Toussaint Louverture (5 page)

There were fifty American merchantmen in the Cap Francais harbor when the insurrection first broke out on the Northern Plain, so it was not long before the United States began to receive frantic requests for supplies and military aid from the besieged French colonists. The official response was hesitant at first. The fledgling United States was short of cash and wary of being drawn into bewildering French internal conflicts. Two years of strife among Saint Domingue's
blancs
had not gone unnoticed by American tradesmen in the ports. In general, American officials and diplomats were having a hard time formulating a coherent attitude toward events in France and her colonies— understandably, since the most drastic differences between the American and the French revolutions had not yet become obvious. But
despite some ambivalence of the U.S. government, unofficial shipments to Saint Domingue soon hit a high enough level to make the French representative in the United States worry that the French
exclusif
be completely shattered.

A one-way voyage from France to Saint Domingue took six weeks, more or less, depending on the weather. Reaction of the home government to events in the colony could never be rapidly expressed. On May 15,1791, the French National Assembly had passed a hotly contested piece of legislation which granted civil rights and the vote to
gens de couleur
born of free parents. In July, the colored men in Saint Domingue's Western Department, the area surrounding Port-au-Prince, raised a clamor for enforcement of the new law. Denied, they then raised an armed rebellion commanded by Louis-Jacques Beauvais, who like so many leaders of the Haitian Revolution was a veteran of the siege of Savannah during the American Revolutionary War. In late August and early September, as the fires of the black rebellion were sweeping the Northern Department, Beauvais's troops won a couple of engagements with French troops and colonial militias.

In the meantime, a clash between royalist
grands blancs
and revolutionary
petits blancs
in Port-au-Prince had ended with the slaying of the Chevalier de Mauduit, the ranking regular army officer there. His royalist partisans retreated to the village of Croix des Bouquets, a few miles inland from the capital. By then, news of the huge slave rebellion to the north had begun to filter through the mountains that separated the Cap Francais region from Port-au-Prince. At Croix des Bouquets, the
grands blancs
suddenly thought it best to recognize their colored relatives as equals. A mutual defense pact was struck—the Concordat of Croix des Bouquets—by whose terms the whites recognized the law of May 15, with its extension of civil rights to mulattoes. In the Southern Department, on the long jawbone of Hispaniola's southwest peninsula, similar arrangements were made between the
grands blancs
and the
gens de couleur,
who after all shared not only a blood tie but also a vital interest in the plantation system and the slave system on which it depended. The success of these pacts was partly explained by the fact that the
gens
de couleur
were proportionally more numerous in the Western and Southern departments than in the north—they were still outnumbered by the black slaves but not by such a crushing margin.

Word of the slave rebellion in the Northern Department and the general unrest in the Western Department had not yet reached Paris when on September 24,1791, the National Assembly passed yet another law. This one abrogated all the terms of the decree of May 15 and threw the question of mulatto civil rights back to the white colonists. Three civil commissioners—Edmond de Saint-Leger, Frederic Ignace de Mirbeck, and Philippe Roume de Saint Laurent—were quickly dispatched to deliver the new decree to Saint Domingue. They also brought news of a general amnesty declared by the National Assembly for “acts of revolution.” Of course the amnesty was meant to settle conflicts among whites, but the black rebel leaders in the Northern Department were quick to claim a share in it.

In fact, the rebel leaders had made efforts to open negotiations before the commissioners ever arrived, writing to Governor Blanchelande, and to the Chevalier de Tousard, a senior officer of the Regiment du Cap; the latter responded, “Do not believe that the whites … would lower themselves so far as to receive conditions dictated and demanded of them by their rebel slaves.”
⁸
Unconditional surrender of the rebels was the only solution that the whites would even consider, though they were in no position at all to enforce it. However, after all the damage the whites on the Northern Plain had suffered, emotions among the survivors inevitably ran high. The commissioners (who did not know the full extent of the disaster before they arrived in Cap Francais on November 22) did their best to calm them, though with small success. Unfortunately, the Colonial Assembly took the position that the commissioners should not be involved in negotiations with the rebel slaves at all, since the commissioners themselves had just delivered a decree from the home government giving the assembly an overarching authority to decide “the fate of the slaves.”
⁹
This controversy over jurisdiction crippled all the commission's efforts to resolve the crisis.

