FOUR

Closing the Circle

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:

Pay close attention, my brothers: there are more blacks in the colony than there are colored men and whites together, and if some disturbance occurs it will be us blacks that the Republic holds responsible, because we are the strongest and it is up to us to maintain order and tranquility by our good example. I am, as chief, responsible for all events, and what account can I make to France, who has heaped us with so many good deeds and has granted me its trust, if you refuse to hear the voice of reason.⁶

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.

Sonthonax and Toussaint were also in basic agreement about the two most serious threats to the French republic as it existed in Saint Domingue: the English, who in their collaboration with the royalist grands blancs frankly intended to restore slavery along with all other aspects of the ancien regime; and the potential for a colony-wide mulatto revolt, of which Villatte's rebellion might have been only a harbinger. The mulatto class (traditionally a property-and slave-owning class) was less than wholly enthusiastic about Sonthonax's project for eradicating all class and racial distinctions and for the empowerment of the largely black nouveau libre majority.

In the north, open resistance to this program had been scotched by Sonthonax's deportation of Villatte and his cohorts. The most powerful colored general in the south, Rigaud, was fighting on the republican side and threatening the British positions in the Western and Southern departments. Rigaud had emerged as the most important military leader for the gens de couleur; in diplomacy and propaganda he was abetted by Pinchinat, who had been implicated in the Villatte rebellion. With another colored brigadier general, Beauvais, Rigaud had established a considerable arrondissement from Jacmel to Les Cayes on the south coast, which he occupied in a state of quasi independence, since communication with the French authorities in the north was difficult. The military regime which he headed was accused of maintaining slavery in all but name (an accusation which would also be leveled against Toussaint Louverture from time to time).

From the moment of their recall to France, Sonthonax and Polverel had lobbied for a substantial force of European troops to be sent to the colony, but without success. In 1796, Sonthonax arrived in Saint Domingue armed mainly with his powers of diplomacy; he had to obtain military support from the commanders already in place—chiefly Toussaint Louverture and Andre Rigaud. Sonthonax did, however, receive a shipment of twenty thousand muskets, which he distributed with great gusto among the nouveaux libres,saying to each recipient: “Here is the liberty which Sonthonax gives you; whoever would take this gun from you means to make you a slave again.”⁹ The prodigious rhetorical effect of this gesture made Sonthonax again a rival for the immense popularity of Toussaint Louverture. And when he urged the field hands to work, Sonthonax told them in the same breath, “Don't forget that nobody has the right to force you to dispose of your time against your will.”¹⁰ Meanwhile, most of the guns Sonthonax passed out wound up in the hands of Toussaint's men, while some, unwisely given to uncommitted supporters of the recently departed Jean-François, were immediately used against the French republican forces.

Sonthonax needed the cooperation of both Rigaud and Toussaint, and he needed them to cooperate with each other. The latter goal was difficult to achieve, though both generals were persistent in attacking their common enemy, the English. Sonthonax sent a delegation to the south, seeking to confirm French governmental authority there. At first, the field hands turned to the delegates (Kerverseau, Rey, and Leborgne), protesting the slavery-like labor conditions they suffered and showing the irons and isolation boxes with which they were punished. However, Rey and Leborgne seemed to have been poorly chosen for a sensitive mission; these two were notorious for their debauchery even before they arrived in Les Cayes—where Leborgne went so far as to seduce Rigaud's fiancee, then boast of the conquest all over town. Justly infuriated by this sort of outrage, Rigaud and his partisans managed to rouse a popular rebellion on the rumor that it was really the commissioners who intended to restore slavery. After considerable violence, the delegates fled to Spanish Santo Domingo, followed by some fifteen hundred French families from the region. Rigaud and his group managed to turn a nice profit by selling them passports. Mulatto domination of the military, the civil service, and the plantation economy continued unchecked in the south. A proclamation from the commissioners defending the conduct of their delegates and rebuking the mulatto leaders was paraded through the streets of Les Cayes—pinned to the tail of a jackass.

The breakdown of relations with Rigaud made Sonthonax and the Third Commission ever more dependent on the military power of Toussaint. Both Sonthonax and Laveaux urged the black general to make a move against the English at the oft-disputed town of Mirebalais, which was in fact a key point in Toussaint's whole strategy along the south bank of the Artibonite River. Mirebalais was the principal town of a fertile valley which produced many commercial crops and which also offered access to horses and cattle on the formerly Spanish ranches of the Central Plateau. Toussaint needed to secure a route from Mirebalais to a west coast port, and after his failure to capture Saint Marc he had shifted his sights to Arcahaie, a smaller coastal town to the south. Arcahaie was the stronghold of Lapointe, a cultivated mulatto commander with an army of three thousand men whose first loyalty was to their leader, but which he had put at the disposal of the English invaders. Lapointe was not easily driven out of his base, though several intermediate points along the Artibonite (Petite Riviere to the north and Verrettes to the south) were already in Toussaint's hands.

The British had a new officer at Saint Marc, General Simcoe, the most redoubtable fighter they'd had on the scene since Brisbane. Toussaint adapted his strategy to suit this new opponent. In April 1797, he recaptured Mirebalais, which had been occupied for the English by the vicomte de Bruges. Recovering this position allowed him access to the plain of Cul de Sac, across which he could threaten the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, which was still in English hands. He advanced as far as Croix des Bouquets, where British resistance finally forced him to retreat. General Simcoe was then inspired to challenge Toussaint along the length of the Artibonite and to reclaim Mirebalais for the English. Dessources, the grand blancs ally of the English who'd been humiliatingly whipped by Toussaint not long before, came out from Saint Marc with two thousand men to occupy Verrettes—in a simultaneous maneuver the British general Churchill recaptured Mirebalais. Toussaint moved out from Gona'ives with a force of ten thousand and again annihilated Dessources and his legion as they attempted a retreat from Verrettes to Saint Marc. One of Dessources's artillery officers shot himself to avoid capture; Dessources himself staggered into Saint Marc “almost naked and covered with mud.”¹¹

Colonel Cambefort, the royalist commander of French forces at Le Cap before 1791 and an associate of Toussaint's through his brother-in-law Bayon de Libertat, had collaborated with the British from the beginning of the occupation of the west. With no great success, the British had tried to use him to win influence in the region of Le Cap during the months when Villatte's rebellion was coming to a boil. Once Toussaint routed Villatte's party, Cambefort was put in command of Saint Marc, until Simcoe replaced him there in May 1797. Fresh from his victories in the interior, Toussaint launched a new assault on Saint Marc; soon after Cambefort departed for Port-au-Prince.

This attack left Mirebalais undefended, but Toussaint knew that if Saint Marc fell, Mirebalais would be easily retaken. In his first rush he captured several camps north of the town, then organized an attack on Fort Charvill, on the peak called Point a Diamant. A battery firing on Saint Marc proper prevented any sortie from the town, while Toussaint's men charged the walls of Fort Charvill with ladders. The attack failed when the ladders turned out to be too short. The following day, the English got reinforcements from Port-au-Prince and recaptured the posts Toussaint had taken. Toussaint was obliged to retreat in some haste, abandoning a couple of cannon and a wallet containing a note from Sonthonax urging him to use those guns against Saint Marc.

Though Saint Marc remained in English hands, Toussaint's threat there had obliged Simcoe to recall his forces from Mirebalais, which Toussaint easily reoccupied. His access to the grasslands and livestock of the Central Plateau was now assured. The English would not seriously challenge him again in the interior, and they had permanently lost the line along the south bank of the Artibonite River.

For Toussaint's successes in this campaign, Sonthonax promoted him to commander in chief of all the French army in Saint Domingue. And on May 23, 1797, Toussaint reported this achievement to Laveaux, and expressed his hope for still more complete victory: “Inspired by love of the public good and the happiness of my fellow citizens, my dearest wishes will be at their zenith, and my gratitude perfected, if I am happy enough to be able, after having expelled all enemies from the colony, to say to France: The standard of liberty flies over all the surface of Saint Domingue.”¹² This letter reached Laveaux in France, where he had sailed in October 1796 to take up an elected office as representative of Saint Domingue in the French National Convention.

The repair and the reform of the plantation economy was hindered by the damaged state and the dubious status of the plantations themselves. Most had been abandoned by their grand blancs owners and managers during the first phase of extreme destructive violence beginning in 1791, but under varying circumstances. Some had fled their lands and the colony, purely and simply as refugees. Others had been deported as counterrevolutionaries during Sonthonax's first tour in Saint Domingue. A great many had sailed from Cap Francais with the fleet that carried away the defeated Governor Galbaud. The deportees and those who sailed with Galbaud were apt to be classified as emigres, counterrevolutionary enemies of the French republic; as such, their lands could be confiscated by the state. Yet no official list of emigres existed for Saint Domingue, so these plantations were sequestered, rather than confiscated outright, and could not legally be sold to anyone who might redevelop them. Leasing these plantations to temporary managers struck both Sonthonax and Toussaint Louverture as a stopgap solution; many were taken over by members of Toussaint's officer corps, who used various degrees of military force to put nouveaux libres back to work in the cane fields, and some by Toussaint himself.

Sonthonax was adamant in refusing to allow anyone to return to Saint Domingue who might be considered an emigre. Friction between Toussaint and the commissioner developed around this point, for Toussaint courted the return of many grand blancslandowners. In general, this group possessed a lot of managerial and technical knowledge which Toussaint felt was essential to the restoration of Saint Do-mingue's prosperity (and its value to the French nation), particularly in the skill-intensive area of refinement of white sugar. In particular, the group included men like Bayon de Libertat, who had fled Cap Francais with Galbauds fleet in 1793. During Bayons years of exile in the United States, Toussaint faithfully sent him the proceeds from his plantations in Saint Domingue, and in 1797 he authorized Bayon's return to the colony.

Thanks to his unusually close connection to Bayon de Libertat's circle, and to his own status as an ancien libre and sizable landowner before the revolution, Toussaint had a certain standing (by class though not by race) in the group of returning proprietors. This connection, and Toussaint's policy of advancing the claims of white landowners to recover their property and redevelop plantations with free labor, suggested, not only to Sonthonax and the white Jacobins but also to many among the nouveau libreblack majority, that Toussaint's loyalty was dangerously divided. The numerous small rebellions against his authority in the past few years had mostly been provoked by his effort to restore a system of plantation labor; putting white former slave masters back in authority was, in the eyes of many, more suspicious still.

Toussaint, like Sonthonax, was apparently working to build a new society, which would replace the hierarchies inherent in a slave-based system with a new triracial egalitarianism founded on regard for the Rights of Man. Freedom for the former slaves of Saint Domingue was absolutely fundamental to his plan, and Toussaint never wavered in insisting on that point—on which his support from the nouveaux libres depended. But among the colony's other races and classes, implementation of this program proved tricky.

Following Villatte's deportation and Sonthonax's disastrous mission to Rigaud, the mulatto-dominated Southern Department had to all intents and purposes seceded from the colony—at least it no longer recognized the commission's authority—while the gens de couleur elsewhere were quietly alienated from both Sonthonax and Toussaint. The military situation, though improved since Sonthonax's previous sojourn, was still difficult. The Treaty of Basel had formally ceded Spanish Santo Domingo to France, but there was no military force sufficient to occupy this large tract (which was twice the size of the French colony), and until Toussaint permanently conquered Mirebalais it was actually the English who enjoyed the supply line into the Spanish Central Plateau. Though the English could not expand their territory, the French were having no better success in dislodging them from the key towns they occupied on the coast.

Ill at ease with the military predicament, Sonthonax began trying to persuade Toussaint to decommission many of his troops and send them back to work on the plantations, while at the same time requesting more European troops from France. Naturally, Toussaint's suspicions were aroused. Moreover, the effectiveness of Sonthonax's rhetorical gestures, along with the sincerity of his commitment to permanent general liberty, made him a serious rival for Toussaint's popularity among the nouveau libreblackmajority. Field hands had begun to address Sonthonax as “Father,” and among them his name had the force of a magical talisman.

