Toussaint Louverture (20 page)

This cat-and-mouse game went on all day, with numerous exchanges of letters and circuits of messengers. By this time, Datty's insubordination was unmistakable, and the use of force seemed the inevitable next step. A white French officer might have taken it, but Toussaint had a different turn of mind. “Etienne's refusal made me spend the whole night considering what line I ought to Take. I reflected that if I used force, that might occasion Much more evil than there had so far been. At six in the morning, I decided; I left to go Find Etienne. I took with me Jean Pierre Dumesny, my Secretary,
*
and four of my dragoons.'
⁵⁷

No wonder it took all night to calculate the risk of entering a rebellious encampment with this merely symbolic escort: in very similar circumstances, Toussaint had taken Brandicourt prisoner. But this gamble
paid off: “I arrived at Camp Lagon at six-thirty; seeing me arrive, Etienne came before me; I scolded him and asked him Why he had Disobeyed, and what he could have been thinking of. He apologized and said that it was his troops who had kept him from coming. When I got down from my horse, all the Citizens, armed or not, came to tell me Good Day and to tell me how glad they were to see me.”
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The peaceful approach, however risky, allowed Toussaint to reoccupy his patriarchal role. The men of Datty's command were ready to recognize him as head of a household that included them all.

Toussaint then took Datty aside for another long session of remonstrance and coaxing, and finally “succeeded in making him hear reason.” Then he inquired about Datty's secretary, one Maguenot (most likely a white Frenchman, one of several who served the black officers as scribes), and learned that he was lurking in another of the three rebel camps on the mountain. Maguenot was the probable author of the letter from “the Citizens in arms at Lagon” that Toussaint had received the day before. Between the lines of Toussaint's report to Laveaux, it appears that at this point Toussaint saw a possibility for laying the blame for Datty's insubordination on this Maguenot.

“ ‘You have a Secretary there who is a cunning, wicked man,’ “ Toussaint suggested to Datty. “ ‘He is deceiving you, I am sure of it,’ and I asked him if he had seen a postscript he had put in the margin of the Letter that he wrote to me and sent by the citizen Gramont [i.e., the first news Toussaint had of the insurrection at Port de Paix, delivered to him at Verrettes], in these terms: The bearer of the Letter is the citizen Gramont, I am in No Way guilty, I am forced to live with wolves.”
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Etienne Datty declared that he had not seen this bit of marginalia, which suggests that perhaps he could not read: many of the black officer corps were illiterate and thus at the mercy of their secretaries. With the scales thus fallen from his eyes, Datty told Toussaint “no doubt he [Maguenot] could have put other bad things into the letters which I had him Write to the Governor General and the Commandant of the province, Without my knowing anything of it.”
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It may well have been true that Maguenot helped stir up the trouble; it was certainly true that arresting him made it easier for Toussaint to reinstate Datty in his command without any punishment or
reprimand—which, given the mood of Datty's men, was clearly the prudent thing to do. Maguenot was sent away under armed guard, while Toussaint and Datty dined together. After the repast, these two returned together to Andro Plantation.

“I arrived at Habitation Andro at four o'clock and found that everyone was there; I ordered Etienne to have them fall into line in front of the house. That being done I made them all Swear to put everything back into good order, to submit to the laws of the Republic, and I Gave them Etienne Datty To Command them.” Whereupon Datty's men cried, “Vive la Republique! Vive la Liberte et l'figalite! Vive le General Laveaux! Vive le General Toussaint!”
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Then they all began to dance, while Toussaint retired to his room for a long-overdue rest; in the previous seventy-two hours he had taken scarcely more than a catnap. The next day he had to gallop back to Verrettes, for the English had taken advantage of his absence to attack his post there. In partnership with Laveaux, Toussaint had done a great deal to restore stability to much of the colony, but what he'd achieved was still constantly threatened, from both within and without.