Freeing the slaves of Saint Domingue was not the original goal of the rebellion in the north. According to the rhetoric of the political seg-
ment of the meeting at Bois Cai'man, the slaves were to revolt not for their freedom but to demand an end to whipping and other abuses, to gain three free days per week, and to win enforcement of some other provisions of the official Code Noir which were generally ignored by plantation owners. Throughout the summer of 1791, rumors had circulated through the whole colony's slave population that King Louis XVI had already granted the three free days but that the slave masters of Saint Domingue had refused to implement his order. This rumor inspired a plot for rebellion in the area of Les Cayes in the Southern Department, which was discovered and snuffed out some weeks before the mass insurrection exploded in the north.

The slaves who gathered at Bois Cai'man were given to understand that King Louis XVI wished them well and had created the Code Noir for their benefit, but that he himself was being held hostage by evil white men who surrounded him (a distorted but not entirely groundless view of what was actually going on in France). This understanding explains, at least in part, why so many bands of rebel slaves used royalist flags and insignia and declared that they were fighting for the king.

Perhaps a hundred thousand slaves had risen in arms in August, but on December 4, the leaders (including Jean-François, Biassou, and by this time Toussaint) offered to return them peaceably to the plantations in return for abolition of the whip, one extra free day per week, and freedom for a mere three hundred people—a very small number which was later reduced to around fifty. By Gross account, “the negro Toussaint a Breda” was instrumental in persuading Biassou to accept the smaller number; without him “the conference would have ended without success.”
¹⁰

Impervious to the diplomatic efforts of Mirbeck, Roume, and Saint-Leger, the Colonial Assembly rejected this proposal in such contemptuous terms that Biassou, when he got the message, flew into a rage and wanted to kill all the white prisoners without delay. According to Gros, only Toussaint's quick and eloquent intercession saved him and the rest from an ugly death; “braving all dangers, he tried to save us, were himself to be the victim of the monster's rage.”
¹¹
Another white captive, M. la Roque, saw Toussaint report the breakdown of the deal to Jean-François: “Toussaint a Breda … told him, with tears in his
eyes, that all was lost, that the twenty-some prisoners that had come from the different camps would no longer be going to Le Cap, and that war had again been decided.”
¹²

The rebel leaders had not only sent emissaries to the Colonial Assembly but had also directly approached military leaders like Tousard, and had begun to make direct contact with the commissioners recently arrived from France. As the commissioners were much more conciliatory than the Colonial Assembly, the rebel leaders preferred to deal with them—despite the fact that the assembly had formally forbidden the commissioners to treat with the rebel slaves.

Soon after the collapse of the original deal to exchange the white prisoners for a limited number of liberties, a new meeting with the commissioners was arranged for December 21 on Saint Michel Plantation. Again, the discord on the white side took its toll: as the two parties approached each other, M. Bullet, who had been master of Jean-François, rushed out and struck him in the face. But Commissioner Saint-Leger went after Jean-François, who had quickly retreated to the midst of his men, and persuaded him to swallow the insult and return to the conversation. Tradition has it that Jean-François was so impressed with Saint-Leger's approach that he knelt at the white man's feet.

On the strength of this parlay, the white prisoners finally were released. This time they were gathered at the camp of LaTannerie; from there Toussaint himself would escort them safely into Le Cap. By the end of December Toussaint had dug himself in deep at La Tannerie, which Gros describes as one of the two most seriously fortified camps under rebel control, equipped with cannon and surrounded by ditches and pitfall traps ‘which could wound a lot of our people.”
¹³

“What was our surprise,” Gros goes on, ‘when once we arrived at La Tannerie, we saw the blacks gather and fall upon us with saber in hand, threatening to send only our heads to Le Cap, and cursing the peace and their generals.”
¹⁴
Again it was only thanks to Toussaint's intervention that a wholesale slaughter of the prisoners was prevented.