In this rather uneasy situation (in September 1796), elections were held to choose colonial representatives to the French National Assembly. In a curiously double-edged letter, Toussaint urged Laveaux to stand as a candidate:

My general, my father, my good friend,

As I foresee, with chagrin, that in this unfortunate country, for which and for whose inhabitants you have sacrificed your life, your wife, your children, something disagreeable will happen to you, and as I would not wish to bear the pain of being witness to that, I would desire that you should be named deputy, so that you will be able to have the satisfaction of seeing your true country again and all that you hold most dear, your wife, your children—and so you can be sheltered and not be the pawn of the factions which are gestating in Saint Domingue—and I will be assured, along with all my brothers, of having the most zealous defender of the cause we are all fighting for. Yes, general, my father, my benefactor, France possesses many men but where is the one who would be forever the true friend of the blacks, like you? There will never be one.¹³

This tortuously mixed message undoubtedly springs from an equally complex mixture of motives. Who is really threatening Laveaux in those ominous opening phrases, the “factions which are gestating in Saint Domingue” or Toussaint Louverture himself? Either way, the warning to leave or face dire consequences would have been difficult to miss.

It's also difficult to understand just why Toussaint wanted Laveaux off the Saint Dominguan scene, for Laveaux was his strongest, most loyal ally in the French administration, one whom he could sincerely call a benefactor. But Laveaux had been a long time in the colony, and did indeed miss his family in France. And Toussaint, whose information from overseas tended to be quite current, was aware of a counterrevolutionary movement brewing in France, and thus he saw a need for a faithful friend in Paris—a “zealous defender” not only of general liberty but also, especially, of Toussaint Louverture. Laveaux departed to take up his office in France in October 1796, but Toussaint continued to write to him regularly for the next two years, filing the same minutely detailed reports on military and political events that he had done when Laveaux was his immediate superior in the colony.

Sonthonax was also elected deputy to the French National Assembly in the September 1796 election—whether under pressure from Toussaint or not is less clear. As his conflicts with Sonthonax worsened, Toussaint had a stronger motive to get the commissioner out of the colony, but while some accounts claim that Toussaint threatened to destroy Cap Francais (again!) if Laveaux and Sonthonax were not elected, others say that Sonthonax campaigned for his own election, to the point of ordering Toussaint out of town and sending a friend “through the streets armed with a sword, distributing the list of those who were supposed to be named to the legislature.”¹⁴ General Pierre Michel arrived in force on election day, promising to “turn all to fire and blood if Sonthonax and his candidates were not named”¹⁵ —but Pierre Michel usually acted on the orders of Toussaint.

Though elected at the same time as Laveaux, Sonthonax seemed far less eager to leave Saint Domingue. Given his earlier experience of recall, it seems likely that he wanted to use the election to secure a line of retreat for himself in France in case he should be forced out of the colony a second time. On the other hand, some observers suspected that Sonthonax did not ever intend to leave the colony. Instead, he and his partisans who had also won election to the National Assembly in September 1796 would form the core of a new colonial assembly which would make Saint Domingue independent of France. In November 1796, Sonthonax began to write letters to the home government requesting his recall, yet he stayed on for nearly a year longer, and sometimes seemed determined to stay indefinitely.

Between the election of September 1796 and August 1797, the “factions gestating” began to split the colony between Sonthonax and Toussaint Louverture. At the same time, fissures opened among the five members of the Third Commission. Giraud, almost from the moment of his arrival, had been fearful of “the savage ferocity of the Blacks” and “the refined perfidy of the colored people and the ancien libre Negroes.”¹⁶ Giraud believed that Raimond was plotting to slaughter all the whites in the colony, and Sonthonax and Leblanc exploited his fear to isolate Raimond and make him powerless on the commission. (Roume, the fifth commissioner, had been sent to represent the French in Spanish Santo Domingo.) With Pascal, who was now his son-in-law as well as the commission's secretary general, Raimond turned to profiteering from the leasing of plantations confiscated from their emigre owners—an activity which reinforced their relationship with the sector of Toussaint's black officer corps which was enriching itself under this system. Then Giraud disintegrated into nervous illness and returned to France, and Sonthonax and Leblanc had to bring Raimond back into the commission's decision making.

For his own part, Leblanc began to compete with Sonthonax, courting popularity with the prominent blacks in the region of Le Cap. Toussaint was shocked to be included in these overtures, or he pretended to be, and wrote to the commission as though Leblanc had offered him a bargain with the devil. Thus far, Toussaint had remained on good terms with Sonthonax, with whom he had frequent private conferences during this period. Then Raimond quietly approached Toussaint to warn him that Sonthonax was scheming for independence with the other recently elected delegates to the National Assembly. Wary Toussaint told Raimond that the accusation might stem “from the bitterness you cherish against your colleague, for I know that you don't have a good understanding between you.”¹⁷ Nevertheless, he agreed to sound Sonthonax out on the matter without revealing that Raimond was his source. Sonthonax denied any such ambition and promised to send the delegates to France without further delay— though in fact he sent only a few of them.

Since Sonthonax's return, a quarrel had been simmering between him and Toussaint over the matter of emigres in general. The particular case of Bayon de Libertat brought it to a head. On July 4, 1797, Sonthonax sent Toussaint a remarkably hotheaded letter protesting Bayon's return to Saint Domingue, with a copy of “the law which condemns to death the emigres who return to the territory of the Republic after having been banished, and condemns those who have aided or favored their return to four years in irons. It is in the proclamations of the Commission as well as in the deposition of Bayon that you will read your duty with regard to this man, the brother-in-law of Tousard and the intimate friend of Baron de Cambefort, commander of Saint Marc. I am too much your friend to recommend you a weakness … The Commission, always compassionate, does not ask or require the blood of the guilty man, but only that he purge Saint Domingue of his unworthy presence.”¹⁸

This ultimatum was rash in all sorts of ways—aside from the insult and threat of injury to Toussaint's friend and former master, it was ill considered for Sonthonax to threaten Toussaint himself with four years in irons. On July 18, Toussaint took the matter over the commissioner's head, writing to the Directory in Bayon's defense. Barely five weeks later, Sonthonax himself was compelled to leave Saint Domingue.

In August 1797, Toussaint called on Sonthonax in the commissioner's house at Cap Francais. Toussaint was accompanied by Raimond and Pascal, but Sonthonax preferred to see Toussaint alone. Their conversation was interrupted, but on August 20 Sonthonax visited Toussaint to continue it—again with no witnesses. The next day, Toussaint summarized both halves of the interview to Raimond and Pascal, who set it down as a dialogue ten pages long. This piece de theatre may very well be a work of fiction but it served as Toussaints justification for pressing Sonthonax to leave the colony:

TOUSSAINT: Recall, when you proposed independence to me, you personally told me that to assure liberty it would be necessary to cut the throats of all the great planters, and you made the same propositions to other blacks, who reported them to me.

SONTHONAX: That was a long time ago, but that project was never carried out.

TOUSSAINT: I'll answer you as Creoles do—If you have a hog that eats chickens, you may put out its one eye, you may put out its other eye, but it still will eat chickens whenever it can.

SONTHONAX: What's that supposed to mean?

TOUSSAINT: It means that the wicked are incorrigible. The other time, when you came here, you told the hommes de couleur to slit the throats of all the whites, and the nouveau libre blacks to slit the throats of all the anciens libres. That's what caused the civil war and caused so much French territory to be turned over to the English and the Spanish. And then you left, and you left us nothing but trouble.

SONTHONAX: How can you have such a bad opinion of me?

TOUSSAINT: It's a true fact and all the world knows it.¹⁹

How much truth was there in any of this? At least enough to blacken Sonthonaxs reputation. Sonthonaxs exhortation to Dieudonne to fear and mistrust the mulattoes had been a public statement—in Toussaints construction of the dialogue, the rest seemed to follow quite logically. The idea of an independent Saint Domingue had arisen before 1791, and Sonthonax certainly suspected a pro-independence motive in Toussaints resistance to his own authority. This dialogue neatly turned that accusation on the accuser. Still, it is not impossible that Sonthonax did have his own dream of leading Saint Domingue to independence.

His role (as reproduced from Toussaint's formidable memory) is not a noble one. Before the play is over, Toussaint has reduced Sonthonax to pleading:

TOUSSAINT: Commissioner, this conversation will never be finished, but to conclude it, I tell you that you must prepare yourself to leave for France.

SONTHONAX: NO, General, let us forget the past.

TOUSSAINT: Comissioner, you are too well known; the salvation of the colony requires that you leave for France; it is absolutely necessary that you go; her security depends on it.

SONTHONAX: Let's forget all that, let it all be over; I promise that I will give you all I own—everything that you want.

TOUSSAINT: I want nothing, I need neither gold nor silver nor anything at all. You must go; the salvation of the colony requires it.²⁰

And so the stage was set. On August 20, the commissioner received a letter similar to the one earlier sent to Laveaux, though this one was signed by Generals Moyse, Henry Christophe, and Clervaux and several junior officers, as well as Toussaint: “Named deputy of the colony to the Legislative Corps, commanding circumstances made it your duty to remain for some time still in our midst; then your influence was necessary, troubles had disturbed us, it was necessary to settle them. Today, when order, peace and zeal for work, the reestablishment of agriculture, our success against our external enemies and their impotence permits you to present yourself to your function—go tell France what you have seen, the prodigies to which you have been witness. Be always the defender of the cause which we have embraced, of which we will be the eternal soldiers.”²¹

Sonthonax sent at once a letter of acquiescence, then stalled for time, and investigated to see if he might find any military support for his staying on among the garrisons of Cap Francais. Toussaint, meanwhile, gathered his own forces at Petite Anse, a few miles outside the town. At four in the morning on the fourth day of Sonthonax's delay, he fired a cannon, then sent the French general Age with a message to Julien Raimond: “If your colleague has not left before sunrise, I will enter Le Cap with my dragoons and embark him by force.”²² On August 24, Sonthonax boarded the ship L'Indien and began his voyage to France.

“He was still in the intoxication of triumph,” wrote General Kerverseau of Toussaint, “when I arrived at Le Cap. I saw the hero of the day, he was radiant; joy sparkling in his glances, his beaming features announced confidence. His conversation was animated; no more suspicions, no more reserve … He spoke of nothing but his love for France and his respect for the government; he presented himself as the avenger and the support of the rights of the metropole, and all the friends of order and peace made their best effort to persuade themselves of his sincerity”²³

The sincerity of Toussaint's loyalty became a matter of debate in France as soon as Sonthonax arrived there—as Toussaint had certainly anticipated it would. On September 4, 1796, he sent aversion of his dialogue with Sonthonax (so incriminating to the latter) as a report to the minister of marine in France, who supervised overseas colonies; the gist of this communication was to accuse the commissioner of scheming to make Saint Domingue independent for his own personal profit and to bring about that independence through a series of racial massacres in the style of the worst excesses of the French Terror. The accusation had at least some credibility, for Sonthonax had publicly inveighed against the white slave-owning colonists, denouncing them as “a horde of ferocious tyrants” and “bloody men,” rejoicing that such “slave traders and cannibals are no more.”²⁴ Toussaint reiterated his complaints against Sonthonax in a long letter to Laveaux (whose presence in the French legislature he hoped might counterbalance that of the evicted commissioner) and was seconded by letters sent by Julien Raimond to the minister of marine.

