Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (55 page)

Jewish of Jews,” he announced—and about the local merchants who were

their agents. There was, finally, an even more serious problem: disease. “I

already have 1,200 men in the hospital,” he announced, and warned the

minister to prepare for a “considerable consumption of men in this land.”

Just a few days later, pleading for “troops, provisions, and money,” he wrote that he had over 2,000 soldiers in the hospital, including 500 wounded. He

pleaded for hats to “preserve the soldiers from sunburns that send them to

the hospital,” as well as medical supplies, noting anxiously that if he did not receive them, “no matter what supernatural efforts I make,” he would be

unable to “preserve Saint-Domingue for the Republic.”39

His troops also confronted a new and difficult style of warfare. “This is a

war of Arabs,” Leclerc complained to Bonaparte. “We have barely passed

before the blacks occupy the woods surrounding the road and cut off our

communication.” His troops suffered at the hands of “rebels” who “hide

themselves in the bushes” and in the “impenetrable woods that surround

the valleys.” When they were repelled, they retreated to safety in the hills.

The landscape posed particular problems for the European soldiers. “You

have to have seen this land to have an idea of the difficulties you encounter here with each step,” Leclerc added. “I haven’t seen anything that compares to it in the Alps.” Another French officer would recall the irony of

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the war: “Victors everywhere, we possessed nothing but our rifles. The en-

emy held nowhere, and yet never ceased to be the master of the country.”40

Still, French troops advanced steadily in some areas. Thanks to the de-

fection of Laplume and his forces, they rapidly gained control of most of

the south. In the north, they attacked Christophe, who commanded a few

thousand troops made up of both soldiers and cultivators, and forced him

to retreat. French troops occupied Gonaïves on February 23, though not

before it had been burned to the ground by its defenders. On the same

day Louverture massed more than 3,000 troops along positions overlook-

ing a long valley called the Ravine-à-Couleuvre, a “corridor” that provided

an easy passage between key points of the Western Province. In addition

to his regular troops, he had the support of several thousand armed cultiva-

tors who occupied the hills above the valley. A division commanded by

Rochambeau attacked them, and after a furious battle Louverture re-

treated. The French claimed a great victory, reporting that Louverture lost

800 soldiers and his troops fled in panic. Louverture provided a decid-

edly different account of the event, noting laconically that after the “affair”

that pitted him against Rochambeau he moved to another position, bring-

ing with him a number of prisoners he had taken during the battle.

Louverture’s maneuver seems to have been meant primarily to cover the

retreat of another part of his forces, and to prepare a larger confrontation

with the French in the mountains to the south.41

Soon afterward Louverture suffered a major blow. Maurepas, who had

for a time continued to fight the French forces in the Northern

peninsula—aided by a “horrible rain” that slowed down their advance—

surrendered. Leclerc had offered to allow Maurepas to keep his rank in

the French army, and Maurepas, seeing little hope of success against the

French, had accepted. Leclerc wrote optimistically that the “inhabitants of

the land” believed Louverture had lost, that his soldiers were “deserting

his flags” and cultivators were returning to their plantations. “They all think we are the masters of the colony, and I think so too.”42

The war was far from over, however. While Louverture was retreating

before Rochambeau, another French unit marched on the port town of

Saint-Marc, where Dessalines was in command. As they approached, they

saw “the flames light up” in front of them. Dessalines had “prepared every-

thing” to make sure the fire spread rapidly once it was set. “Combusti-

bles”—including barrels of power and alcohol—were placed in all the

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houses, and his soldiers were to set fires everywhere when the order came.

Dessalines led by example, setting his splendid, recently completed man-

sion on fire. By the time the French entered they found the town smolder-

ing and abandoned, with the dead bodies of several hundred residents,

mostly white, left to greet them. Dessalines headed toward Port-au-Prince

with his troops. Pamphile de Lacroix, the French officer in command

there, had recently strengthened his position by securing the loyalty of two

local leaders, the onetime maroons Lamour Desrances and Lafortune.

Lacroix sent them against a unit of rebel troops approaching the town,

who were outflanked and decimated. Dessalines turned back from Port-

au-Prince and began a march toward the mountains overlooking the

Artibonite plain, where he hoped to join with Louverture’s retreating

troops.43

War brought with it an old question, one that had split the slave insur-

gents in 1791: What was to be done with the whites? For nearly a decade

an uneasy peace had existed in Saint-Domingue between white and black

soldiers who served side by side, and between white and black plantation

managers and the plantation laborers. Tensions had simmered, and some-

times exploded, as they had in the October 1801 insurrection on the north-

ern plain, but generally whites in the colony were safe under Louverture’s

regime. With the arrival of the Leclerc expedition, however, many whites

soon found themselves hostages of the rebels.