Resolving the Datty affair had taken six rather hectic days, and Toussaint had needed to walk delicately over a long line of eggshells to avoid coming to blows with his own people—to the extent that Datty's people were his. Even the style of address of their letters underlines the gap between them: Toussaint is brigadier general in the French army, while Datty (in his own signatures as well as in Toussaint's salutations) is “Commander of the Africans.” One is a French military officer who happens to be wearing a black skin; the other is a tribal leader. It is likely that all or most of Etienne's men really were “Africans” in the sense that, like the majority of the
nouveaux libres,
they had been born in Africa. The first instinct of these men was to trust the chiefs of their own group ahead of any Creole commander like Toussaint, though Toussaint, who knew how to operate both as a tribal leader and as a member of the French military hierarchy, was able to win Datty's men over, and without any serious show of force. His situation required him to shuttle constantly between these two roles, and he had a remarkable facility for doing just that, as his long report to Laveaux on
the Datty affair is intended to demonstrate. A European officer in his place ‘would have been far less likely to grasp, for example, that the willingness of the locals to find hay for his horses meant that they were likely to stand by him in the controversy, but it was through such subtle gestures that Toussaint maintained his connection to his popular base.

Toussaint was black, as he would often remind the
nouveaux libres,
but he was also (unlike the majority of them) a Creole, born in the colony and adapted to its ways from birth, and furthermore (unlike all the
nouveaux libres)
he had been a prosperous land-and slave-holding freedman well before the revolution whose principal leader he was now becoming. Much as he labored to disguise them, those differences did create a fissure between Toussaint and the roughly half million people he was trying to mold into a new black citizenry, competent to defend its own freedom on both the political and the military fronts.

The unrest in Port de Paix, settled in Toussaint's favor, is one example of this problem. In the Western Department, the uncertain loyalty of Dieudonne's force was another. This issue too was settled in Toussaint's favor by his letters and intermediaries, at roughly the same time that he himself was halfway across the colony managing the business of Datty. Toussaint wrote his crucial letter to Dieudonne on February 12, the day before he received the first news of the uprising at Port de Paix. Just ten days later, Toussaint was writing to Laveaux about similar trouble in La Souffriere “since Macaya went there with Chariot after having escaped from the prisons of Gona'ives.” Another tribal leader, Macaya had been a far more prominent figure than Toussaint when rebellion erupted in 1791, and with Pierrot had helped Sonthonax wrest control of Le Cap away from Galbaud in 1793. “I only had Macaya arrested because he was corrupting my troops and taking them to Jean-François,” Toussaint wrote to Laveaux.
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Perhaps it would be cynical to suppose that he also saw Macaya (like Blanc Cassenave, Dieudonne, and others) as a potential rival for advancement in the French military.

Certainly Toussaint and Macaya were of different breeds. After Macaya's escape from Gona'ives, Toussaint complained to Laveaux, “Every day he holds dances and assemblies with the Africans of his
nation,
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to whom he gives bad advice. As long as these two men remain at La Souffriere, people of ill intention will find them easily disposed to help them to do evil … It would be most suitable to have Macaya and his cohort Chariot arrested, for they are staying too long in these neighborhoods … [Macaya] will now do all the harm he can so as to revenge himself on me. I pray you, my General, to pay careful attention to that, for if you don't cut the evil off at its root, it may grow very large.”
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The episodes of Datty Dieudonne, and Macaya show that unrest among the enormous African-born contingent of the
nouveaux libres
was very widespread. At the same time a completely different sort of outbreak was brewing among the
gens de couleur.
Toussaint's letter about Macaya is sprinkled with equally urgent complaints about Joseph Flaville, the mulatto commander who had vexed him not long before by making certain posts which Toussaint considered to be part of his own command report instead to Villatte at Le Cap. Indeed, Villatte's power and influence there were not only becoming more and more vexatious to Toussaint, but also more and more dangerous to Laveaux and to all French authority in the colony.

Toussaint's situation vis-a-vis these
anciens libres
was tricky. Like most in Villatte's colored contingent, he had been free well before 1791, and like them, he had prospered in the prerevolutionary plantation economy. His interest in political rights for freedmen was similar to that of the
gens de couleur.
Unlike them, however, he was black. It seems unlikely that the antipathy between Toussaint and men like Flaville and Villatte was altogether racially based, for Toussaint had mulattoes among his most trusted officers to the very end of his career (on terms like brothers born of the same mother, as Dattys men observed). However, it is likely enough that some colored officers were loath to accept a full-blood Negro as commander in chief, and certain that Villatte would have viewed the rapid growth of Toussaint's power in the Northern Department as a threat to his own position at Le Cap.

