Read Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution Online
Authors: Laurent Dubois
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a kind of delirium, perhaps driven by the horror of what had just hap-
pened. Louverture railed against Moïse, complaining that for years he had
explained to him how to be a virtuous soldier, disciplined and obedient,
and a virtuous man. But instead of listening to the “advice of a father” and
to the orders of a “chief devoted to the happiness of the colony,” Moïse had
let himself be guided “only by his passions.” The result: “he has perished
miserably!” “This will be the fate of all who imitate him,” Louverture
warned ominously. “The justice of heaven is slow, but it is infallible, and
sooner or later it strikes the wicked and crushes them like thunder.”36
Louverture did not content himself with fulminating against the de-
parted Moïse. He struck out at seemingly the entire population he was
governing. He lashed out against the men “without religion” who had
caused disorders in the colony. He blamed such disorders on bad
parenting, the “negligence with which fathers and mothers raise their chil-
dren, shirking religion, obedience, and love of work and instead passing on
a disdain for cultivation.” Since “bad impressions are difficult to get rid of,”
the result was the proliferation of “bad citizens, vagabonds, and thieves.”
The girls became prostitutes, always ready to “follow the urgings of the first conspirator who preaches disorder, assassination, and pillage.” Indeed, because the war had killed “many more men than women,” the towns were
full of women whose “existence is based wholly on libertinage,” and who
incited others to “banditry.” The police and officers of the colony must con-
stantly keep their eyes open and be ready to punish all such “vile” and
“dangerous” individuals. Louverture also declared that any married of-
ficers or administrators who accepted “concubines” in their houses or who
were unmarried but “lived publicly with several women” would be fired.37
The plantations were also full of dangerous men and women. “Since the
revolution,” Louverture claimed, “perverse men” had declared that “lib-
erty was the right to remain idle, to do bad with impunity, to disdain the
laws and follow only their whims.” Such a “doctrine” was of course ac-
cepted happily by “bad subjects, thieves, and assassins.” “It is time to strike out against the hardened men who persist in these ideas; all must know
that there is no way to live peacefully and respectfully except through
work, assiduous work.” “As soon as a child can walk,” Louverture declared,
“he must be put to work on the plantations doing some useful task.” “In a
well-ordered state,” he explained, “idleness is the source of all disorders.”
Domestics, too, needed stricter surveillance by those they worked for, who
should “treat them with justice” but also “force them” to their duty. For
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since “in the new regime all work deserves a salary, each salary demands
work.” Louverture’s proclamation demanded the strict enforcement of his
October 1800 regulations on cultivation. It ratcheted up the threats issued
against those officers and administrators—like Moïse—who refused to en-
force this decree assiduously. Any officer who tolerated laziness or va-
grancy was an “enemy of the government”; any who “tolerated pillage and
assassination” was to be executed; any individual who encouraged sedition
would also be punished with death.38
Louverture ordered the creation of a new system of surveillance. He or-
dered managers and owners to draw up lists of the laborers on their prop-
erty to be used for “fixing cultivators on the plantations.” “Security cards”
listing each individual’s name, address, employment, age, and sex were to
be issued by local officials. A fee would be charged, and they would be
given only to those who had a job and demonstrated “irreproachable con-
duct.” Domestics had to present a “certificate of good conduct” from their
employers to get their cards. Those who could not present them on de-
mand would be punished. “Foreigners,” especially “metropolitans,” that is,
European-born Frenchmen, without documents would be deported. “Cre-
oles” would be sent to a plantation. A note at the end of the decree ex-
plained that by “creole” the government meant “any individual born in the
colony or in Africa.” This was a departure from the traditional use of the
term, generally used to refer only to American-born and slaves. It was an
important step, for it in essence identified the majority in the colony who
had come from Africa as natives of Saint-Domingue. It did so, however,
not to grant them rights as citizens but to limit those rights.39
The November proclamation was a crushing condemnation of the social
world of Saint-Domingue, and a charter for a new police state in which the
duty of all citizens to work for the state would be strictly enforced. It was a remarkable blend of moralism—indeed, Louverture ordered the decree
be read after mass by all the priests in the colony—and bureaucratic inno-
vation. In one way, the draconian regime whose consolidation it articulated
turned out to be quite a success: Louverture oversaw a remarkable revival
of the shattered plantation economy in Saint-Domingue. By 1801, accord-
ing to official reports, coffee exports had risen from almost nothing to two-
thirds of their level in 1789. Improvements in the sugar industry, where
damages were more difficult to repair, were smaller, and included little of
the more profitable refined sugar, but by 1802 exports were at one-third
those of 1789. These official figures did not include a significant amount of t e r r i t o r y
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underground and contraband trade, much of it carried out with the sup-
port of the regime. Under Louverture’s control, the rebuilding of many
sectors of Saint-Domingue’s plantation economy was well under way.40
Louverture would later claim that in early 1802 the colony was “enjoy-
ing the greatest tranquility” and that “commerce and cultivation” were
