Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (60 page)

tween Christophe and Sans-Souci, and the latter seems to have agreed to

submit to the authority of Dessalines. Christophe, however, seeing the

leader of the Congos as a threat to his authority, invited him to a meeting

and then had him assassinated. The enraged Congos attacked Christophe’s

troops, sending them into a retreat, and captured Paul Louverture, execut-

ing him in revenge. Dessalines then led troops against the remaining

Congos, who retreated further into the mountains but continued to harass

the insurgent army. The unfinished “war within the war” weakened the

insurgent position in the north and continued to haunt postindependence

Haiti. After Christophe made himself king of the north of Saint-

Domingue, he built a great palace called Sans-Souci, whose name was

probably meant in part to erase the memory of his Congo victim.28

Despite such internal conflicts, by early 1803 Dessalines had managed

to assert his command over most of the insurgents in the colony. He and

his officers gradually unified the forces of hundreds of local leaders, con-

tinuing to harass the French throughout the colony, and often decimating

the troops sent against them. In mid-1803 one unit of Polish soldiers was

completely surrounded by insurgents. “Seeing myself surrounded by more

than 3,000 negroes,” the desperate officer in command of the unit wrote,

“I see no prospect of holding out with such a small detachment, and rather

than fall into the hands of this savage people fighting for its own freedom, I am taking my own life.” Some Polish soldiers made an equally daring

choice: they switched sides, joining the rebels. In October 1802 Dessalines

had noted that he was joined in his defection by “many European soldiers

who are concerned, loyal, and tormented because they are men who, like

me, have taken up arms for their own liberty, and they are considered as

my friends.” He was referring, it seems, to Polish troops with whom he

had made connections during his service in the colonial army. The Poles

had, years before, enlisted in Bonaparte’s army in the hope that the French

would support their own bid for national independence. French soldiers

often made fun of them, and even spread the rumor that they were canni-

bals. Many were dismayed by the brutality exercised by the French, and a

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few, perhaps recognizing in their enemy the same hopes that animated

them, concluded that they were fighting an illegitimate war against a just

cause. The exact numbers of defections to the rebel side are difficult to

know. One Polish officer, however, recalled that Dessalines had “won over

30 fusiliers” from his unit and subsequently turned them into his honor

guard.29

As their armies grew, the revolutionaries continued to use the “ruse and

ingenuity” that had served the insurgents of 1791 so well. One French of-

ficer recalled an “African ruse” that was used again and again and “con-

stantly succeeded.” “An entirely naked negro appeared in front of one of

our posts, a short distance away; he approached, clowning around to amuse

the soldiers with his grimaces; then he started making fun of us and pro-

voking us with outrageous gestures.” When the French troops, “their pa-

tience soon exhausted,” fired at him, he dove out of the way. “Irritated,”

the soldiers approached to fire at him, and soon a group of soldiers enticed

into pursuing him ran headlong into an ambush. At one point in 1803,

French sentries outside Les Cayes “sighted a magnificent horse, riderless

but carrying a saddle and a saber, prancing through the nearby fields.” The

“gullible” captain offered a reward to any soldier who would capture the

horse; four volunteered, but as they sought to approach the horse, they fell

into an ambush and were all captured by a group of insurgents.30

Although they formed a crucial part of the indigenous army, the veter-

ans of Louverture’s war were only one part of the revolution. The war

became a mass uprising among the residents of the colony, with plantation

laborers fighting in huge numbers. The prospect of defeat was more fright-

ening than the rigors of war. Women fought alongside men. In one battle in

the south they made up the first wave of an attack, carrying bundles of

brush meant to help the troops behind them cross trenches around a forti-

fication, and were massacred by French musket fire.31

According to Descourtilz, Dessalines had convinced the “Congos” who

fought with him that it would be a blessing if they were killed by the

French, for they would “immediately be transported to Guinea, where

they would once again see Papa Toussaint, who was waiting for them to

complete his army, which was destined to reconquer Saint-Domingue.”

This was a return to Africa whose goal was ultimately to take back the

colony. Inspired by such promises, wrote Descourtilz, the African fighters

marched into battle “with a supernatural intrepidity, singing Guinean

songs, as if possessed by the hope that they would soon see their old ac-

t h o s e w h o d i e

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[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

An engraving from the series published in Haiti in 1822.

Louverture is dying in the arms of his domestic servant, who ac-

companied him to Fort de Joux.
Private collection.

quaintances.” Others responded in a different way, taunting death. A song

probably passed down from the era of the revolution runs: “Grenadiers,

charge! / There is no mother, there is no father. / Grenadiers, charge! /

Those who die, it’s their problem!” There was nothing, the song suggested,

other than the battle to be fought—no ancestors, no relatives, no one to go

with the soldier into the grave.32

Death was also making its rounds across the Atlantic. On April 8, 1803,

high in the Jura Mountains of France, a doctor was called from a nearby

town to the prison at Fort de Joux to examine a corpse. It was Toussaint

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Louverture, who had died the night before. There was “a bit of mucus