Sonthonax retaliated by accusing Toussaint of pro-independence and counterrevolutionary intentions, starting with the first secret beginnings of the black leader's political and military career in 1791 or before. Toussaint's close association with Catholic priests (the Abbe Delahaye and a couple of others had become part of his entourage since his rise to power) could be made to appear culpable in this context, as could his connections to the grand blancs circle of Haut du Cap, which included not only Bayon de Libertat but also the well-known royalist conspirators Colonel Cambefort and Colonel Tousard. In conclusion, Sonthonax denounced Toussaint as a royalist reactionary to the core: “At the instigation of those same emigres that surround him today, he organized in 1791 the revolt of the Blacks and the massacre of the landowning Whites. In 1793 he commanded the army of brigands at the orders of the catholic king.”²⁵ Thus Sonthonax lent his support to the old rumor of a royalist counterrevolutionary conspiracy behind the original slave revolt in the north. However, it is almost impossible to verify any real fact in this exchange of slanders between Sonthonax and Toussaint.

In France, the spring 1797 elections had brought a royalist majority to power. In the new National Assembly the dispossessed land and slave owners of Saint Domingue found a vigorous advocate in Vincent Marie Vienot de Vaublanc. His speeches were bitterly critical of Sonthonax, “who has sacrificed everything to the Africans, in the hope of dominating them through each other,” but instead finds himself “reduced to trembling before them and to seeing his orders despised by men who owe only to him the authority with which they abuse him.”²⁶ In Vaublanc's view, Sonthonax had become the prime example of the humiliation of whites brought about by his own misguided policies, notably the abolition of slavery. Vaublanc's rhetoric called more or less openly for the restoration of the ancien regime in Saint Domingue.

Toussaint Louverture was well aware of these developments and of the menace they represented to liberty for all. One theory suggests that he forced Sonthonax out of the colony as a sacrifice to Vaublanc's faction, which had indeed called for Sonthonax's removal. But Vaublanc's rhetoric was also aimed directly at Toussaint and his officers. “And what a military government! To whose hands is it confided? To vulgar and ignorant negroes, incapable of distinguishing the most unrestrained license from the austere liberty which yields to the law.”²⁷ In September 1797, Laveaux made a speech defending Toussaint against such vitriol, describing him as “a man gifted with every military talent” and “a Republican full of sentiments of humanity”²⁸ and protesting that his loyalty to France was absolute.

In November, Toussaint himself wrote to the French Directory, reminding the government that he trusted in France enough to send his children there. At the same time he made it painfully clear that preserving liberty for the former slaves of Saint Domingue would be more important to him even than the welfare of his children should circumstance force him to make that choice. The conclusion of this letter, much as it tries to insist on his belief in French support for general liberty, is riddled with doubt and crowned with defiance: “could men who have once enjoyed the benefits of liberty look on calmly while it is ravished from them! They bore their chains when they knew no condition of life better than that of slavery. But today when they have left it, if they had a thousand lives, they would sacrifice them all rather than to be subjected again to slavery. But no, the hand that has broken our chains will not subject us to them again. France will not renounce her principles … But if, to restore slavery in Saint Domingue, you were to do so, then I declare to you, that would be to attempt the impossible; we knew how to face danger to win our liberty, and we will know how to face death to keep it.”²⁹

France decided to try a diplomatic course. On March 27, General Joseph d'Hedouville arrived in Saint Domingue as the agent of the French government. On March 27, 1798, he landed in Ciudad Santo Domingo, on the Spanish side of the island which had been ceded to France by the Treaty of Basel but into which Toussaint's power did not yet reach. En route overland to French Saint Domingue, Hedouville consulted with Commissioner Roume and with General Kerverseau. The latter was Toussaint's sharpest critic in the French military, but Hedouville had also been briefed by Colonel Charles Humbert Marie Vincent, who was Toussaint's greatest military friend and supporter after Laveaux.

When Toussaint wrote to Laveaux following Sonthonax's forced departure, he blamed much of the trouble on the difficulty of governing by committee, for the Third Commission really had squandered much of its energy on internal strife. Far better, Toussaint reasoned, that France should be represented in Saint Domingue by one sole leader. “I want him to be European, this chief, because I want us not to lose sight of the country from which emanates the power that rules a colony two thousand leagues away from its metropole.”³⁰ Of course, Laveaux himself had met this description better than anyone. The new agent was a different sort of officer.

Hedouville's recent service in the region of Poitou, which had been a hotbed of counterrevolutionary and royalist uprisings since 1793, had earned him the sobriquet “Pacificator of the Vendee.” Sonthonax, upon his second return to France, had drawn a comparison to Saint Domingue by denouncing Toussaint as “one of the chiefs of the Vendee of Saint Domingue.'³¹ Villaret-Joyeuse, a partisan of Vaublanc who would later command the fleet that brought Napoleon's invading army to the colony, made that comparison more precise: “Why don't you try in Saint Domingue what you have done with so much success in the Vendee? Saint Domingue is also a Vendee to be reconquered; it is devastated by the double scourge of civil war and foreign war; it's only by force of arms and by energy mixed with gentleness that you will succeed in bringing it into submission.”³²

Hedouville, whose successes in the Vendee had relied on diplomacy as much as battle, arrived in Saint Domingue better supplied with gentleness than with force: the home government had allowed him scarcely any fresh European troops. Kerverseau, having sized up his situation, advised him to display confidence, though he had very little material strength: “I must tell you then, that despite your character as Agent of the Directory, Toussaint will be more powerful than you. An order signed by him will have more force than all your proclamations, than those of the Directory, than all the decrees of this Legislative Corps. But all his power will be yours, once he is certain of your principles.”³³

Hedouville installed himself in Cap Francais on April 20, 1798. Toussaint, wary of the newcomer, was not there to meet him; in a series of letters, he excused himself by citing his campaigns against the English invaders on the west coast and the distance over difficult terrain. In view of his notoriously rapid movement all over the colony, the latter explanation was not very convincing. In fact, Toussaint was busy conducting his own negotiations for a British withdrawal with General Thomas Maitland, who had arrived to take over the British operations in Saint Domingue just three weeks before Hedouville's landing.

The adventure in Saint Domingue had not turned out as the British hoped. They had not been able to make the area of the colony they occupied anywhere near as profitable as it had formerly been for France. They earned something better than £500,000 from exports during the occupation, which, on the other hand, cost them more than £7 million in money, as well as about 20,000 casualties. At Maitland's arrival, the British had only 2,500 European soldiers under arms, plus a few thousand black and colored troops of doubtful reliability, while Toussaint was reputed to have 20,000 men to bring against them.

Having driven the British from Mirebalais and the interior, Toussaint was now able to put pressure on the cordon of forts which protected Arcahaie. In March 1798, he broke through it. Though the formidable Lapointe was still holding out for the British in Arcahaie itself, Toussaint's advance allowed him to seriously threaten the British positions to the north, at Saint Marc, and to the south at Port-au-Prince. The British situation in the Western Department looked less and less tenable.

Maitland had studied the rivalry between Rigaud and Toussaint and concluded that the two generals were unlikely ever to cooperate. He believed that Laplume, who since the overthrow of Dieudonne had commanded a large force for the French republic just to the south of British-held Port-au-Prince, was a quasi-independent third factor; for Laplume's loyalty to Toussaint was never certain. The British general knew that possession of Port-au-Prince would greatly empower whichever leader it was yielded to. If Toussaint got the prize, the British would still have both Laplume and Rigaud in a buffer zone between Port-au-Prince and the British post at the port of Jeremie toward the western tip of the Grande Anse. Furthermore, by dealing with Toussaint, Maitland might drive a wedge between him and Hedouville, whose arrival made an easy exit for the British less likely.

On April 23, Maitland offered to withdraw all British forces from the west of Saint Domingue, on condition that the French colonists who had collaborated with the British be granted amnesty. Over the next few days, Toussaint negotiated that the forts and their cannon would be turned over to him intact—a major and rather surprising concession. The accord was signed on April 30, and not until the following day did Toussaint write to Hedouville at Le Cap to notify him of the fait accompli. Teeth presumably clenched, Hedouville approved his action, noting marginally that French law and the French Constitution permitted no one to come to terms with proscribed emigres. But Hedouville could not influence events in the Western Department from where he sat, and troops commanded by Christophe Mornet and Toussaints brother Paul were already advancing toward Port-au-Prince across the Cul de Sac plain.

A great many Frenchmen chose to depart on British ships; those who remained were understandably apprehensive. Laplume was also present in force outside Port-au-Prince, and when he struck a peace agreement with the mulattoes of Croix des Bouquets, Bernard Borgella, the grand blancs mayor, sent a delegation to thank him. Then Christophe Mornet arrived in Port-au-Prince to assure Borgella that the transition would be orderly. A Frenchman in the town described Mornet's men:

His tattered troops, covered in a few rags molded to their trunks, true sans-culottes, starving and in want of everything, naturally should have breathed nothing but pillage; so far from anything like that, not only did they not commit the lightest insult, but we even saw them, upon entering a city evacuated by the enemy, go without rations for two days without a murmur. Where are the European soldiers who, in such a case, could maintain so exact a discipline?³⁴

When Toussaint entered Port-au-Prince soon afterward, the amnestied French colonists came out to receive him with tremendous fanfare—doubtless born of their relief at the extraordinary self-control of the black troops already occupying the town. Toussaint appeared with extreme modesty, wearing a plain field uniform without epaulettes, his customary head-cloth tied beneath his tricorner hat. He declined the most extravagant gestures of the welcoming whites, declaring, “Only God should walk beneath a dais; only to the sole master of the universe should one offer incense.”³⁵ He had, however, promised to respect their property, and he backed up the promise by sending the stray cultivators of the region back to work on the plantations. On May 26, he announced to all citizens of Port-au-Prince: “The times of fanaticism are no more; the rule of law has succeeded that of anarchy”³⁶ When the British fleet sailed on May 28, Toussaint arranged aTe Deum in the Port-au-Prince cathedral to celebrate.

The evacuation of the west left the British with only two posts in the colony. Though the naval bases at Jeremie (threatened by Rigaud at nearby Tiburon) and at Mole Saint-Nicolas (which Maitland judged could not withstand a siege backed by the artillery which Toussaint could bring to bear from land) were valuable to the defense of Jamaica, Maitland judged that they were not worth their cost. On July 27, he reported to Governor Balcarres of Jamaica that he was on the verge of deciding to evacuate Saint Domingue altogether.

Throughout the summer of 1798, Maitland received emissaries from both Hedouville and Toussaint, still with the goal of promoting dissension between them—as Hedouville warned Toussaint in a July 5 letter. Aside from the particular differences developing between the agent and the general in chief, the traditionally contentious division of power between Saint Domingue's civil and military authorities was there for Maitland to exploit. On July 30, he decided to close the deal with Toussaint, having concluded (as Kerverseau had done) that as commander in chief of the army the black general held the real reins of power.

The accord for the evacuation of Jeremie, signed by General Huin for Toussaint and Colonel Harcourt for Maitland on August 13, was immediately put into practice; the English were gone from the south by August 23. This agreement, as well as the one for the evacuation of Mole concluded on August 30, contained favorable terms for emigre colonists which were irritating to Hedouville—not to mention that Maitland had promised earlier that he would surrender Mole to no one but Hedouville himself. But to complete the undermining of the agents authority, Toussaint and Maitland signed a secret agreement at Point Bourgeoise on August 31: a nonaggression pact and trade deal which lifted the British blockade from Toussaint's Saint Domingue, and gave him a free hand within its borders so long as he honored a promise not to export the black revolution to the British Caribbean colonies. (Toussaint kept his end of the bargain a year later by betraying a conspiracy to raise a slave revolt in Jamaica.) The arrangement concluded, Maitland and Toussaint repaired to the last British base at Mole, where the white general treated the black one to a festive dinner, and afterward gave Toussaint the elaborate silver service used at the meal, with the compliments of the king of England.

Toussaint and Maitland shared amiable feelings toward members of the grand blanc group in exile, and Toussaint let Maitland know that he would welcome the return of such refugees not only from the United States but also from Jamaica—meaning that the French collaborators who had fled the Western Department with the English would be allowed to come back almost right away. Hedouville, for his part, was expelling grands blancs pardoned by Toussaint as emigres, though not so fast as Toussaint was admitting them.

