Toussaint Louverture (31 page)

Suzanne, apparently, never traveled south of Gonai'ves. Toussaint's marital fidelity was stern in the north, but when he went south, it seemed to relax. His Port-au-Prince residence was a bachelor's paradise. An affair with Madame Desdunes,
&femme de couleur of the
Artibonite region, produced children whose descendants survive to this day. Another special favorite was “la Dame Fissour,” the mixed-blood wife of a wealthy
blancs
from Leogane, the first important town south of Port-au-Prince. Such was her intimacy with Toussaint that his bodyguards would permit her to enter his private apartments unannounced at any hour of the day or night—an extraordinary privilege for the wary general to grant to anyone.

At the same time he seems to have enjoyed romantic liaisons with some of the most prominent white women still in the colony, judging from a box of souvenirs he kept at Port-au-Prince (where Suzanne would almost certainly never have come across it). The French general
Boudet and his staff found a false bottom in the box, which revealed “locks of hair of all colors, rings, golden hearts pierced with arrows, little keys, necessaires, souvenirs, and an infinity of love letters which left no doubt of the success in love obtained by the old Toussaint Louverture! Meanwhile he was Black, and had a repulsive physique … but he had made himself the dispenser of all fortunes, and at a whim his power could change any condition.”
¹³

Women of the highest society now competed for Toussaints attention and favor, not only behind closed doors but also with extravagant public demonstrations. Catherine Viard, described as one of Toussaints “favorite adulteresses,”
¹⁴
invited him to a special mass (a curious combination of his tastes for public piety and private dalliance). Soon after his return from the annexation of Spanish Santo Domingo, the most prominent women of Port-au-Prince (including the wife of General Age) turned out on horseback to greet him, shading his progress with palm fronds and presenting him an embroidered pennant.

There was a strong paternal flavor to Toussaints rule—the population was beginning to call him, affectionately, “Papa Toussaint”—and he had a weakness for damsels in distress. A woman who could gain an audience with him stood a good chance of having her problem rapidly solved, whether or not he was interested in her romantic favors. One especially credulous French husband was rumored to stand watch outside the door of Toussaints private office while his wife and the black general had long, long conferences within.

Across the board, Toussaint showed a remarkable warmth to the old
grand blancs
class, who had been banned as emigres by representatives of the French Revolution, but strongly encouraged to return to their properties now that no such representatives were present in Saint Domingue. As Toussaint had incorporated everything he found useful in European military strategy into his own, he now meant to incorporate everything he found valuable in European culture—then the culture of the French Enlightenment—into the new society he was building, a society which actually practiced, without regard to race, the values of
liberte, egalite, fraternite.
He spent the evenings following large receptions in
petits cercles,
which were held in an antechamber to his bedroom otherwise used as an office; these were generally attended by
the “principal Whites of the country,” the priests with whom Toussaint was intimate, and distinguished foreign visitors. Toussaint knew some phrases of Church Latin, which he liked to deploy in these situations, sometimes using them to baffle poorly educated men who sought positions in his administration. He set great store by real education, both religious and secular, and education was an important topic of
his petits cercles.

A prominent figure among the returning white proprietors was Bayon de Libertat, of whose reception at Toussaint's palace a curious anecdote is told: “He [Bayon] ran there, and wanted to throw himself into the arms of the one who people everywhere said was his benefactor; but this benefactor recoiled, and cried out in a solemn voice, so that all the world could hear him well: Go easy, Monsieur Manager— today there is a greater distance between me and you than there was in the old days between you and me. Return to Habitation Breda; be firm and just; make the Blacks work well, so that the success of your small interests will add to the general prosperity of the administration of the first of the Blacks, of the General in Chief of Saint Domingue.”
¹⁵

