Toussaint Louverture (36 page)

Coisnon had a tricky and dangerous mission, as Vincent could testify from his own recent experience. His best protection would have been the trust and affection of his students, Isaac and Placide, and Toussaint's presumed happiness in seeing his sons again. But as it hap-
pened, Coisnon and the young men were not sent in advance of the fleet after all, whether because the rough weather during the crossing prevented it, or because Leclerc was too proud to temporize with the black rebels. The priest and Toussaint's sons were still with Leclerc's squadron when it hove to at the mouth of the Cap Francais harbor, and Leclerc seemed in no hurry to send them ashore.

The buoys marking the safe channel through the reefs into the harbor had been removed. Leclerc's admiral, Villaret-Joyeuse, could not bring his warships into port without the help of local pilots. Emissaries landed in a small boat, requesting that the town's commander, General Christophe, assist their landing.

Christophe, like Toussaint, had been a free man before 1791. In his early days he had seen something of the world as the slave of an English sea captain, and he had attended the battle of Savannah with the other French colonial forces there. He had been an important commander in the civil war with Rigaud and the mulattoes, though not quite so important as Dessalines. So long as Moyse enjoyed Toussaint's favor, Christophe's command was limited to the immediate area of Le Cap, but Moyse's death had expanded his power all over the north of the colony.

Both Vincent and Roume (who had recently arrived in the United States and was filing his reports from there) believed that Christophe would be loyal to France rather than Toussaint if it came to a choice between them. According to Roume, Christophe had told him that Toussaint would have to be “not only an atrocious scoundrel, but also stupid or out of his mind if he wanted to betray France to ally himself with England and make himself independent.'
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Roume claimed that Christophe had accepted from Toussaint his promotion to brigadier general only because he thought he would be shot if he refused. To Forfait, the minister of marine, Roume offered to use his own influence to get Christophe to betray Toussaint. Vincent, meanwhile, wrote to Leclerc that “we can count on Christophe at least at the moment of the appearance of our forces; I worked toward that idea for a year before my departure.'
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Apparently Vincent believed he had a secret understanding with Christophe that he would preserve Le Cap and turn it over to
the French, if it should come to that. If Coisnon's effort to persuade Toussaint failed, phase two of his mission (more hazardous still) was to turn other black leaders against Toussaint, especially Christophe and perhaps Dessalines.

Coisnon, however, remained shipboard. When other messengers from the fleet reached him, Christophe stalled, replying to Leclerc that he could not receive the French army without instruction from Governor General Toussaint Louverture—who supposedly was nowhere to be found.

Toussaint's movements during these first days of the invasion are occluded. By his own generally disingenuous account written in the Fort de Joux, Le Cap was already burning by the time he got his first glimpse of the situation from the height of Grand Boucan. However, almost a week elapsed between Leclerc's first landfall at Point Samana and his landing in force at Le Cap on February 4, and Toussaint, renowned for the speed of his movement, would hardly have taken so long to cover the distance between those two points. Leclerc's messenger noticed that during their parleys General Christophe stood near the cracked door of an inner office, and suspected that Christophe's responses were controlled by someone on the other side. Vincent had predicted that such would be the case—that Toussaint would try to manipulate Christophe without showing his hand to the French, and that under Toussaint's close surveillance, Christophe would not be able to act freely.

Leclerc sent a testy letter to Christophe (whom the civilian authorities and numerous whites in the town were imploring not to oppose the French landing), advising him that eight thousand men were landing at Port-au-Prince and four thousand at Fort Liberte,
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and summoning him to surrender the harbor forts immediately. Christophe's reply was intransigent: “You will not enter the city of Le Cap before it has been reduced to ashes, and even on the ashes I will fight you still.'
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Rochambeau, an undiplomatic individual whom a later phase of the invasion would prove to be alarmingly sadistic as well as hotheaded,
forced the issue on February 2 by attacking the harbor posts at Fort Liberte, not troubling himself with any peaceful preliminaries. Toussaint's concluding remark at Point Samana had been “France is deceived; she comes to defend herself and enslave the blacks.'
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In the same spirit, the defenders of Fort Liberte shouted, “Down with the whites! Down with slavery!” The battle was bloody, and cost the life of at least one noble French officer. Rochambeau butchered all the prisoners he took. Once this news reached Le Cap there was no turning back and the war was on.

On February 4, Leclerc sailed with General Hardy and a detachment of troops for a landing at Limbe, west of Morne du Cap on the Bale d'Acul, hoping that a convergence movement on Cap Francais might also preserve the rich plantations of the Northern Plain. On the road toward the town this detachment met stubborn resistance, commanded in person, according to one of Hardy's memos, by Toussaint Louverture (whose presence at this place and date suggests that he might well have been in Cap Francais earlier, directing Christophe and stalling for time). In town, as the French forced their way ashore, Christophe set an example by setting fire to his own magnificent residence with his own hands. Soon the whole town, so recently restored from the disaster of 1793, was again ablaze. A doleful procession of civilian refugees climbed to the height of Morne Lavigie to watch the conflagration. Christophe did not offer battle on the scale that he had promised, but instead (probably in obedience to Toussaint's recent order and certainly in conformity with Toussaint's overall strategy) preserved his demibrigade by retreating. On February 6, Leclerc's force, marching north from Limbe, joined one of Rochambeau's columns crossing the plain from Fort Liberte, and the next day Leclerc entered Le Cap to find that Christophe had kept the first part of his vow: the town was nothing but a smoldering ruin.

