Toussaint Louverture (21 page)

In gratitude, and also to secure himself and his government against further suspicion from the
nouveaux libres,
Laveaux proclaimed Toussaint lieutenant governor that April I on the Place d'Armes, and announced that henceforward he would do nothing without Toussaint's approval. Toussaint, exhilarated, shouted to the crowd: “After God, Laveaux!”
⁶⁹
—an exclamation he had recently heard addressed to himself by Datty's men around Port de Paix. On the same day, Dieudonne died in his southern prison, suffocated not by a “bilious choler” but by the weight of his chains.

Trained as a lawyer and skilled as a diplomat, Leger Felicite Sonthonax was, above all, a survivor. The order for his and Polverel's arrest in Saint Domingue was signed by Robespierre, but by the time the two recalled commissioners arrived in France, Robespierre had fallen and the Terror was over. Sonthonax and Polverel were tried before a more moderate National Convention, by a committee predisposed in favor of abolition, though their accusers and prosecutors were a group of colonists who had lost their property. The various phases of the proceedings went on for over a year, from September 1794 to October 1795, and generated the first in-depth and reasonably objective report on events in French Saint Domingue since 1791, authored by Garran de Coulon, who presided over the commissioners' trial. Polverel died before it was over, but on October 25,1795, Sonthonax won complete vindication, emerging from the cloud of his disgrace as a kind of hero. Three months later, he was appointed head of the Third Civil Commission to Saint Domingue, a body which also included Julien Raimond, an
homme de couleur
who had tirelessly lobbied for the rights of his class since the 1780s, and Philippe Roume de Saint Laurent, an experienced colonial hand who had been a member of the First Civil Commission. Marc Antoine Giraud and Pierre Leblanc brought the number of commissioners to five. Citizen Pascal, a white Frenchman who would marry
one of Julien Raimond's daughters, was appointed as the commission's secretary general.

The ship bearing the Third Commission sailed into Cap Francais on May n, 1796; Sonthonax especially was received as a great emancipator. The French government had directed him to proclaim the abolition of slavery all over again, which he did with great enthusiasm; his popularity was also enhanced by his consort, Marie Eugenie Bleigeat, a
femme de couleur
attached to him since his first tour of the colony, who had borne him a son in Paris. During this honeymoon period of 1796, the head commissioner was so beloved by the
nouveaux libres
that they were supposed to have taught their children to pray especially for Sonthonax in their daily devotions.

But Sonthonax was the target of vicious rumors as well as blessings and bouquets. From the moment of his return, some began to spread the completely false tale that he had escaped execution in France on the condition that he would restore slavery in Saint Domingue. In July 1796, Toussaint Louverture wrote in a report to Laveaux: “The wicked are conspiring more than ever … I write to Commissioner Sonthonax by this same mail to let him know how the wicked ones are reducing his credit, so as to lead the gullible field hands, among others, astray. They are making them believe, among other absurdities, that he has returned from France to put them back into slavery. Several soldiers and field hands from the Artibonite have come to warn me about what is going on. I have dissuaded them from what the wicked have told them, and sent them back home reassured.”
¹

For his part, Sonthonax noted (despite the euphoria surrounding his return) that “the regime established in Saint Domingue at our arrival was perfectly similar to the eighth-century feudal regime.”
²
Considerable arrondissements had been carved out by various black and mulatto military leaders, who could as reasonably be compared to twenty-first-century warlords as to medieval barons, and the tension between
nouveaux
and
anciens libres
was palpable. One of Sonthonax's first acts was to deport Villatte and his chief supporters to France—an endorsement of the steps recently taken by both Laveaux and Toussaint Louverture. To underline that endorsement, Sonthonax also promoted
Toussaint to general of division, advancing him a rank ahead of any other non-French officer in the colony.

By the time the Third Commission reached Saint Domingue, Toussaint Louverture was plainly the most powerful commander in the colony (though Andre Rigaud, in the south, was a close second) and also the most useful to France. With the exception of Mole Saint-Nicolas, where the English still held the forts and the harbor, he had secured all of the Northern Department for the French republic. His campaigns in the interior during the summer and fall of 1795 had won the regions of Mirebalais and of Grande Riviere for France. Fort Liberte, once the stronghold of the Spanish black auxiliaries under Jean-François, was now garrisoned by Toussaint's troops, commanded by Pierre Michel. Following the Treaty of Basel and the departure of Jean-François and Biassou from Saint Domingue, most of the men those two had commanded in the name of Spain had fallen into Toussaint's ranks.

For Toussaint, as for Sonthonax, the two matters of chief concern in the summer of 1796 were the potential for another mulatto rebellion in the style of
I'affaire Villatte,
and the English invasion, which still had a lease on life. In the Cordon de l'Ouest, Toussaint had made his posts impregnable, but he was still disputing the south bank of the Artibonite River with the redcoats, and in September 1795, the English had recaptured Mirebalais from Toussaint's brother Paul, thus opening an important supply line to the livestock herds on the grassy Central Plateau. Throughout 1796, Toussaint harassed the English at Mirebalais guerrilla style, making use of an alliance with a local maroon community known as the Dokos, but he could not commit the forces to dislodge them altogether.

Toussaint's military management of the north was developing a certain authoritarian quality which some among the
nouveaux libres
were inclined to resent. Toussaint had thought it best to undermine and eliminate many of the more traditional African chieftains who, like Biassou, doubled as
houngans,
or Vodou priests. The complaint he wrote to Laveaux about Macaya in February 1796 was one example of this program; his overthrow of Dieudonne was another.