flourishing; the island had reached “a degree of splendor that had never
been seen before.” He had been accused of treating the cultivators as
“slaves,” but all he was trying to do was to increase the “general happiness
of the island” by making the people of Saint-Domingue “taste liberty with-
out license.” He had, he added, succeeded, to the point that “you could
not see a single idle man in the colony” and the “number of beggars had
decreased.” “Never have order and tranquility reigned so widely in Saint-
Domingue,” concurred a French officer in January 1802. And General
Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, who arrived in Saint-Domingue soon
afterward with decidedly hostile intentions toward Louverture, noted that
agriculture in the colony was at a “very high level.” In fact he claimed that on the plantations under the command of Louverture’s officers, the
“blacks” were being worked harder than they ever had been under the
whites. He found, furthermore, that he could fulfill the strict orders he
had been given to restore order on the plantations and make sure the ex-
slaves were working assiduously by using Louverture’s regulations, which
he deemed were “very good.” They were, he noted, so “strong” that he
would not have dared propose them himself.41
But the strictness of Louverture’s November 1801 decree highlighted
the strain of the balancing act he had been sustaining for years. Committed
to defending liberty at all costs, Louverture had turned himself into a dic-
tator, and the colony he ruled over into a society based on social hierarchy, forced labor, and violent repression. The proclamation was a measure of
Louverture’s failure to find a middle way by which a true liberty could co-
exist with the plantation economy. When, a few months later, ships arrived
from France to crush Louverture, he would find that among his officers
and soldiers, not to mention the cultivators and city-dwellers of Saint-
Domingue, there were many who were unwilling to fight to save him. But
those French who confused Louverture’s regime with slavery were also in
for a rude awakening. Despite the many limits he had placed on freedom,
the ex-slaves clearly saw the difference between the present and the past.
And they were willing to lay down their lives rather than go back.
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c h a p t e r t w e l v e
The Tree of Liberty
Forthirty-sevendaysinlate1801,thewindsblewrelent-
lessly off the Atlantic into the French port of Brest. Pinned in the
harbor was a fleet of ships packed with some 7,000 troops waiting
to sail. “Never have the western winds blown so persistently,” complained
the naval commander, while the general in charge of the troops, Charles
Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, wrote to Napoleon Bonaparte that for days the
wind had not paused for even “one hour” to allow the convoy to set out
to sea.1
Leclerc had been by Bonaparte’s side for many years. They had fought
together against the British at Toulon in 1793, and then a few years later
in the conquest of Italy, where Leclerc met and married Napoleon’s sister,
Pauline. Leclerc had led the troops that dispersed the Parlement dur-
ing the 1799 coup that made Bonaparte first consul. Now Leclerc was
being sent on a mission of crucial importance: wresting control of Saint-
Domingue from Toussaint Louverture.2
In the end the wind let up, and the Leclerc expedition sailed into the
Atlantic. The ships from Brest were joined by convoys from other ports;
once united, the expedition consisted of fifty ships—about half of France’s
larger naval vessels—carrying almost 22,000 soldiers, along with approxi-
mately 20,000 sailors. Reinforcements followed during the next year; ulti-
mately upward of 80,000 fighting men were sent to Saint-Domingue.3
“All of France is coming to Saint-Domingue,” Louverture reportedly
exclaimed when he saw part of the armada hovering off the shores of
the colony weeks later. Though he did not yet know it, among its passen-
gers were his two sons, Isaac and Placide, whom he had sent to study
in Paris a few years before. Bonaparte had met with them before their de-
parture, telling them that their father was “a great man.” The army he
was sending to Saint-Domingue, he assured them, was meant only to
strengthen the military forces there. Wishing to see the extent of the edu-
cation of Louverture’s sons, Bonaparte quizzed them on their mathemati-
cal skills. Finding them satisfactory, he entrusted them with a letter for
their father asking him to submit to the authority of General Leclerc.
Within a few months Isaac and Placide would be heading back across the
Atlantic, this time as prisoners.4
“What are presumably the objects of the French West India expedition?”
the British abolitionist James Stephen wondered in early 1802. The ques-
tion was an important one not only for France but for Britain and its Carib-
bean colonies. In late 1801 the British government signed the preliminar-
ies of a peace treaty with France that would be finalized as the Treaty of
Amiens in March 1802. Although the period of peace between the two em-
pires would be short-lived, it was to have a profound impact in Saint-
Domingue, for it made the Leclerc expedition possible.5
Emancipation had been decreed in 1793 in large part to secure Saint-
Domingue from British occupation, and in the intervening years war had
made Louverture and his army necessary allies for the French govern-
ment. Laveaux and others had celebrated the military services rendered by
the ex-slaves in order to mitigate concerns in France about the economic
disruption caused by emancipation. With peace, however, military neces-
sity could no longer be used against those clamoring for a reconstruction of
the plantation economy. Consistently attacked during the previous years in
Paris, Louverture came to be seen in government circles less as a valuable
ally than as an obstacle to Bonaparte’s new colonial plans. Peace made the
Leclerc expedition both politically expedient and militarily possible. The
end of the global struggle with the British freed up French forces that had