Toussaint's policy gave him a burst of popularity among the whites of the Western Department. The ladies of Port-au-Prince, who had caught on to his taste for elaborate religious ceremonies, took up a collection for a thanksgiving mass. Toussaint, far less reserved than when he had first taken possession of the town, mounted the pulpit to declaim: “I am going to imitate Jesus Christ, whom we adore in this temple—he forgave in the name of his Father; I will forgive in the name of the Republic.”³⁷

Rumors of the secret treaty with Maitland soon leaked, further damaging Toussaint's shaky relationship with Hedouville. He had called on the agent at Le Cap for the first time soon after he'd taken possession of Port-au-Prince and the west from the English, but had not stayed long, preferring to retire to the security of his own base at Gonai'ves. In July, he visited Hedouville again, this time in the company of General Andre Rigaud. The latter was technically still under order of arrest since his rebellion against Sonthonax and the Third Commission in 1796, and as wary of the new agent as Toussaint was, it seemed. A volatile character, Rigaud was irked that the British had yielded the towns of the Western Department to Toussaint rather than to him, but when the two generals met in Port-au-Prince, they manage to smooth over that difference. United by a common mistrust of Hedouville, they traveled from Port-au-Prince to Le Cap together.

But once he met Hedouville in person, Rigaud dropped his reserve, so that the agent found him a warmer and more congenial figure than the suspicious, aloof Toussaint. This development reactivated Toussaint's mistrust of Rigaud, and Hedouville, who felt that he would have better luck managing these two generals if they were at odds with each other, encouraged the breach between them by favoring Rigaud. Before he left the south, however, Rigaud had been worried that Hedouville might have him deported to France to face charges related to his 1796 rebellion against the Third Commission, so he had arranged for an insurrection to break out at Anse a Veau during his absence— one that only his return to the south could subdue. As there was no time to call it off, the insurrection began on schedule and Rigaud, now trapped by his own artifice, had to rush home to settle it, leaving Toussaint to sort out his problems with Hedouville alone.

So far as labor policy went, Toussaint's and Hedouville's ideas were not so very dissimilar. Both wanted to restore the plantation economy by sending nouveaux libres back to work in the cane and coffee fields. Both were inclined to bind the freedmen contractually to plantations for periods as long as three years, and often to the same plantations where they had previously been slaves. When Toussaint undertook such measures himself he thought of them as necessary for the restoration of prosperity, but when they were undertaken by Hedouville, Toussaint could easily be persuaded that the agent was a tool of Vaublanc and the faction in France that was maneuvering for the restoration of slavery in fact, if not in name. One of his letters to the agent makes much of the idea that he, Toussaint, had been set free by the principles of the postrevolutionary French Constitution—and no mention of the fact that he had been free for more than a dozen years before. Toussaint pre-ferred to identify himself with the nouveaux libres as much as he could—but the stringent labor rules were hugely unpopular with that group, no matter who was pushing them.

Hedouville had brought no significant military force with him, but he did have a team of civil servants with which he intended to replace most of the men Toussaint had appointed to various civilian posts in the government. Like Idlinger, who was in charge of the government's accounting in Le Cap, many of Toussaint's appointees were white Frenchmen, and many were considered to be corrupt, but Hedouville's efforts to replace them with his own people quickly became another sore point. In an effort to interrupt Toussaint's negotiations with the British, Hedouville ordered that enemy envoys should be admitted only at Le Cap, but Toussaint paid no attention to that. When Hedouville rebuked him for his leniency toward the emigres, Toussaint wrote tartly to the Directory, “Ah, since one reproaches the blacks for throwing out their former tyrants, isn't it part of their duty to prove that they know how to forgive—to welcome the same men that persecuted them?”³⁸

One of the French naval captains told Toussaint “how flattered he would be, after having brought General Hedouville, to return with General Toussaint Louverture, whose services would find in France all the sweetness and honor which they so richly deserve.” The shades of sarcasm and menace in this remark did not escape Toussaint, who responded darkly, “Your ship is not big enough for a man like me.”³⁹ Officers of Hedouville's largely symbolic honor guard persisted in teasing him with the prospect of a perhaps involuntary journey to France, until Toussaint finally pointed to a nearby shrub and said that he would make the trip ‘when that is big enough to make a ship to carry me.”⁴⁰ Toussaint wore a red head-cloth under his general's bicorne; this mouchwa tet had a Vodouisant significance—it represented a bond between Toussaint and the warrior spirit, Ogoun Ferraille. Hedouville's supercilious young staff officers boasted that four of them would be enough to arrest “the ragheaded old man.” Ogoun did not take the insult lightly; not very long after, a couple of these witty young blades were slain in an ambush south of Port-au-Prince.

If Hedouville was playing Rigaud against Toussaint, Toussaint was not much troubled by his game. “Let Monsieur Rigaud go take his instructions from the Agent of the Directory,” he said, in a moment of unusual frankness, to one of the French colonists he had amnestied in the region of Port-au-Prince. “I could very well have him arrested, but God forbid—I need Monsieur Rigaud … the caste of Mulattoes is superior to mine …; if I were to remove Monsieur Rigaud, they would perhaps find a leader worth more than he … I know Monsieur Rigaud …; he loses control of his horse when he gallops …; when he strikes, he shows his arm … Me, I know how to gallop too, but I know how to stop on a dime, and when I strike, you feel me but you don't see me.⁴¹

Hedouville's efforts to contain and limit Toussaint's power, via Rigaud or any other counterweight, were rapidly coming to nothing. After the British withdrawal he wanted to reduce the size of the black army, but could do nothing toward this end. He mistrusted Toussaint's cadre of black officers, many of whom were illiterate and thus in Hedouville's view too easily led, or misled, by their white secretaries— who were apt to belong to the suspicious grand ^Zawc/emigre class. And despite all Hedouville's remonstrations and proclamations to the contrary, Toussaint persisted in favoring this latter group, which was not only protected by his agreements with Maitland but also had an important role in his own project for rebuilding the economy of the colony. Most of the civilian bureaucracy was reporting to Toussaint's officer cadre, and the military had infiltrated most branches of administration. Hedouville's struggle to reassert civilian control created still more friction.

When Hedouville urged him to cut the number of his troops, Toussaint told him, “Ah well, if you are able, you can do it yourself.” The reaction of Toussaint's adoptive nephew Moyse, who then commanded at Fort Liberte, was still more pointed: “That agent wants to diminish the troops, and I want to increase my regiment. If there are no soldiers, there won't be any more general.”⁴² Moyse was also more and more openly hostile to labor policies which would attach former slaves to their former plantations, regardless of their source.

In the fall of 1798, rumors began to spread that a massacre of the whites was in the offing. The French Revolutionary calendar's New Year came in late September, and the nouveaux libres circulated more widely and generally than usual during this period, holding dances and assemblies which fed the fear among the whites that an insurrection was being planned. Toussaint sought to scotch the rumor, telling his officers: “Show how absurd is the intention they have imputed to the blacks, and don't allow any assembly to take place.”⁴³

In this tense atmosphere, quarreling broke out between soldiers of the Fifth Regiment, commanded by Moyse at Fort Liberte, and planters in the area. Hedouville was alarmed enough by that situation to order Moyse replaced by Manigat, a black magistrate in the town backed by some of the few white troops at the agent's disposal. Moyse was away on a tour of inspection of the countryside when Manigat took over, and when he returned, Manigat declared him a rebel. After an exchange of gunfire between Manigat's supporters and his own, Moyse left town with many men of the Fifth Regiment and began raising the field workers of the Northern Plain in an insurrection against Hedouville. By some accounts, Toussaint met Moyse at Hericourt Plantation and helped coordinate the rising.

Hedouville sent for help from Toussaint at Gonai'ves, but Toussaint would not receive the messengers, though one was his close friend Colonel Vincent and the other his sometime confessor, the Catholic priest Antheaume. Instead, Toussaint had them briefly imprisoned in the Gonai'ves fort. When Hedouville learned what had happened to them, he resigned himself to leave Saint Domingue. In an address to the citizens of Le Cap, Hedouville blamed the trouble on an emigre plot to make the colony independent of France. By then the population of the Artibonite Valley had joined the insurrection, and Dessalines was marching north from Saint Marc at the head of the Fourth Regiment, with an order in Toussaint's own handwriting and phonetic spelling (which meant that it must have been composed in great haste): “I spoke to you yesterday about Fort Liberte—well, it is now in the power of the white troops by the order of Hedouville … Hurry up and get twelve hundred men ready to march against Le Cap and arrest him before he embarks.”⁴⁴

By the time Toussaint and Dessalines reached Le Cap, riding the wave of the huge popular insurrection, Hedouville was already on shipboard, with his honor guard and a handful of local sympathizers, including the mulatto commissioner Julien Raimond and Belley, the retired black delegate to the French National Convention. He sent ashore a few of Moyse's officers whom he had with him in exchange for an assurance that the harbor forts would not fire on his vessel as it departed. Toussaint promptly wrote to the Directory, denying any ambition for independence and blaming the trouble on Hedouville. Though the church of Le Cap had not yet been fully reconstructed since the fire of 1793, Toussaint had aTe Deum sung on the site to celebrate the departure of all enemies from the colony; the French agent was apparently lumped into this category, along with the British troops and navy.

Hedouville sailed for France on October 22,1798. He had lasted for less than one year in Saint Domingue. As a parting shot, he transferred all his authority as representative of the French government to General Andre Rigaud. It remained to be seen whether this gesture would be as ineffectual as Sonthonax's similar appointment of Dieudonne a few years previously.

Ignoring Hedouville's promotion of Rigaud, Toussaint invited Roume (who, since his experience began in the early 1790s, was probably the most seasoned French diplomat still in Saint Domingue) to return from the Spanish side of the island and replace Hedouville. Roume had been authorized by the home government to take over as agent if Hedouville died, and Toussaint now invoked this clause, despite a slight difference of circumstances. Leery of this proposition at first, Roume eventually accepted it, arriving at Port-au-Prince in January 1799. Perhaps he could serve as the sole European chief that Toussaint had been longing for. On his way into French Saint Domingue from the Spanish side of the island, Roume ran into several intimidating demonstrations by large mobs of blacks, whipped up by Toussaint to remind the Frenchman just how real power was balanced. A delegation met Roume at Croix des Bouquets just outside Port-au-Prince and warned him that his authority would be recognized only if he acted in concert withToussaint—perhaps a deliberate echo of the similar promise Laveaux had made to the citizens of Le Cap when he appointed Toussaint lieutenant governor in 1796.

Despite the color of French authority that Roume's presence could provide, recent developments, especially the imperfectly kept secret treaty with Maitland, gave rise to suspicion that Toussaint meant to make the colony independent, if he had not, for most practical purposes, already done so. There were leaks of the Toussaint-Maitland accord in the correspondence of English merchants and even American newspapers like the Baltimore Telegraph, where English agents were wont to plant propaganda stories from time to time. The Telegraph also reported that Toussaint expelled Hedouville because the agent was planning to invade the United States. In December 1798, a London newspaper put it in the plainest English: “With this treaty, the independence of this important island has, in fact, been recognized and guaranteed against any efforts the French might make to recover it.”⁴⁵ Yet this sally might have been more a taunt of the French than a description of the actual situation in Saint Domingue.