Events of the last two years had been extraordinarily empowering to the race of
gens de couleur
and the class of
anciens libres.
The
grands blancs
had been swept out of the north of the colony by the aftermath of
I'af-faire Galbaud.
Since the ratification of the National Convention had confirmed the abolition of slavery and of all racial discrimination among French citizens, the
gens de couleur
of the north had reason to believe that they had finally inherited the kingdom of their fathers.

So Laveaux's return to Cap Francais was resented by many in the colored community there, which had restored and occupied many of the white-owned houses in the fire-ruined town, and had occupied the municipal offices. Toussaint foresaw trouble; on February 19 (in the midst of all the other turmoil) he wrote what for him was a frantic letter, advising Laveaux to stay clear of it: “Get yourself to Port de Paix if you can. Follow the advice of a son who loves his father, and don't leave there without letting me know … As soon as I have put my cordon in order I will write you everything I am thinking.”
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Either Toussaint never had a chance to write the follow-up letter, or Laveaux did not receive it, or he decided not to take it seriously.

Though never so fiery a Jacobin as Sonthonax, Laveaux did irk some sympathizers of the ancien regime in Le Cap by continuing Sonthonax's policies there: one inflamed observer accused him of setting up a “tribunal of blood.”
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Thus there was some hostility on the part of the remaining whites in the north, on which Laveaux's colored enemies could capitalize. It's also possible that the English invaders at Port-au-Prince, using the royalist Colonel Cambefort as their conduit, encouraged Villatte to depose Laveaux from his governorship. Still more probable was some degree of collusion with the mulatto commanders Rigaud and Beauvais, who between them controlled most of the Southern Department. The idea of mulatto rule of the whole colony was constantly sponsored by Pinchinat, an
homme de couleur
who despite his advanced age was a fierce personality: in 1791 he had calmly suggested, “Let us plunge our bloody arms into the Hearts of these monsters of Europe.”
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Pinchinat was a wily politician and skilled propagandist; Lapointe, commander at Arcahaie, declared that he feared the writings of Pinchinat more than an army. Certainly Pinchinat played some part in instigating what become known as
I'af-faire de 30 ventose.

On that date (March 20, 1796), the colored officials of Cap
Francais imprisoned Laveaux and announced that he had been replaced in his governorship by Villatte. With his accountant, Perroud, Laveaux languished in jail for two days. Then, on March 22, Pierre Michel, a black officer acting on Toussaint's orders, entered Le Cap in sufficient force to rout Villatte and his followers, who fled into the countryside. Laveaux and Perroud were freed and restored to their offices, as a proclamation sent by Toussaint rebuked the population of the town for colluding with the coup attempt. On March 28, Toussaint himself appeared at the head of his army and received a hero's welcome.

In addition to disposing of another of Toussaint's rivals, this episode cemented the quite genuine friendship—and strategic partnership—between Toussaint and Laveaux. On April 1, Laveaux called an assembly on the Place d'Armes of Cap Francais, where he proclaimed Toussaint to be not only “the savior of the constituted authorities,” but also “a black Spartacus, the negro Raynal predicted would avenge the outrages done to his race.”
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Toussaint had taken the coup attempt quite seriously as a threat to the stability of the whole colony, or more precisely as a threat to the administration he was building with Laveaux. He knew that the Villatte insurrection might well have gone colony-wide—Villatte had gone so far as to send notice to military officers all over the colony that he was now their commander in chief, and had also set about organizing a new colonial assembly. When Toussaint got the news at Gonai'ves, he immediately sent two battalions, commanded by Charles Belair and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, to reinforce Pierre Michel at Le Cap, while he himself remained where he was, poised to strike in any direction, sending a stream of dispatches and messengers to other towns warning them not to rebel, as well as a report to the French consul in Philadelphia. When he marched north toward Cap Francais he routed Villatte from a fort he'd occupied near Petite Anse; Villatte departed, snarling that he hoped “Laveaux would have his throat slit by the blacks he was caressing.”
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In fact, Villatte's party had managed to start a rumor that Laveaux and Perroud had imported two shiploads of chains for the restoration of slavery, and the two Frenchmen were threatened by a black mob until Toussaint opened the general warehouse to let the crowd see that no such chains were there.