Despite its distinctly apocryphal flavor, this tale is interesting, and maybe its most important detail is that Toussaint performed his reac-
Uonfor all the world to hear.
That is to say, he publicly distanced himself from Bayon de Libertat—and by implication from the whole white planter class—while at the same time describing plainly for all hearers just what the role of that class was meant to be in the new order of things. The favor Toussaint showed to the
grand blancs
planters had brought him under some suspicion among many of the
nouveaux libres,
but his response to Bayon makes it clear that the
grands blancs
and their interests are now subordinate to the interests not only of “the first of the Blacks” but also of his whole “administration”; that is, a new black ruling class representing the power of the
nouveau libre
majority. Returning whites were the white grains, integrated into inconsequence by a thorough shakeup with the dark corn in the jar. And if Toussaint's economic policies did allow the white planters to pursue their own “small” interests, that was only in service of the larger interest of restoring the colony's prosperity for the benefit of the black administration and a newly constituted black citizenry.

The rebuilding of the colony was proceeding apace. After ten years of'war, Saint Domingue enjoyed a season of stability at the turn of the nineteenth century, and damage from the decade of conflict began to be repaired. The Jewel of the Antilles, Cap Francais, ‘was rebuilt to an even more sumptuous level than it had known under the ancien regime, featuring elegant new residences for Toussaint and his officers, eminently including the local commander, Henry Christophe. General Dessalines had accomplished something similar in Saint Marc. Many members of Toussaint's officer corps now had the opportunity to grow wealthy by operating plantations whose
grand bL·nc
owners had fled. This situation produced some tension ‘with the white landowners ‘who accepted Toussaint's invitation to return; their lands were supposed to be under a leaseholding arrangement whose details had become an impractical legalistic tangle since Sonthonax and Polverel first tried to manage things. In practice, the returning white planters often found it quite difficult to reassert control of their property or to extract the compensation to ‘which they were legally entitled.

Toussaint ordered all earnings from the properties of absentee owners to be paid into public treasuries, both to finance his extremely large army and to pay a corps of civil servants ‘which was often accused of the most flagrant corruption. Income from the rental of absentee-owned plantations and town houses was surprisingly large—one observer estimated it at over four million livres in the Western Department alone. Much of this money was spent on arms, and a great deal simply leaked away. The fact that many civil service posts were unpaid encouraged embezzlement, and at the same time Toussaint was assigning more and more civil service tasks to the military, especially collection of import-export duties. White civilians in Toussaint's inner circle, like Bunel, Idlinger, and Allier (the secretary'who did most of Toussaint's correspondence ‘with the home government), were rumored to have both hands in the till. The French general d'Hebecourt, whom Toussaint trusted for negotiations ‘with the English and other surrounding powers, had to be bribed before a returning planter could regain control of his land. In the end, however, the turnover of all sequestered properties required Toussaint's own signature. When Toussaint learned that debts were being sold for collection to the military, he put a stop to it.

In the very brief period of peace Toussaints administration enjoyed in 1800 and 1801, restoration of the plantation economy was a limited success. Saint Domingue had had several cash crops under the ancien regime; in order of importance they were white sugar, brown sugar, coffee, cotton, and indigo. During the ten years of war, production of all these goods had dropped to less than half their former levels. Toussaint's administration could do little to increase production of white sugar, a labor-intensive process requiring considerable technical skill. Indigo was for all practical purposes abandoned. Disenchanted colonists were heard to complain that too many plantations were buried “in grass and vines.”
¹⁶
However, exports of cotton and brown sugar increased by several percentage points between 1799 and 1801, while the export of coffee, significantly, nearly doubled during the same period.

If the damage to and deterioration of the plantations during the war years was problematic, the stability of the workforce was still more so. The majority of the newly freed slaves had been born in Africa, and once they were relieved of their
grand blanc
masters their natural inclination was to revert to practices of African village life, which was based on subsistence agriculture, not plantation labor. Toussaint Louverture was perturbed by this trend and by the tendency of many
nouveaux libres
(especially those who had come of age since 1791 and so never experienced slave labor) to adopt a wandering manner of life which Toussaint saw as an abuse of freedom and formally denounced as vagabondage.