Vodou was, and remains to this day, fundamentally unresponsive to command and control from the top. Each of the myriad temples scattered over the colony was a sort of cell that could network with others by many different horizontal routes. Toussaint, who like many of his people found it comfortable to combine a private practice of Vodou with a public and equally sincere profession of Catholicism, understood the revolutionary potential of the Vodou networks and used them to his own advantage when he could. He also understood that Vodou would always be resistant to any centralized authority, including the authority he was trying to build.

A related issue was Toussaint's determination to restore the plantation economy, which his enemies could turn into an accusation that he meant to restore slavery. This claim had been a feature of Blanc Cassenave's abortive rebellion in 1795. In June of that year, “a citizen named Thomas” spread a rumor among plantation hands at Marmelade that Toussaint was “making them work,” so as to “return them to the slavery of the whites.” “I went there myself to preach to them and make them hear reason,” Toussaint reported to Laveaux; “they armed themselves against me and as thanks for my efforts I received a bullet in the leg, which still gives me quite vivid pain.”
³

In April 1796, not long before the arrival of the Third Commission, Toussaint had to subdue a similar revolt in the parish of Saint Louis du Nord. His proclamation to the inhabitants there strikes the tone of a disappointed but affectionate father: “Oh you Africans, my brothers, you who have cost me so much weariness, sweat, work and suffering! You, whose liberty is sealed by the purest half of your own blood, how long will I have the grief of seeing my stray children flee the advice of a father who idolizes them! … Have you forgotten that it is I who first raised the standard of insurrection against tyranny, against the despotism that held us in chains? … You have liberty, what more do you want? What will the French people say … when they learn that after the gift they have just given you, you have taken your ingratitude to the point of drenching your hands in the blood of their children … Do you not know what France has sacrificed for general liberty?”
⁴

As fervently as Toussaint claimed brotherhood with the mass of the
nouveaux libres,
he also addressed them as “Africans”—not as Creoles like himself. The two cultures had real and large differences between them, and the “Africans” were perennially resistant to the work ethic Toussaint was trying so urgently to get them to adopt. Any ruler who wanted productivity for the colony faced the same obstacle, which was described with a certain loftiness by a French commentator in Port-au-Prince: “Work, which produces wealth and nourishes commerce, is the child of our artificial needs; needs which the Negro ignores, just as the philosopher disdains them.”
⁵
Toussaint's task was to dissuade the
nouveaux libres
from this disdainful attitude (philosophical or not) and to convince them that work was essential to the defense of their freedom. At the same time the African-Creole cultural gap must be bridged by a universal black solidarity.

Generally well informed about events in France, Toussaint probably knew in advance that Sonthonax was returning to Saint Domingue. The language of his address to the people of Saint Louis du Nord, even as it affirms the liberating role of France, also (like the proclamation of Camp Turel) stakes Toussaint's own claim to be the chief emancipator of the
nouveaux libres.
Later in the same address, his reassurances become more frank:

Toussaint liked to illustrate such speeches by displaying ajar of black corn with a thin layer of white grains on top. With a couple of shakes the white particles would vanish completely into the black mass. Meanwhile, Toussaint's “voice of reason” was saying two things at once:
at the same time that it preached obedience to France it also reassured the audience that the black majority would eventually prevail, no matter what, because “we are the strongest.”

To a considerable extent, Sonthonax and Toussaint Louverture shared a similar agenda at the point that the Third Commission arrived in Saint Domingue. Sonthonax's abolitionism was completely sincere, and he was enthusiastic about his assignment to level the society of the ancien regime, uprooting the old divisions of race and of class, even to the point of empowering the black majority (since Sonthonax felt he had been burned, during his first tour in the colony, by the mulatto race and the class of
anciens libres).
Toussaint could meet Sonthonax on the ground of this egalitarian social project, and of their common commitment to general liberty for all. And Sonthonax could meet Toussaint on the ground of ultimate loyalty to the French republic. There is no evidence that Toussaint was nurturing any scheme for independence during this period. All his public proclamations insisted that the
nouveaux libres
owed a debt and obligation to France as the sponsor of general emancipation and supporter of the Rights of Man, and his actions reinforced his words. On the practical plane, Toussaint and Sonthonax had roughly the same program: to reestablish the plantation system with freedmen's labor.

Sonthonax was wise enough to court Toussaint's personal goodwill—the strong friendship that already existed between Toussaint and Laveaux was helpful in this regard. In July 1796, Sonthonax wrote to Toussaint: “As a private individual, you have all my friendship; as a general, all my confidence.”
⁷
During the same summer Sonthonax helped arrange for Toussaint's oldest sons, Placide and Isaac, to travel to France for their education—a project apparently favored, if not initiated, by Toussaint, who wrote to Laveaux on June
16:
“Receive, I beg you, my sincere thanks for the goodness you have wished to have for my children; count in advance upon my gratitude; I assure you it is without limit. The Commissioner Sonthonax has written me the most obliging letter in that regard; he will give them passage to France on board the
Wattigny.
How many obligations I have to him and to you!”
⁸

Placide and Isaac Louverture sailed for France on the same ship
that had brought the Third Commission to Cap Francais, and afterward Sonthonax bestirred himself to ensure that their passage into the French educational system was smooth (the costs were assumed by the French government). Under the ancien regime it had been traditional for the more prosperous (and mostly mulatto) freedmen to send their children for education in France, and this move would help Toussaint's sons to advance as French citizens under the new world order. But Toussaint was too canny not to have realized that his sons would also be hostages; perhaps the formality of his thanks was slightly strained.