There were others besides Vincent who had tried to dissuade Napoleon from the invasion; a colonist named Page had warned him, “You will throw eight thousand men into Saint Domingue; they will take up their positions; doubtless Louverture will not have the impudence to fight them; he will retreat into the mountains and leave them to be consumed
by the temperature of the towns and the want of fresh provisions.'
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And in an amiable postmortem talk with Pamphile de Lacroix, Christophe remarked that the black resistance should have “known how to fly when it was best, and cover its retreat with deserts it leaves behind it … If instead of fighting, our system of resistance had consisted in running and in alarming the Blacks, you would never have been able to touch us. Old Toussaint never stopped saying so; no one wanted to believe him. We had arms; our pride in using them ruined us.
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LeClerc's Attack on Cap Francais, February 4—6, 1802

“Old Toussaint s” strategy for resistance and his explicit orders in the first days of the invasion were close to what Page and Christophe described. Though his army was well-seasoned, determined, and confi-
dent, he was indeed wary of risking it in the open field against veterans of the Napoleonic wars in Europe. His preference was to deny terrain to the enemy by destroying the towns on the coast and scorching the earth of the lowlands, then to fight a war of attrition from the mountains until the invasion buckled under its own weight (as Page had predicted it must). Toussaint had seen what the fever season had done to the unacclimated English invaders and had nothing against letting disease do as much of his work as possible. A February 7 letter to Dessalines put it vividly: “Do not forget that while waiting for the rainy season, which must rid us of our enemies, we have no recourse but destruction and fire. Consider that the land bathed with our sweat must not furnish our enemies the least nourishment. Jam up all the roads, throw horses and corpses into all the springs; have everything burned and annihilated, so that those who come to return us to slavery will always have before them the image of the hell that they deserve.'
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Dessalines was supposed to burn Port-au-Prince, and Toussaint had sent similar orders to his other commanders all over the colony, but the first French movements were so swift, determined, and effective that many of his messengers were intercepted. The courier to Paul Louverture in Ciudad Santo Domingo had actually been given two letters, a false one directing him to receive the French and a true one commanding him to destroy the town and retreat. The French picked off this courier, presented the false letter, and occupied Santo Domingo without firing a shot. In Santiago to the north, the priest Mauviel had been rusticating since Toussaint changed his mind about installing him as bishop of the Le Cap cathedral. He persuaded Santiago's mulatto commander, Clervaux, to yield to the French without a struggle. Thus Toussaint almost immediately lost all the key points he had been at such pains to secure in the Spanish part of the island.

In the west, there were other disasters. Dommage, a trusted commander at Jeremie, failed to receive Toussaint's dispatch. Persuaded by Napoleon's proclamation,
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he turned over the town to the French and
gave them a firm foothold on the Grande Anse. Laplume, who was similarly seduced and may also have been disaffected since the suppression of the Moyse rebellion, disobeyed the order to burn Les Cayes and the surrounding area, and instead offered his services to the French.

When Toussaint launched his couriers from Point Samana, Des-salines was absent from Port-au-Prince. In his place the white General Age commanded, at least in name—a local cynic reported that Age was constantly drunk and knew more about houses where he could get free libations than he did about his own officer corps. When General Boudet landed his messengers, Age secretly let them know that he had no real power in the situation; actual authority lay with his nominal subordinate, the mulatto Lamartiniere. It was Lamartiniere who arrested Boudet's messengers, who were held as hostages for the next several weeks.

Misled by pride in his arms, Lamartiniere thought he could hold the town without burning it. A couple of days' temporizing gave Boudet time to organize a successful attack on February 5, the day after the forced landing at Le Cap. Lamartiniere had threatened to massacre the white population if Boudet tried to fight his way ashore, but about half of them hid in their houses and came out later to welcome the French soldiers after Boudet had secured the town. Lamartiniere's attempt to blow up the arsenal failed. At Savane Valembrun, on the site where one of “Papa Doc” Duvalier's most notorious prisons would later stand, he executed the whites he had been able to capture, then retreated to Croix des Bouquets.

The first week of hostilities left both sides in a state of shock. The French were stunned by the destruction of Le Cap and by anarchy all over the Northern Plain, where the field hands had uncached their guns and begun to burn, pillage, and slaughter the white population. (Old friend to liberty though he was, the Abbe Delahaye was among the slain.) For his part, Toussaint must have been rattled by the speed and extent of his losses and by the betrayals of so many of his officers. In a week's time the invasion had practically reduced him to his original “arrondissement” in the Cordon de l'Ouest.

Around Port de Paix, on the Atlantic coast west of Le Cap, General
Maurepas was putting up a brilliant resistance to an assault led by the French general Humbert. Port de Paix was so well defended that Vincent had warned Leclerc that it was not worth the danger and difficulty of attacking it and that the artillery defending the harbor was exceptionally well placed. Maurepas, whom Vincent characterized as “extraordinarily hard,”
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killed a third of Humbert's twelve hundred men before blowing up the forts, setting the town on fire, and retreating up the valley of Trois Rivieres with his Ninth Regiment still intact. But for the moment Toussaint was out of communication with Maurepas. When Leclerc decided to revert to diplomacy, Toussaint was willing to entertain the idea. Belatedly, Coisnon got the chance to try his hand.

Toussaint had gone to ground at Ennery, a secure pocket in the mountains just northeast of Gona'ives where he and his wife owned several plantations. Ennery was a crossroads controlling not only the ways to the Gona'ives port but also the length of the Cordon de l'Ouest via Marmelade to Dondon, the way to Borgne via the heights of Limbe and Port Margot, and the way to Port de Paix via Gros Morne. On the night of February 8, Toussaint's sons, twenty-one-year-old Placide and twenty-year-old Isaac, arrived there with their tutor, Coisnon. It had been almost six years since their parents had seen them; their reunion was a tearful one.