Toussaint's more cynical observers find this episode suspicious. How likely was it that he could be attacked in this way by his own men in his own best stronghold without any inkling it was going to happen?
In the future, Toussaint would become notorious for secretly instigating violent popular uprisings which only his authority could subdue. And perhaps he wanted to make sure that the white prisoners would remember that he, Toussaint, had been their savior on the very day of their release. However, it is at least as likely that the attack at La Tannerie was a spontaneous response to the discovery, on the part of the mass of insurgent slaves, that their leaders meant to send them all back to the fields for the pittance of fifty liberties. That would have given them good enough reason to curse both the peace and their own generals.

Whatever had sparked it, the attack was deflected, and Toussaint led the prisoners out of the mountains, “across the countryside hostile to the whites,” reports Roger Dorsinville, “and the streets of Le Cap, hostile to himself, all the way to the seat of the Assembly. He was seen, apparently tranquil behind his mask, traversing these stormy double lines.”
¹⁵
He rode at the head of 150 cavalry dragoons—a show of organized force which must have been startlingly impressive to the whites of Le Cap, and more than sufficient to guarantee Toussaint's safe passage in and out of town. Once the prisoners had been returned, Toussaint had hoped to negotiate a complete peace settlement, but the assembly refused even to receive him, sending out a note instead: “Continue to give proofs of your repentance … Address yourself to the commissioners.”
¹⁶

The last fillip must have been derisory, since the assembly had undercut the commission at every turn and derailed every settlement the commissioners could arrange. Whether Toussaint had tears of frustration in his eyes when he left Le Cap that day has not been recorded; more likely he remained impassive, as Dorsinville described him on the way in. Certainly he understood very well that the whites' inability to agree among themselves had ruined their last chance to reach a peaceful settlement with the blacks.

During the weeks of talks with the whites, the rebel slaves had maintained a sort of cease-fire. By Gross account, Biassou meted out serious punishments to any of his men who went raiding in white-controlled territory during that period. But once the assembly's contemptuous
attitude derailed the negotiations, the Northern Department was back at war. By mid-January 1792, Jean-François and his men were on the offensive, capturing the district of Ouanaminthe on the Spanish frontier, while Biassou made a daring night raid on l'Hopital des Peres de la Charite on the edge of Cap Francais itself, rescuing his mother, who was a slave there, and slaughtering the patients on his way out. To reach this hospital (where he himself had formerly been a slave), Biassou had flanked the outer defenses of Le Cap, briefly occupying Fort Belair, which protected the southern approach to the town along the road from Haut du Cap. He could most likely have captured or destroyed the entire town, if the goal of his raid had been less limited.

Jean-François had intimated to Gros that he felt himself to be almost a captive of the great mass of rebel slaves he was ostensibly leading. Of course, Jean-François could anticipate that Gros would report to the Colonial Assembly upon his release and so may have been simply hedging his bets. However, it does seem somewhat doubtful that he and the other leaders really could have delivered their followers back into slavery, especially on such disadvantageous terms as those being discussed in December 1791. An eyewitness reports that when the amnesty offer of September 24 was read in Biassou's camp, Toussaint followed it with such a persuasive speech that the rebel slaves in his audience were moved to declare themselves ready to return to work that very day, if he asked them to. At most other times, however, their mood was very much more intransigent.

The original purpose of the revolt in the north was not to end slavery for the majority of the slaves, but simply to improve its conditions. Soon enough, though, the stream of events they had started carried them far beyond that limited goal. In the last days of September, when white troops routed an encampment of insurgent slaves from Galliflet Plantation on the Northern Plain, they found a letter addressed to “Monsieur le general and the citizens of Le Cap,” dated September 4, 1791, and signed by Jean-François. “Come down to where we are,” the missive exhorts its audience,