mixed with blood” in his mouth and on his lips, and an autopsy unveiled

the deterioration of the prisoner’s hearts and lungs. He had, the doctor de-

clared, died of “apoplexy” and “pneumonia.” Louverture was gone at the

age of fifty-nine, his body thrown into an unmarked grave near the prison,

his soul, if Dessalines was to be believed, on its way to take command of

the steadily growing army of the dead waiting for him in Africa.33

Two months later, in Saint-Domingue, a judge in Saint-Marc con-

demned Louverture for having defrauded a group of planters in 1799 by

paying them too little for some of their properties in the Artibonite. The

planters were invited to take back the properties, while the defendant, hav-

ing “failed to appear,” was condemned to pay the court costs incurred by

the planters. It was a gesture in futility on two counts. Louverture, of

course, was not going to pay his fine, and there was little hope that the

planters would recover their land. In early May the short-lived peace be-

tween the French and the British was broken in Europe. It was the coup

de grâce for the French troops in Saint-Domingue. Already driven out

of much of the colony, they now had no hope of receiving reinforcements

from Europe and furthermore had to contend again with the British en-

emy. Rochambeau withdrew to Le Cap, where his “answer to the blockade

of the ports by a British fleet, to the disintegration of his army, to the hospitals glutted with the mutilated and the dying, and to Dessalines’ victories,

was to throw a ball.” During the “last days of Saint-Domingue,” with the

remaining French forces in Le Cap surrounded by insurgents, the century

of French rule ended in a final festival of brutal recrimination and pathetic debauchery.34

“Dessalines is coming to the north / Come see what he is bringing,”

invites a song recalling the general’s final march against the French. Passed down and recorded in 1901, the song notes the different weapons he

was carrying: “He is bringing a
ouanga nouveau
”—“a new fetish” or “new magic,” it announces; “he is bringing muskets, he is bringing bullets . . .

He is bringing cannons to chase away the whites.” Dessalines’s magic tri-

umphed in mid-November 1803. Directing a final attack against French

positions outside Le Cap at Vertières on the eighteenth, Dessalines sat on a

stone, holding his snuffbox, and watched as his troops took the final, crucial hill, conquering “a country, a nation for his entire race.” Finally accepting defeat, Rochambeau negotiated a surrender. The several thousand remaining French troops, along with many white residents of Le Cap, sailed

t h o s e w h o d i e

297

out of the harbor, where they were taken prisoner by waiting British ships.

They left behind them upwards of 50,000 dead, the majority of the soldiers

and sailors sent to the colony since early 1802. Dessalines marched trium-

phantly into Le Cap Français, which was soon given a new name: Le Cap

Haïtien.35

In order to create the new nation of Haiti, Dessalines and his officers

invented a new verb. “Le nom français lugubre encore nos contrées,” they

declared. This sentence translates roughly as “The French name still

haunts our lands.” But it transformed a French adjective,
lugubre
—

“gloomy”—into a verb. The declaration, issued on January 1, 1804, was a

furious attack against the brutalities of the French, and a call for the mem-

bers of the new nation to reject forever the past of empire and slavery.36

On December 31, 1803, Dessalines was presented with a draft of the in-

dependence declaration. Written by an elderly and educated man of color,

“an admirer of the work of Jefferson,” the document was modeled on the

U.S. Declaration of Independence and “set forth all the rights of the black

race, and the just complaints” that the population had against France.

Dessalines, however, felt that it lacked the “heat and energy” required for

the occasion. A young officer of color named Louis Félix Boisrond-

Tonnerre declared: “In order to draw up our act of independence, we need

the skin of a white to serve as a parchment, his skull as an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen.” Dessalines concurred, and put the task of

writing a new version of the declaration of independence in Boisrond-

Tonnerre’s hands. The latter stayed up all night writing the proclamation

for the next day’s ceremony. The more moderate one it replaced was lost,

leaving behind only the trace of its rejection.37

“It is not enough to have expelled the barbarians who have bloodied

our land for two centuries,” the declaration began. “We must, with one

last act of national authority, forever assure the empire of liberty in the

country whose birth we have witnessed.” The history of French colonial-

ism had left its mark everywhere: “Everything revives memories of the cru-

elties of this barbarous people: our laws, our habits, our towns, everything

still carries the stamp of the French.” In declaring independence, the peo-

ple of Haiti must forever reject their colonizers. “What do we have in com-

mon with this people of executioners?” The “difference between our color

and theirs,” the “ocean” that separated them, all made clear that “they are

not our brothers, that they will never be.” The people of the colony must

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“swear to posterity, and the entire universe, to renounce France forever,

and to die rather than live under its domination.” The nation’s “cry” must

be “Anathema to the French name! Eternal hatred of France!”38

Contemporary sources on the history of the island claimed that its origi-

nal Taino inhabitants had called the land “Haïti.” Versions of this name

had been used a few times by residents, notably in a 1788 pamphlet call-

ing for a colonial reform that would include renaming the colony “Aïti.”

Educated officers such as Boisrond-Tonnerre, who had studied in Paris,

were familiar with such historical sources. And the broader population had

an “awareness” of the island’s former inhabitants who had left remains of

their presence scattered throughout the mountains and plains, where they

were frequently uncovered by those working the land. Dessalines and his

officers decided to baptize the land they had conquered “Haiti.”39

The choice of this name was not the first use of indigenous symbolism

by Dessalines. After going into rebellion in late 1802, Dessalines briefly

adopted the term “Army of the Incas” for his troops, who also sometimes

called themselves “Sons of the Sun,” though these terms eventually gave

way to the less poetic term “Indigenous Army.” The former slaves who

made up the army, and most of the population of the new nation, were of

course no more native to the island than were the French colonizers whose

expulsion the proclamation of independence demanded. Dessalines’s use

of symbols derived from indigenous peoples was an attempt to assert a le-

gitimate claim to a land in which a majority of the nation’s inhabitants were exiles, having been brought there from Africa against their will. But it also suggested that this claim was based on resistance to, and the ultimate