Toussaint had objected that the labor policy Hedouville pursued was tantamount to slavery, but he himself was as determined to “make the Blacks work well” as he exhorted Bayon de Libertat to be. In October 1800, he decreed a labor policy still more stern than that proposed by Hedouville; it was based on the military model and enforced by the army. This decree was reiterated and reinforced by the constitution Toussaint created for the colony in 1801, which defined the plantation as a “family, whose father is necessarily the owner of the land or his representative.”
¹⁷
Here was paternalism of the strictest sort: the “father” had unlimited authority to discipline his “family.” Cultivators were to all intents and purposes confined to their plantations and subject to
severe penalties if they wandered away or slacked in their work— though now they were to be paid for their labors.

“I have never thought liberty to be license,” Toussaint pronounced in an 1801 address, “or that men become free can deliver themselves without consequence to sloth and disorder; my most formal intention is that cultivators remain attached to their respective plantations; that they enjoy a quarter of the income; that no one can be unjust to them without consequences; but at the same time I want them to work still more than in the old days; that they should be submissive, that they exactly fulfill their duties; [I am] well resolved to punish severely whomever avoids them.”
¹⁸
To many so brusquely subjected to it, this regime looked all too much like slavery.

Most of the black army officers (even those who, like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, were hostile to the return of the white planters) embraced the labor policy, which was designed, among other things, to help them enrich themselves. Dessalines, given broad authority to enforce the labor rules in the west and the south, soon made himself notorious as a more rigorous taskmaster than the
grands blancs
ofthe bad old days. He put his opinion very simply: “Blacks don't know how to work if you don't force them.”
¹⁹

The whip, as such, had been abolished, but Dessalines substituted canes. Often he administered the punishment with his own hand: a beating on the buttocks so severe that the victim could not move for several days afterward. Dessalines caned recalcitrant workers without prejudice, and sometimes unproductive overseers were also beaten. White proprietors on underproducing plantations might be flogged as well—to prove that Dessalines had no favoritism for them. When abuse of the cane became widespread, Toussaint issued orders against it. Dessalines switched to a leathery shrub common all over the Artibonite plain: “I beat with
bayahondel”
he cried. “Oh yes, I beat.”
²⁰
He was just as energetic in repressing rebellions against the work policy here and there in the colony, marching into areas of unrest and killing whomever he happened to meet till the trouble stopped. When he learned that the cultivators were distressed at his appointment to command the new Canton Louverture, he said tersely, “That's their business—I've got a bayonet.”
²¹

Dessalines's enthusiasm for enforcing labor policies was an extreme case, but many members of the black officer corps probably agreed with Toussaint's larger thinking: it was necessary to restore productivity in order to stabilize trade relationships with neighbors like Jamaica and the United States and, still more important, to raise money for the purchase of arms and the maintenance of a large army for the defense of general liberty—the universal goal. But there was at least one officer who did not agree.

Toussaint had an unusually close and personal relationship with General Moyse, whom he had adopted as a nephew during slavery time. Moyse commanded at Fort Liberte and had been instrumental in Hedouville's expulsion. In Moyse's company, Toussaint was less guarded than usual; in October 1800 he declared: “Does Hedouville believe he can scare me? I have been making war for a long time, and if I have to keep on with it, I am ready. I have had business with three nations and I have beaten all three. Also I am calm in the knowledge that my soldiers will always be firm in the defense of their liberty. If France has more people, let her keep them to fight the English—she won't have too many. She has already lost twenty-two thousand men in our country, and if she sends any more they may very well meet the same fate. I don't want to go to war with France. I have saved this country for her up to now, but if she comes to attack me, I will defend myself.”
²²
It is an exceptionally frank and quite accurate statement of Toussaint's attitude at this time: his preference was to keep the colony under French rule, so long as general liberty for all and his personal position were not threatened—but he was prepared to fight to the bitter end if these conditions were not met.