisional government. As first consul, Napoleon Bonaparte became for all practical purposes the military ruler of France.

Napoleon was a self-invented and self-made man, in much the same style as the black general across the Atlantic Ocean in Saint Domingue, whom he was now obliged to study. Perhaps he was not flattered to see a version of himself in blackface there—though the oft-told tale that Toussaint provoked him with a letter addressed “To the First of the Whites from the First of the Blacks” appears to be false; no such document has ever been found. The view that Napoleon took of Toussaint in 1801 was in fact quite similar to the view that Toussaint was apt to take of the men against whom he had to measure himself: analytic, dispassionate, and often utterly ruthless.

In deciding whether to consider Toussaint Louverture as ally or adversary, Napoleon had many reports and opinions to digest. The extremes of the case were represented on the one hand by the French general Kerverseau, one of Toussaint's most hostile critics, and on the other by Colonel Vincent, one of Toussaint's closest white friends and one of his greatest supporters in the French camp. Kerverseau had made his first tour of Saint Domingue in 1796, soon after Toussaint was named lieutenant governor of the colony by Governor General Laveaux. Suspicious of Toussaint's elevation (and perhaps jealous of his status as second in command), in 1799 Kerverseau filed a memo with the French minister of marine, denouncing “the tricky genius, the hypocritical moderation, the real and pretended fanaticism, and the delirious vanity of the general Toussaint.” Kerverseau went on to claim that Toussaint “loves mystery, requires a blind obedience, a devout submission to his will. He wants to govern the colony like a Capuchin convent … He loves to wrap himself in clouds; he only moves by night.”
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In 1801, as Napoleon contemplated how best to deal with
Toussaint's ascendancy in Saint Domingue, Kerverseau filed a longer report, claiming that under the old colonial regime Toussaint had been regarded by Africans as a sort of magical being, but by most whites as an “energetic, industrious and honest person”—until the revolution “transported him into another sphere, giving wings to passions thus far enchained, and creating in him a new man.” He belittled Toussaint's military ability, claiming that he “prays on the mountain while his soldiers fight on the plain.”
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More damningly, Kerverseau accused Toussaint of disregarding or subverting the authority of representatives of the French government to whom he should have been subordinate, and of making arrangements with the Americans and the British which might have been considered treasonable from the point of view of France. He singled out the better-known compliments of Toussaint's admirers, like Laveaux's hailing him as a “black Spartacus,” for a contemptuous debunking. At the same time, Kerverseau could not always restrain himself from a grudging admiration: “in the particular relations I then had with him, I had often occasion to admire the justice of his judgment, the finesse of his repartee, and a combination of ideas truly astonishing to find in a man born and grown old in slavery, whose principal occupation for forty years had been the care of mules and horses, and the whole of whose studies had been limited to learning to read and to sign, but poorly, his name.” But a few lines later he reminds himself and his readers that “we cannot forget that he was one of the principal authors of the disasters of the colony and one of the most notable chiefs of those bands of rebel Blacks who, dagger and torch in hand, made of the most opulent country in the universe a wasteland of desolation and grief.”
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