When he retreated from Saint-Marc, Dessalines’ troops had taken sev-

eral hundred whites with them as prisoners. Among them was the French

traveler Michel Descourtilz, who had been in the colony since 1798. Writ-

ing years later about his “captivity” at the hands of “forty thousand ne-

groes,” he described a series of massacres perpetrated by Dessalines. The

general, he claimed, had readied his black troops to eliminate white sol-

diers in the colony who might support a French attack. “Soldiers, these

whites from France who are coming; if they are calm, it’s good, leave them

alone.” “But,” he warned, “if I find out they have come to trick us, then

watch out, soldiers!” When ordered to, his black troops were to arrest their

white comrades-in-arms, “herding them like sheep,” in order to prevent

them from joining the arriving enemy. Dessalines was not indiscriminate in

his suspicion of whites, however, making it known that some—notably

those who were assimilated enough to eat “callaloo” (a local dish)—might

be spared “when needed.”44

Once the conflict with Leclerc’s troops began, whites realized there

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were “enemies everywhere.” “The color white,” wrote Descourtilz, was

“condemned,” and orders had been issued for plantation workers to fire on

any whites who were not escorted by black soldiers. The ex-slave officers

who held them hostage prodded one another with “stories of cruelties

committed by certain white property owners,” developing an “ardent de-

sire” to “avenge” the humiliations suffered “in the time of slavery.” They

also probably—as Descourtilz did not mention—had an eye toward the fu-

ture, fearing the possibility of the return of those times.45

By the time Dessalines had reached the mountains, he had very few

white prisoners with him. Questioned by Louverture, he claimed they had

been captured by French troops, been killed in combat, or had escaped.

Descourtilz wrote that he had witnessed them being slaughtered by the

hundreds under Dessalines’s direct orders. His account was corroborated

by Lacroix, who described finding 800 corpses in the town of Verrettes as

he pursued Dessalines’s retreating troops, and coming across other piles of

bodies along the route they had taken into the mountains. Seeking to spare

his troops from the stench of one group of bodies piled up near their camp,

and lacking shovels to build a mass grave, he burned them. Instead of re-

moving the odor, this move filled the air with an even more acrid smell,

one he was never able to remove from his clothes.46

Some black soldiers sought to protect white prisoners. Descourtilz,

spared from the initial slaughter because of his ability to “heal people who

are sick,” had his life saved twice by sympathetic soldiers. One of these, an elderly man named Pompée, held up a revolver to protect Descourtilz and

announced that anyone who wished to kill the white doctor would have to

kill him first. Those who showed him pity were vindicated: Descourtilz

would prove himself useful in taking care of rebel wounded during the dra-

matic battle that was to come.47

In the mountains bordering the Artibonite, at Crête-à-Pierrot, was a small

fort that had been built by the British during their occupation of the re-

gion. Louverture placed Dessalines in command of a garrison there with

orders to resist the French troops marching from Port-au-Prince. He

hoped to entice Leclerc into “tangling himself up around the fort by mak-

ing him think it was a last stand,” and then lead some of his troops in a

campaign to “bring war to the north.” At the time, Louverture did not

yet know that General Maurepas had surrendered to Leclerc, and so prob-

ably overestimated the possibility of success. Once French forces, led by

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Leclerc himself, settled into a siege of the fort at Crête-à-Pierrot,

Louverture envisioned an even bolder plan: launching a surprise attack

against them. He hoped, he later claimed, to send Leclerc “back to the first

consul” and ask that someone else be sent in his place. The battle would

not go as Louverture had expected, but neither was it the rapid triumph

the French hoped for.48

The French hoped that by crushing Louverture’s forces they could put

an end to the rebellion. One man responsible for plantations in the

Artibonite region anticipated that once the army had taken Crête-à-Pierrot

from the rebels, “all the cultivators” who had been “swept along” with

them would return to their plantations. Some former slaves helped the

French troops advance—Lacroix complimented a series of plantation driv-

ers who worked with him for their “intrepidity”—and they reached Crête-

à-Pierrot in early March. Arriving by night, they surprised an encampment

of sleeping soldiers outside the walls. Awakened, the retreating troops ran

toward the fort with the French in hot pursuit, but then suddenly disap-

peared into the wide trenches that surrounded its walls. The French sol-

diers found themselves standing out in the open in front of the fort, which

“vomited all its fire,” mowing most of them down. Another arriving French

unit charged the fort and suffered the same fate. The troops inside then

tricked their enemy once again, emerging over its walls for an attack, draw-

ing them against them, and then retreating into the trenches around the

fort so that their comrades inside could fire murderous volleys into the ad-

vancing ranks. Several hundred French soldiers soon lay dead, and many

others, including one general, were severely wounded. Understanding the

futility of the situation, Lacroix ordered a retreat. The battle, however,

continued as the troops retreated, for they were constantly harassed by

small attacks and ambushes. As Lacroix wrote, he quickly came to recog-

nize how “war-hardened” the “blacks of Saint-Domingue” had become.

The French troops could see, on the plantations near the roads, “cultiva-

tors with their families who were observing our movements.” Some shot at

the soldiers who guarded the flanks of the unit. They fled as soon as de-

tachments of soldiers were sent after them, but when these detachments

returned they appeared and started firing again. “It was evident,” wrote

Lacroix, “that we no longer inspired any moral terror, which is the worst

thing that can happen to an army.” As a later chronicler wrote: “Every-

where the land harbored enemies—in the woods, behind a rock; liberty

gave birth to them.”49

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Imprisoned inside the fort, Descourtilz overheard Dessalines speaking

to his troops. His recollection of the speech, published years later, was

probably shaped by later events, but it remains one of the few surviving re-

cords of the general’s words. “Take courage, I tell you, take courage,”

Dessalines commanded. “The whites from France cannot hold out against

us here in Saint-Domingue. They will fight well at first, but soon they will

fall sick and die like flies.” He warned them not to misunderstand some of

the actions he might take along the way to the ultimate defeat of the

French. “Listen well! If Dessalines surrenders to them a hundred times,

he will betray them a hundred times.” They would see that “when the

French are reduced to small, small numbers, we will harass them and beat