Toussaint, meanwhile, continued to make substantial gestures of loyalty to France. With a series of local proclamations, letters to Laveaux, and reports to French official entities like the Ministry of Marine, he built a case for Hedouville's misconduct, analogous (in his representation) to that of Sonthonax. The foundation of these arguments was the old, prerevolutionary competition which the home government had intentionally fostered between the military governor of the colony and the civil intendant (Thomas Maitland had known how to play on this built-in fissure). Thus the civil chief, Sonthonax, with right and the law on his side, had in 1793 emerged bloody but more or less victorious over the military governor, Galbaud. Toussaint, as military governor with right on his side, had righteously deported the civil chief Sonthonax in 1797. The abrupt departure of Hedouville was explained in a similar manner. In his letter to the Directory, Toussaint accused the agent's entourage of counterrevolutionary dress and demeanor coupled with “the most liberticide propositions, the same that Vaublanc proclaimed.”⁴⁶ A work policy announced by the agent, which required field hands to engage themselves to their plantations for three years, smacked altogether too much of slavery, Toussaint claimed (though his own labor policy was not much different).

In sum, Hedouville had come to introduce strife where Toussaint had carefully constructed peace. “According to his reputation as Pacificator of the Vendee,” Toussaint wrote to Laveaux, “that is to say, as a benefactor of humanity, I should have thought that General Hedouville would have at least preserved the good harmony which he found among us; well, either General Hedouville was carrying a different spirit during his mission to pacify the Vendee,* or his character changed enormously as soon as he set foot in the colony. For he showed himself every day to be suspicious, brusque, and carried away against everyone.” ⁴⁷ Increasingly inclined to offer the honor of his victories to divine powers of one kind or another, Toussaint gave credit for the preservation of public order against the threat represented by Hedouville to the colony's “Tutelary Genie.” “Whatever may be the injustices of the agents of the government,” he assured Laveaux, “I shall be no less constant in my principles and no less obedient to the authorities of the Motherland, because I am a long way from dumping the blame for the misconduct of her agents on her. I only want to express my wish that the Directory, instructed by experience, shall henceforward send no more men to govern the most beautiful colony of the Antilles who, so far from advancing it toward prosperity, do nothing but slow it down—partisans who follow only their passions and for whom the destruction of the country is nothing, so long as they reach their goal.”⁴⁸

With Hedouville gone (and so long as no other vicious partisans like him should arrive), Toussaints peace would be just as fastidiously restored—all with the object of retaining the colony, and restoring its vast economic potential, for France. The credibility of this presentation was undercut by a couple of circumstances: Toussaint had made independent agreements with England, otherwise an enemy of France. Also, at the end of the 1790s, he began extremely discreet explorations (abet-ted by his new British allies) of the possibility of rescuing his older sons, Placide and Isaac, from the College de la Marche, where he had sent them as proof of his own loyalty and commitment to a future under the French republic. Soon after Hedouville's departure, Maitland reappeared in Jamaica and sent Colonel Harcourt to confer with Toussaint, a move that made some think that Maitland had influenced Toussaint to expel Hedouville. There were rumors that Saint Domingue would be turned over to the English and their emigre allies, but (though emigre refugees were returning in force from the United States) Toussaint did his best to quiet the whispering, and proclaimed his loyalty to the French republic as loudly at home as he did in his letters to Laveaux and the Directory.

On November 15, 1798, Toussaint issued a proclamation requiring all the able-bodied blacks in the colony who were not attached to the army to return to work for wages on the plantations (generally the same plantations where they had formerly been slaves). Thegrand blancs planters were elated, and Toussaint had to struggle to stop them from exulting too loudly and telling the nouveaux libres, “You say that you are free, but here is a letter from the General in Chief that forces you to come back to work for me!”⁴⁹

Such remarks did nothing to sustain the idea that Toussaint still stood for general liberty first, last, and always. What troubled him now was the cost of freedom. As he saw it, the former slaves had no choice but to work productively, for the defense of the freedom they had won. Toussaint did his best to defuse the renewed hostility between former masters and former slaves by having the work policy enforced by the black military officers, rather than by the white planters. The edict was designed to help restore the export economy based on production of sugar and coffee, in cooperation with mulatto planters and returning grands blancs who had the requisite technical skills, and were now expected to manage their properties with freedmen's labor—the workers were free, but constrained by Toussaints edict, backed by military force. Toussaint was eager to establish trade relations with countries other than France, for diplomatic reasons and also to get revenue for the purchase of arms, in case diplomacy should fail.

• • •

The end of the Terror in France had brought about a conservative swing in the home government, one which had a stabilizing effect. By the end of 1795 the rebelliousness within French borders had all been subdued, and Napoleon was beginning his series of victories which drove the Austrians out of Italy. France's increased confidence in foreign affairs led to friction with the United States, then under the presidency of George Washington. The many French privateers operating out of Saint Domingue's ports often failed to distinguish between British and American targets, and in 1796 Washington was told (mistakenly but damagingly) that Sonthonax had authorized the taking of American prizes. France, on her side, was irked by recent accommodations the United States had made with Britain. In 1797, the Directory did license French privateers to capture American merchantmen—despite the fact that much French trade was carried on American boats—in order to discourage U.S. trade with Britain. When John Adams succeeded Washington as president, he made a new effort to rectify this situation, but his emissaries in Paris were rebuffed and even insulted.

The United States had sent Jacob Mayer as consul to Cap Francais, mainly to see to the repatriation of American sailors stranded ashore in Saint Domingue after the capture of their ships. In the spring of 1798 Congress passed a law suspending all trade with France and areas under French authority for a period of nine months—the act was viewed as a prelude to a declaration of war. However, Jacob Mayer was advised by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering that the suspension was “limited to places under the acknowledged power of France. Consequently, if the inhabitants of Saint Domingue have ceased to acknowledge that power, there will not … be any bar to the prompt and extensive renewal of trade between the United States and the ports of that island.”⁵⁰

At the same time that Maitland was negotiating special British trade arrangements with Toussaint, Jacob Mayer was commissioned to let the black general know that the United States would also support such a step toward Saint Domingue's independence from France—and perhaps even an outright declaration. But these intimations came Toussaint's way just as Hedouville arrived in the colony, and under these circumstances, Toussaint was too canny and cautious to take the bait immediately or openly.

As soon as Hedouville departed, though, Toussaint sent one of his French administrators, Joseph Bunel, on a mission to the United States, accompanied by Jacob Mayer. (Of Bunel, Colonel Vincent wrote, “I believe him to be the most dangerous advisor to Toussaint, whose confidence he has more than anyone; this man does infinite harm to France.”)⁵¹ These emissaries carried a letter from Toussaint to President Adams: “You can be assured, Mr. President,” Toussaint wrote, “that Americans will find protection and security in the ports of the Republic and St. Domingue, that the flag of the United States will be respected there, as that of a friendly power and ally of France.”⁵² The mission had provisions such as yams—which were more easily produced in quantity than sugar or molasses—to offer in trade, and could also offer to put a stop to the taking of American prizes in Saint Domingues waters if trade should be renewed.

Bunel immediately fell foul of the French consul in Philadelphia, Philippe Andre Letombe, who wrote to Paris that Bunel had not even bothered to visit him, but instead was collaborating with Maitland and, aside from arranging exceptional trade agreements, was courting firm U.S. support for an independence bid in Saint Domingue. But in the currently awkward state of French-American relations, Bunel had better access to the Adams administration than Letombe, and the encouragement Toussaint was giving for the return to Saint Domingue of grand blanc refugees who were now scattered all over the U.S. Eastern Seaboard no doubt helped improve Bunel's position.

The possibility of independence for Saint Domingue aroused violently mixed feelings in the American Congress, with the case against it most strongly stated by Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania:

Suppose that island, with its present population, under present circumstances, should become an independent state. What is this population? It is known to consist, almost entirely, of slaves just emancipated, of men who received their first education under the lash of the whip, and who have been initiated to liberty only by that series of rapine, pillage, and massacre that have laid waste to that island in blood. Of men, who, if left to themselves, if altogether independent, are by no means likely to apply themselves to peaceable cultivation of the country, but will try to continue to live, as heretofore, by plunder and depredations. No man wishes more than I do to see an abolition of slavery, when it can be properly effected, but no man would be more unwilling than I to constitute a whole nation of freed slaves, who had arrived to the age of thirty years, and thus to throw so many wild tigers on society.⁵³

To the anxiety that an independent Saint Domingue would spread slave rebellion across the Caribbean and into the southern United States was added the fear that such a state would become a base for pirates—like the pirates who threatened American shipping along the Barbary Coast (often with the covert encouragement of the British), but much, much closer to home. That French Saint Domingue had to all intents and purposes been founded by pirates had by no means been forgotten.

However, the declared subject of the congressional debate was not Saint Domingue's independence but the possibility of renewing trade relations, which had been lucrative and important for American merchantmen for many years. The embargo against trade with France was to be renewed—but exceptions could be made “either with respect to the French Republic, so to any island, port, or place, belonging to the said Republic, with which a commercial intercourse may safely be renewed.'⁵⁴ It was so well understood that Saint Domingue was the island in question that the rider was commonly called “Toussaint's Clause.” But free trade with Toussaint's Saint Domingue had its own set of risks, at least for the slaveholding south of the United States. Thomas Jefferson, marginalized in the Adams administration, fretted about that: “We may expect therefore black crews&supercargoes&missionaries thence into the southern states … If this combustion can be introduced among us under any veil whatsoever, we have to fear it.”⁵⁵

Despite all such reservations, the bill was passed, and soon after-ward the USS Constellation captured the French L'Insurgente in Caribbean waters. A naval war between the two countries was clearly under way, for all it had not been officially declared. In that context, Toussaints negotiations with the United States had to be interpreted by the French Directory as treating with the enemy, though the Directory said nothing about it for the moment (for fear that Toussaint would declare the colony independent). Bunel returned to Le Cap to report the success of his mission, accompanied by Jacob Mayer and a new American envoy, Edward Stevens—and a cargo of supplies to launch the new trade agreement. Idlinger, the French accountant called by cynics “Toussaints creature,'⁵⁶was there to receive them, and Maitland's emissary, Colonel Harcourt, sailed into Le Cap at the same time. Not long after, Maitland arrived in person to take part in the conference with Toussaint which confirmed all the terms of the deal.

American ships were to be admitted only at Le Cap and Port-au-Prince; however, American consuls in those two towns could issue these ships passports to visit other ports on the Saint Domingue coast, as could the chief of the American consulate, Edward Stevens. British vessels were to be admitted at all ports without exception, though under false colors, normally the Spanish flag. The British would have their own representative installed in the colony, in a role analogous to that of Edward Stevens. Toussaint agreed to shut down all privateers and corsairs and prevent their operating out of Saint Domingue's ports, and he also agreed to keep his own citizens off the sea, which allayed the fears of southerners like Jefferson. The trade would be carried by American or British ships, Saint Domingue would not develop a merchant fleet, and crews of black ‘wild tigers” would not sail into Charleston or any other U.S. port. But Toussaint could operate transport vessels up and down his own coasts, under protection of the U.S. and British ships, which would also provide him with some local transportation services. Perhaps most significantly of all, Toussaint was to be furnished with whatever munitions of war he requested. Shipments of flour and gunpowder began right away.

The rather complicated terms of this arrangement had been negotiated in stages. First Toussaint worked out the fundamentals in private meetings with Stevens at Le Cap (while Maitland's messenger, Harcourt, was kept waiting in the wings). Then Toussaint induced Roume to sign off on the deal with Stevens to permit U.S. shipping in Saint Domingue's ports—not without difficulty, since Roume was more than a little reluctant to grant such privileges to ships of a nation currently in the midst of a naval war with France.

The conference with Maitland took place later, at Arcahaie; Stevens was present for it, but Roume was not. In addition to the very tricky terms for admitting British ships to Saint Domingue's ports under false flags, Toussaint renewed his pledge not to interfere with Jamaica or other neighboring islands, and to halt the depredations of French privateers. Another secret rider on the deal committed Toussaint to refuse entry to any French warships armed outside the colony—a condition which would exclude practically any French naval vessel. This term was intended to further allay the concern shared by the British and the Americans that the French might use Saint Domingue as a base for expanding the French Revolution, and especially a black slave revolution, into their own slave states in North America (as indeed the French, or Toussaint and his army independently of the French, might well have done). When President Adams announced the trade deal in the United States, these secret terms, and especially the British participation, were carefully kept quiet.

A risky game—but Toussaint was playing it with consummate skill. While constantly, adamantly proclaiming his and the colony's loyalty to France, he had managed to place Saint Domingue under the protection of an enemy naval power. Enemy ships now had more privilege in the French colony's ports than the ships of France herself! But Toussaint would not let British and American naval protection tempt him to a declaration of independence, in part because only France had abolished slavery, while Britain and the United States showed no sign of doing so any time soon. Trade with the United States was essential for Saint Domingue's survival and British acquiescence was essential to that trade. At the same time, remaining French was Saint Domingue's best guarantee of general liberty for its people.

Whatever other intentions he might have had, the preservation of general liberty was always Toussaint's first and ultimate purpose. So long as France remained firmly committed to the abolition of slavery, Toussaint's attachment to France was quite real. And he knew that, for the moment at least, the risk that he might go so far as to declare Saint Domingue independent outright would discourage the Directory from punishing him for behaving, in some respects, as if Saint Domingue were already independent in fact. In this way, Toussaint had achieved a delicate balance for his fledgling state among the superpowers of his time—powers he seemed expert in playing against one another.

There were still internal problems to confront. As Maitland had anticipated, the evacuation of the British had helped to make Toussaint more powerful than any other leader in Saint Domingue. His armament had become very imposing; not only did the British leave him their forts with cannon intact, they also left sixty thousand muskets in good working order. Though the colored commanders Rigaud and Beauvais still shared the Southern Department between them, no one could challenge Toussaint's dominance in the north and the west. Despite Hedouville's strenuous effort to set them against each other, Rigaud and Toussaint sustained a spirit of cooperation for several months after the agents flight. On February 3,1799, Beauvais, Rigaud, and Laplume traveled to Port-au-Prince to meet Toussaint and Roume for a celebration of the anniversary of the National Conventions abolition of slavery. But a few days later, the entente between Toussaint and Rigaud began to crack when Roume took a couple of military districts out of Rigaud's command and turned them over to Toussaint.

Suspicious that Rigaud was plotting a mulatto takeover in Port-au-Prince, Toussaint delivered a harangue in the capital's largest church, warning Rigaud and all the gens de couleur that he could do away with them all if he only chose to raise his left hand against them; it was just their good fortune that for the moment he chose to use the tools of law instead. This threat had a double resonance: in Vodou, malicious black magic is understood to be the work of the left hand, while the right is in charge of healing, benevolent action.

Toussaint's largely secret negotiations with the British and Americans were still going on. Suspicious of the secrecy, Rigaud accused Toussaint of conspiring with Maitland to restore slavery. Toussaint then revealed one of the secrets he had kept with the British general: he let Rigaud know that Maitland had wanted either Beauvais or Laplume to assume command of Jeremie (near Rigaud's hometown, Les Cayes, on the Grand Anse) when the British evacuated, but that he, Toussaint, had insisted that Rigaud take control of the port. At that point, Toussaint would likely have chosen Rigaud as his successor as general in chief (an early indication that Toussaint had already begun to think that this choice would be his to make), but now, thanks to Rigaud's abuse of his trust, he was beginning to prefer Beauvais. Rigaud, Toussaint charged, had shredded Toussaint's order for thanksgiving masses following the departure of the British, offending “the supreme being, to whom I always give credit for the success of my operations.” The next accusation was distinctly more serious: “I know,” said Toussaint to Rigaud, “that in the design to get rid of me you have posted men sworn to you along the road to Arcahaie”⁵⁷—that is to say, assassins.

The ink was barely dry on the last secret convention Toussaint had signed with Maitland when Rigaud, exasperated to the point of no return, published the letter in which Hedouville had transferred his authority as agent to him. It was June 15, 1799, and Rigaud was already marching in force toward Petit and Grand Goave, the two posts which Roume had transferred to Toussaint's command not long before. He captured those two towns so swiftly that Laplume was barely able to escape by throwing himself into a boat. At Arcahaie, having eluded whatever assassins Rigaud might have sent to waylay him there, Toussaint met Richter, one of the American consuls, to hurry up his arms shipments. Barrels of gunpowder with British stamps were offloaded at Port-au-Prince. Clearly, the United States and Britain were backing Toussaint in the conflict, while some observers thought that Rigaud had been incited by Anglophile French colonists and remnants of the old Colonial Assembly who had always hated the gens de couleur and hoped the whole race would be wiped out in a civil war with the blacks.

Toussaint began taking a similar line. The address he made to an assembly of field hands on the Cul de Sac plain is his longest speech in Creole ever recorded:

Am I not a black as much as the rest of you? Was I not a slave like the rest of you?—well what do they want to say? Don't listen to them, my friends. We are all brothers. Who fought for you from the beginning of the whole business until now … wasn't it me? You didn't know me well back then, because I was at Le Cap. Wasn't it the blacks of Le Cap who fought first for freedom? The mulattoes have fought on their own account in this area, and if they tell you they were fighting for you they are deceiving you. Wasn't it them that gave up the blacks around here to be sent to the Mosquito Coast?* Ah, look at Rigaud today—who's looking for trouble, and what does he expect to get out of it? He says I want to sell the blacks to the English. He's crazy, oh!—wasn't it me who chased all the English out of here! Don't listen to people who come around to stir you up against me. Seize them and bring them to me. It's Rigaud and his people, or rather it's the mulattoes who want to make the rest of you go back to slavery. It's they who owned slaves and are angry to see them free. Isn't it I who was a slave myself exactly like the rest of you? The whites had slaves, but they know what is called a revolution, they love the law … they are friends of the blacks, so watch out!—if you do harm to them, you'll make me very angry⁵⁸

The view here expressed of the whites' benevolence and commitment to general liberty was perhaps a little exaggerated. Christophe Mornet, Toussaint's commander in the Cul de Sac region, was enforcing the labor policy with such enthusiasm that one gratified white observer commented that “little remained to be done for the gangs to be working just like in the old days.”⁵⁹ But in this same speech Toussaint apologized for that severity, shifting the blame to Christophe Mornet, and offered all his listeners passports to leave their plantations and go where they liked. As the conflict with Rigaud flowered into all-out civil war, Toussaint found it expedient to rally his black base by suspending his stringent labor policy. He promoted several days of festival that brought swarms of blacks into Port-au-Prince from the outlying area, and on the gallery of the government house he joined in Ibo warrior dances, to help whip up enthusiasm for battles which were sure to come.

On July 3, Roume, under pressure from Toussaint, declared Rigaud a rebel and traitor to France, though the agent still hoped to mediate a peaceful settlement. Five days later, Toussaint sent his main force, which now amounted to between twenty and thirty thousand men, to confront Rigaud at Petit and Grand Goave. Though Rigaud's main strength was in the south, particularly in his home region of Les Cayes, his faction had footholds all over the colony, particularly in the coastal towns. Beauvais, commanding at Jacmel on the south coast, hoped at first to remain neutral, but when gens de couleur in the surrounding countryside were attacked by Mamzel and the Doko maroons (probably on Toussaint's orders), he was forced to join the struggle on the side of Rigaud and his race. Meanwhile, Toussaint was riding rapidly all over the Western and Northern departments to suppress rebellions in the Artibonite Plain and at Mole Saint-Nicolas. On July 25, he broke a siege of Port de Paix, where Rigaud's partisans had attacked Toussaint's General Maurepas.

Not so very long before, Cap Francais had been a mulatto stronghold. In the summer of 1799, Toussaint executed Pierre Michel (the officer who'd been first to rescue Laveaux from mulattoes then led by Villatte) for an attempt to turn over this important town to Rigaud's supporters; fifty other conspirators were put to death at Le Cap on August 4. Rigaud's partisans wanted to assassinate Toussaint, if they could not defeat him on the battlefield; during the summer of 1799 Toussaint had three narrow escapes from ambushes which seemed to target him personally: at Pont d'Ester in the Artibonite Valley, near Jean Rabel on the northwest peninsula, and at Sources Puantes on the road to Port-au-Prince. He broke up another ambush on Desdunes Plan-tation in the Artibonite, and ordered six ringleaders to be blown to bits by point-blank cannon fire on the parade ground at Gonai'ves.

In the midst of all the fighting, Toussaint waged a propaganda war. During the early stages of the conflict with Rigaud, Agent Roume had done his best to defuse it, writing an open letter to Rigaud which urged him not to be trapped in Hedouville's scheme to set him and Toussaint against each other. Roume saw the racial dimension of the conflict and was alarmed by it. An elegant passage turned on the point that Roume himself was married to a femme de couleur: “Toussaint Louverture knows only two kinds of men, good ones and bad ones; it is I who assures you of that; I, the husband of a mulatress; I, the father of a quar-teron; I, the son-in-law of a negress—believe me, my mulatto brothers-in-law, believe me, who has long known the sentiment of the General in Chief, believe that I have come to the degree of admiration which he inspires in me by recognizing him the impartial friend of the Blacks, the Reds, and the Whites.”⁶⁰ This familial view of Saint Domingue's racial situation was one that Toussaint could certainly share. In peacetime he could rise to the level of impartiality which Roume described here, and even during the civil war he liked to point out the numerous loyal mulattoes who remained in his army, many of them in high-ranking, trusted positions.

But now, Toussaint claimed that Rigaud had built his party by assuring all the gens de couleur that “the Mulattoes are the only natives of Saint Domingue, that in consequence the country belongs to them by right, that it is theirs, as France is for the Whites, and Africa for the Negroes.”⁶¹ In his efforts to incite the blacks against the whites, Toussaint argued, Rigaud proved himself “faithful to the principles of Machiavelli.”⁶² The author of The Prince was much on Toussaint's mind these days; he had also accused Hedouville of fleeing his post “to escape the disastrous effects of his Machiavellianism.”⁶³ Now he returned to the Villatte rebellion to demonstrate the Machiavellian cast of Rigaud's faction, alleging that in 1796 the mulattoes were already plotting to seize all three departments of the colony—Villatte in the north, Beauvais in the west, and Rigaud in the south—in a plot masterminded by Pinchinat. Should there be any doubt that the mulattoes hated all the blacks and wanted to destroy them, there was always the example of the Swiss.

The product of this kind of thinking was a war of racial extermination. Toussaint's rising second in command, General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, emerged as the chief executioner. In regions where Toussaint had run into ambushes and assassination attempts, the reprisals were crushing. Dessalines was always more consistently hostile to mulattoes than Toussaint. “The Blacks,” he said, “are friends of repose; whenever they get stirred up it's because someone else put them in motion, and you will always find colored men behind the curtain.”⁶⁴ Dessalines respected courage wherever he found it, and colored men who stood up to him were often invited to serve in his command—as many of them did. To those unable to bear arms, Dessalines would say, “What are the rest of you good for?—to give bad advice. Enough!”⁶⁵ His men understood the remark to be a death sentence.

Toussaint was determined to settle all internal conflicts quickly and absolutely, because there were plenty of external threats still on his horizon as the eighteenth century drew to a close. The Directory had given him no definite reaction to his expulsion of Hedouville; in an increasingly shaky state itself, it had decided simply to watch and wait. In France, both Hedouville and Sonthonax were outraged against him, while the Vaublanc faction was still pressing for the restoration of slavery. Despite some tactful efforts (abetted by his new British allies) to extract them, his two eldest sons were still hostages in France.

Though Toussaint had not been censured for his conduct toward Hedouville, his deals with the English and the Americans might also have provoked the French government, especially the prohibition of French military vessels in Saint Domingue. Though he had made no open bid for independence, it was becoming more and more apparent that Toussaint did not especially want to see French military vessels in port anywhere on the island—which meant that he needed to bring the Spanish region of Hispaniola under his control. But while the civil war continued he could spare no troops for that operation. Therefore, Rigaud's rebellion had to be utterly crushed. Thus far, Toussaint's ruth-less repression of the mulatto revolt resembled the Terror in France, whose original purpose, as declared by Robespierre, was to create seamless internal solidarity for the confrontation of foreign enemies.

By November 1799, the civil war between the mulattoes and the blacks had settled on the siege of Jacmel, which Toussaint delegated to Dessalines, who had routed Rigaud from the positions he had taken further to the north. During the same month the Directory collapsed in France, and Napoleon Bonaparte assumed executive rule of the nation. Though this arrangement described Napoleon as “first consul” in a consulate of three, it was patently clear that France's new system of government was a military dictatorship, controlled by a single dictator. Such a hard swing to the right was apt to be favorable to proponents of slavery, as Toussaint could not help but suspect. In December, the Consulate issued a constitution stating that the colonies would henceforth be governed by “special laws”—alarming news for Toussaint and all the nouveaux libres of Saint Domingue, as such exceptions to the laws that governed the French homeland had previously been used to permit and justify slavery.

Agent Roume, though rapidly falling out of sympathy with Toussaint, wrote to First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte to complain of the effects which such decisions at home were having in the colony, in the souls of men whom Roume characterized as “simple but good.”⁶⁶ The notion of “special laws” for the colonies led the blacks of Saint Domingue to suspect they were going to be governed by “a new code noirbased on the old one.”⁶⁷ Worse, a flurry of letters had begun to circulate, all claiming that an army with a mission to restore slavery would appear on the Spanish side of the island and attack French Saint Domingue across the frontier. The effect of such rumors on Toussaint is not hard to imagine.

On April 27, 1800, Toussaint extracted an order from Roume to take possession of Spanish Santo Domingo. Well aware that the home government did not want this region to fall into the control of its black general in chief, Roume had been refusing since January to sign the order. His once congenial relationship with Toussaint had gone sour. Aware of Maitlands semisecret visits, Roume disapproved of Toussaint's dealings with the British; and the civil war distressed him so much that he concocted a covert plan to halt it by bringing in a Spanish fleet from Cuba to draft both Toussaint's and Rigaud's armies for an all-out assault on Jamaica. Toussaint knew nothing of that fantastic scheme; it was the issue of Spanish Santo Domingo that brought him to a crisis with Roume.

He had Roume locked up for a time in Fort Picolet, on the cliffs above the harbor of Le Cap, but when the agent still held out, Toussaint applied pressure from different angles. A committee of prominent whites led by Mayor Borgella of Port-au-Prince issued a proclamation that Toussaint was “the only man who can seize the reins of government with a certain hand”⁶⁸ and giving him authority (which it had no legitimate power to give) to overrule Roume's decisions. At the same time, a false rumor that Toussaint had been appointed “proconsul” by the new French government was being circulated by the American consul Stevens and by General d'Hebecourt, one of the French officers in Toussaint's inner circle. Toussaint, headquartered in Port-au-Prince to direct the campaign against Rigaud in the south, made a quick run up the coast to Gona'fves, whereupon huge demonstrations broke out all over the Northern Department, with nouveaux libres calling for Roume's deportation. General Moyse was, ostensibly, unable to contain these riots—the same sort of riots he himself had incited against Hedouville. Six thousand men assembled in Le Cap and voted Roume out of his position as agent.

Roume had recently annoyed the British by expelling one of their agents, Douglas, from Le Cap, and Toussaint's British allies were quietly pressuring him to get rid of Roume altogether, but Toussaint did not really want to go so far. He preferred to keep the colony's interests balanced between the interests of the superpowers of his day, and if no representative of the French government remained in Saint Domingue he would be in open rebellion against France, thus wholly dependent on whatever protection he could expect from the United States and from the British navy. At about the same time, his old friend Laveaux, who had been turned away by local authorities from a mission to Guadeloupe, was expected to land in Spanish Santo Domingo. Here was one agent of France whom Toussaint might have welcomed without ambivalence. But Laveaux's ship was captured by the British before he could land, and taken to Jamaica as a prize. Roume would be the agent, or no one would. When Roume finally signed the order to take over the Spanish territory, Toussaint invited him to resume his office.

Toussaints troops were still so tied up in the civil war that he could send only General Age, a white French officer but up to now a Toussaint loyalist, to carry out the mission. Age traveled alone, or the next thing to it. When he reached Santo Domingo City, Governor Don Garcia refused to acknowledge his authority, though Age threatened the arrival of Toussaints army. Don Garcia gave him six soldiers for an escort back to the French border. When Age returned discomfited, Roume rescinded the order, announcing (honestly enough) that it had been extracted by force. Toussaint was furious, but for the time being he was too consumed by the civil war to do anything about it.

For months, Toussaints tremendous black army had been halted outside the defenses of Jacmel. Beauvais, never wholly enthusiastic about war with the overwhelming black army, had finally decided to leave his post and the colony—only to be shipwrecked and drowned. In January 1800, the redoubtable mulatto officer Alexandre Petion—who had previously served in Toussaints command but now decided to switch sides—slipped through the lines around Jacmel and took over the defense. During the next few months, the tightening siege gradually reduced the inhabitants to a state of starvation.

With such a huge numerical advantage, Toussaint's army could easily have surrounded Jacmel on land, but to seal off the town by sea was trickier. Though the British were supposed to allow Toussaint to operate in Saint Domingue's coastal waters, the four ships he sent to blockade Jacmel were captured and hauled off to Jamaica. This event, which coincided with Roume's expulsion of the English agent Douglas, put a strain on Toussaints arrangement with Maitland. Still worse, the French Jew Isaac Sasportas had just traveled from Saint Domingue to Jamaica to raise a slave rebellion there, and got himself arrested. If Toussaint had ever had anything to do with that conspiracy, he disavowed it now—by some accounts it was he who betrayed Sasportas in the first place. Agent Roume, however, would have been happy to disrupt Toussaint's coziness with the English, and may well have had a hand in Sasportas's doomed expedition. For whoever might have been concerned, the Jamaican authorities made a point of hanging Sasportas on a gallows high enough to be visible from the shores of Saint Domingue. Toussaint sent General Huin, who had handled much of the original Toussaint-Maitland dealings, to Jamaica to iron out these difficulties. In the end the British stood back and allowed the Americans to support Toussaint at Jacmel.

When the USS General Greene joined the blockade, Jacmel's situation became truly desperate, and when the General Greene finally bombarded the harbor forts, the defenders held out for less than an hour. Petion managed to evacuate the women from the town, then led the male survivors on a sortie to rejoin Rigaud on the Grande Anse. Broken elsewhere in the colony, the Rigaud rebellion was now confined to the southwest peninsula. Dessalines soon followed up the Jacmel victory by taking the town of Miragoane, and from there he pursued Rigaud's remaining forces into the plain of Fond des Negres. Toussaint, meanwhile, made a triumphal visit to Jacmel, where he addressed the survivors in evangelical terms: “Consider the misfortunes which threaten you; I am good and humane; come and I will receive you all … If Rigaud presented himself in good faith, I would receive him still.”⁶⁹

New delegates from the French Consulate arrived in Hispaniola in June 1800: the experienced Julien Raimond, General Jean-Baptiste Michel, who had been part of the Hedouville mission, and Toussaint's friend and partisan Colonel Vincent. The armed force meant to accompany them proved unavailable at the last minute, so these three took the precaution of landing on the Spanish side of the island (as Hedouville had done). Vincent traveled separately from the other two, accompanied by false rumors that he had orders from the home government for Toussaint's arrest. He was supposed to have been halted by an insurrection in Arcahaie, but the riot was forestalled when a local commander who either had been left out of the loop or pretended to be arrested the officer in charge of stirring up the rising before he could trigger it. Vincent continued north along the coast, passing unmolested through Toussaint's stronghold at Gona'ives, but at Limbe he was seized by an angry mob of nouveaux libres, beaten, and stripped of the papers he carried. The crowd took his epaulettes from him too, and dragged him several miles over the mountains on foot. During one halt he was blindfolded and led to believe he was about to be shot. “I will never forget,” Vincent wrote later, “another black man named Jean Jacques, commander of the northern plain; he had never seen me before, but seeing me mistreated by these Revolting Negroes who seemed very much decided to take my life, he covered me with his own body, in the desert to which I had been taken.”⁷⁰

Michel, who took a different route to Cap Francais, suffered similar treatment. In both cases the apparent object was to confiscate the envoys' papers and make sure they had no secret mission. Meanwhile (as Dessaliness army smashed into the Grande Anse in pursuit of Rigaud), Toussaint was making a triumphal progress north from Jacmel. When the people of the towns along his way came out to honor him as Saint Domingue's sole ruler, he seemed much less shy of accepting such accolades than when he had first taken over Port-au-Prince from the British.

In fact, though the new emissaries brought news that Napoleon had confirmed Toussaint in his position as general in chief (which, given the Hedouville controversy, should have greatly relieved the black leader), and a reassuring proclamation from Bonaparte to all the nou-veaux libres (“Brave blacks, remember that only the French people recognize your liberty and the equality of your rights”),⁷¹ they were also under orders to forbid Toussaint to occupy Spanish Santo Domingo. Furthermore, the new emissaries were supposed to bring the civil war to an end, but Toussaint, who was not immediately to be found in either Port-au-Prince or Le Cap, was intent on taking care of that matter himself. When he finally met Vincent and Michel, on June 25, he did not seem overjoyed by the confirmation of his rank, and he declined to have the sentence (“Brave blacks, etc.”) embroidered in gold on the battalion flags as Napoleon had ordered.

On July 7, Dessalines handed Rigaud a crushing defeat on the plain of Aquin. In light of this event, it meant little for Toussaint to permit Vincent to carry the “olive branch of peace” into Rigaud's last redoubt in Les Cayes. Indeed, when Rigaud learned that Napoleon and the Consulate had confirmed Toussaint in his military functions, he tried to stab himself with his own dagger.

On August 5, Toussaint himself entered Les Cayes, and Rigaud took flight, first to Guadeloupe and then to France. Toussaint announced an amnesty for his erstwhile mulatto opponents but left General Dessalines to administer it in the south. Dessalines exercised very little restraint in his reprisals. The French general Pamphile de Lacroix described the result as a “human hecatomb,” with some ten thousand colored persons of all ages and both sexes left dead, often by mass drownings, “if one can believe the public voice,”⁷²though biographer (and staunch Toussaint defender) Victor Schoelcher objects that if all the alleged slayings had really occurred, the known mulatto population would have been exterminated three times over. But it is clear the amnestywas something of a sham. Toussaint had once mocked Rigaud because “he groans to see the fury of the people he has excited,”⁷³ but now, when he saw what Dessalines had done, he groaned on quite a similar note: “I said to trim the tree, not uproot it.”⁷⁴

The instigation of “spontaneous” riots by the sector of the citizenry sometimes called the “Paris mob” had become a tried-and-true strategy for French revolutionaries during the late 1780s. According to some theories, the royalist conspirators in Saint Domingue were following that model when, with the help of trusted commandeurs like the Toussaint who had not yet become Louverture, they planned the first slave insurrection on the Northern Plain in 1791. The gens de couleur understood this method: Villatte's brief overthrow of Laveaux was marked by a riot in the town, and Rigaud planned one in the Southern Department to give himself an emergency exit from his first meeting with Hedouville. Toussaint, always a savvy observer of such events, almost certainly adapted the strategy for his own use—using popular uprisings to restore Laveaux to his governorship, to drive out both Sonthonax and Hedouville, and to intimidate Roume, Michel, and even his good friend Vincent. He was more careful than most not to let his own hand show in the instigation—instead he entered those anarchic scenes (even those of his own devising) to rescue the victims and restore order. “I won't tolerate the fury,” he said. “When I appear, everything has to calm down.”⁷⁵

Vincent, who had opportunity to observe this “great art of the chief” from several angles, described it with a grudging admiration: ‘with an incredible address he uses every possible means to stir up, from afar, misfortunes which only his presence can make stop, because, I think, for the most part it is he alone who has engineered them.”⁷⁶ For better or worse, the same strategy has been used in Haitian politics from Toussaint's time to ours.

In October 1800, Toussaint gave thanks for the victory over Rigaud and his faction before the altar of the principal Port-au-Prince church. Among other things this orison shows how well he had mastered the priestly language of his time—and how smoothly he could blend it with his own political messages:

What prayers of thanksgiving, O my God, could be equal to the favor which your divine bounty has just spread out over us? Not content to love us, to die for us, to pour out your blood on the cross to buy us out of slavery, you have come once again to overwhelm us with your blessings, and to save us another time. They have been useful to me, your celestial bounties, in giving me a little judgment to direct my operations against the enemies of the public peace who still wanted to spoil your creation: thus my gratitude is without limit, and my life would not be enough to thank you for it…

Make me to know, O my God, the way that I must follow to serve you according to your wishes. It's for that that I lift up my soul toward you. Deliver me, Lord, from the hands of my enemies and teach me to do nothing but your supreme will, for you are my God. Give us constantly your holy blessings, and guide us in the path of virtue and of your holy religion; make us always to know a God in three persons, the father, the son, and the holy spirit, so let it be.⁷⁷

Toussaint would stop at practically nothing to secure himself—and the principle of general liberty for all the former slaves—from present or potential enemies, within and without. As important as eliminating any possibility for further rebellion on the part of the mulatto caste was the extension of his authority over the entire island. The last two delegations from the French government had penetrated Toussaint's realm via Spanish Santo Domingo, and with next to no military force at their disposal. Observing the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte had caused Toussaint to begin considering the possibility of a serious armed incursion by the same route.

Vincent, Michel, and Raimond had arrived with an order forbidding Toussaint to take possession of the Spanish side of the island. In this first week of November, Minister of Marine Forfait reiterated this order. In a separate letter to Roume he requested that the latter remain in his role as agent of France in Saint Domingue and give Toussaint the benefit of his counsel—pending Napoleons planned reorganization of the colony's administration which (Forfait assured Toussaint) “will convince you of the special esteem he has for you and for your brave Blacks.”⁷⁸

Given the earlier promise, or menace, of “special laws” being once more applied to French colonies, Toussaint was not much comforted by Forfait's dispatches, except in that they confirmed the authority of Roume. Not long before, a French fleet carrying reinforcements to an army in Egypt had published a false destination: Saint Domingue. Toussaint had been spooked by this carefully deployed rumor and moved to believe that the next expedition supposedly bound his way might actually arrive where it was advertised.

Roume had always been a reluctant partner inToussaint's project to take over Spanish Santo Domingo. Toward the end of November 1800, Toussaint accused him of sabotaging that plan. On this and other less specific charges (like Sonthonax and Hedouville before him, Roume was said to have “sowed discord among us and fomented trouble”), Toussaint had Roume arrested. Instead of deporting him to France, he had Moyse escort him to Dondon, to remain with his family, guarded by twenty men, in a mountaintop shack sometimes described as a chicken house, “where he will stay until the French government recalls him to make an account of himself.”⁷⁹ Nine months later, Toussaint sent Roume to the United States, where he lingered a while in Philadelphia before finally returning to France.

Roume had come to Saint Domingue with the First Commission in the early 1790s, which gave him much longer experience than most of his French counterparts there; moreover, the family relationships he described in his admonitory letter to Rigaud gave him special insight into the culture of the colony's blacks and gens de couleur. To Kerver-seau, Roume praised Toussaint as fervently as he did to Rigaud, writing in January 1799, “Whatever high opinion I had of his heart and his spirit, I was still a long way from the reality. He is a philosopher, a legislator, a general and a good citizen. The merit of Toussaint Louverture is so transcendent that I have a lot of trouble understanding why so many intelligent people don't see it, and only try to mock and slander him. If, after the justice I have just rendered to this astonishing man, I was not afraid of seeming too vain, I would add that since we have been together, two things are one: either he tells me just what I was about to tell him, or it's I who advances just what he wanted to propose to me. The same zeal for the Republic, the same love for Saint Domingue, the same urgency for the reestablishment of order and agriculture, and for the constitutional organization of the country.”⁸⁰ A few months later, the symbiosis between Roume and Toussaint had very much decayed, and even at this writing Roume may have suspected that the letter to Kerverseau might end up in Toussaint's hands, for Toussaint certainly did try to intercept Roume's correspondence later on, when the trust between them was broken.

Once Roume was out of Toussaint's keeping, he wrote from Philadelphia, perhaps with a freer hand, frankly accusing him of a “project to make Saint Domingue rebellious against France and to usurp for himself the supreme power in the island.” Everything he had won up to now, “so far from slaking the insatiable Toussaint, has only increased his avarice, his pride, and his passion for conquest.”⁸¹ The latter passion, Roume suggested, might move Toussaint to launch his armies on Jamaica or Cuba or both. In a subsequent letter, Roume (who himself could never begin to control Toussaint) portrays him as the pawn of his white advisers: “In spite of the fanatical ambition and profound rascality of Toussaint, I affirm one more time that he is less guilty than those vile white flatterers, Age, Idlinger, Collet and the others. The most terrible of his passions, the desire to rule, had made this old negro, barely escaped from the chains of slavery, mad and enraged.”⁸² In a letter to the Spanish ambassador to the United States, Roume mentioned his feeling that Toussaint might soon be betrayed and overthrown by certain officers in the black army, and explored the notion of having him kidnapped for trial and imprisonment somewhere outside Saint Domingue.

The extreme contradictions in Roume's view of his subject over the years make one wonder if the Frenchman had himself been deranged by his experience with Toussaint—sometimes his picture of Toussaint's “Machiavellianism” seems downright paranoid—or if all his opposite statements were somehow necessary to cover the contradictory quality of Toussaint's actual character. Even in his most hostile letters, Roume remained fascinated. Toussaint is “an extraordinary being,” he wrote, and “he alone holds the thread through the labyrinth”⁸³ of Saint Domingue's peculiarly complex story.

With Roume under wraps in his Dondon chicken house, Toussaint was not immediately concerned with what the French agent might think of him. He notified Governor Don Garcia that he meant to carry out Roume's order of April 27 by sending Moyse with a sufficient force to take control of the eastern portion of the island for France, ignoring not only the more recent orders of Forfait to the contrary, but also the fact that Roume himself had rescinded the April 27 order on June 16. Accounts of the progress of the black army across the formerly Spanish territory differ. Though Toussaint had promised that private property would be respected (a usual feature of his rhetoric which was usually supported by his actions), one Spanish observer claimed: “The flight of the Spaniards who abandoned their lands was found justified by the abominations committed by this army and especially by the General Maurepas, that execrable tiger, who, with impunity, behaved himself just like his bandits who went to the last excesses against people of both sexes and their property.”⁸⁴ Moyse and Toussaint himself were accused of appropriating rich Spanish plantations for themselves and of looting livestock and other goods while leaving the rightful owners destitute.

By other accounts, the French administration and the fresh energy which Toussaint imported into the region were a shot in the arm for the former Spanish colony, which had languished for a long time in the doldrums. The French general Pamphile de Lacroix claimed that the union of the two territories was of mutual benefit, that it created a commerce in livestock badly needed on the French side which was very profitable to the livestock owners on the Spanish side; moreover, “the black soldiers, subject to an austere discipline, had done only a little damage; and there remained in the country no more than the troops needed to hold garrisons, and these garrisons also helped circulate money.”⁸⁵ Once in control of Santo Domingo, Toussaint quickly suspended the clear-cutting of the forests, where the Spanish had been frantically harvesting mahogany and other valuable hardwoods as their best way of getting money out of the colony they were about to lose. He began an important road-building program, and according to Lacroix, he trained the Spanish horses to faster gaits than those known to the Spanish horse trainers. “In the final analysis, this invasion of the blacks, though so much feared, right away became a benefit for the nomadic people of the Spanish part.”⁸⁶

The benefit was not accepted without some resistance. Don Garcia received Toussaint's ultimatum on January 6, and was able to mobilize some fifteen hundred men toward the border (one of their commanders was Toussaint's old adversary Antoine Chanlatte). Meanwhile, Toussaint had sent two columns into Spanish territory. Three thousand men commanded by Moyse crossed at Ouanaminthe, while forty-five hundred led by Toussaint and Paul Louverture came via Mirebalais. The Spanish defense soon crumpled; Chanlatte was defeated by Paul Louverture at the Nisao River; and Toussaint received a delegation letting him know that since both Chanlatte and the French general Kerverseau had abruptly fled on a boat bound for Venezuela, there would be no further opposition to a peaceful takeover. By that time, Moyse's force was two days' march from Ciudad Santo Domingo, where civilians feared a repetition of Jean-François's massacre at Fort Liberte.

On January 26, Toussaint accepted the keys of Ciudad Santo Domingo from Don Garcia—his former commander in the Spanish service. These two did a little verbal fencing over Toussaint's previous career in the Spanish military, but in the end the settlement was friendly enough. Though Toussaint refused to take a conventional Spanish loyalty oath, he did solemnly swear to amnesty all Spanish colonists who chose to remain and govern them according to their newfound rights as French citizens. A month later Don Garcia took most of the remaining Spanish troops to Cuba.

In accordance with current French law, Toussaint announced the abolition of slavery in formerly Spanish Santo Domingo. The importation of African slaves to the Western Hemisphere had been first conceived and carried out in Hispaniola; now a son of African slaves had put an end to it on the same spot.

Who was the man who had done these things, and what were his ultimate intentions? If Toussaint had meant to declare independence, now would have been the time. Maitland, speaking for Britain, and the John Adams administration in the United States had made it sufficiently clear that they would support an independent Saint Domingue. But Toussaint resisted this temptation. Though he had begun to behave in many ways as the chief of an independent state, he stopped well short of any open declaration. So long as Saint Domingue remained French at least in name, she could better elude complete dominance by either Britain or the United States, whose presence in the region was much more imposing. As François “Papa Doc” Duvalier would do in twentieth-century Haiti, Toussaint was charting a separate course among the much greater powers that surrounded him, careful never to become a satellite of any one of them.

His enemies, of whom there were plenty, saw him as a dictator in the making. It was even rumored that the British had encouraged him to crown himself king. But Toussaint seemed to prefer a republican government, at least in form. To be sure, that was a fledgling system in Saint Domingue, where the vast majority of the population had left slavery less than a decade before. If Toussaint's actual methods of government were a long way from pure democracy, the same could certainly be said of France.

Both his private character and his public style combined elements of ruthlessness and benevolence so extreme that it is hard to imagine just how they could coexist in the same person. His repression of Rigaud's rebellion was at times so merciless that it is difficult to deny a strain of hypocrisy in the public prayers he uttered during the very same period. Nevertheless, some of his actions suggest that he retained the belief that forgiveness and reconciliation always remain possible even in the worst of cases—a Christian tenet underlying all his ceremonial gestures of faith.

If a kindly paternalism was evident in Toussaint's way of ruling, the signs of raw authoritarianism were certainly there too. Wherever it might spring up, rebellion would be crushed. The labor policy was strict and severe, and its enforcement meant increasing intrusion of the military into all areas of civil administration and civil life. Toussaint's Saint Domingue was on a defense footing, and would maintain that stance by whatever means necessary.

The thing to be defended, above all, was the freedom of the former slaves. Thus far, at least, Toussaint's purpose was clear and unwavering. At whatever cost, the flag of universal liberty flew—and would continue to fly—from one end of the island to the other.

*In Vodou, drastic changes in behavior and/or personality are explained by an individual's being possessed by different spirits at different times; metaphorically the individual is seen as a horse that carries different spirit-riders.

*Toussaint is reminding his audience of the black regiment bizarrely known as the “Swiss,” who were recruited in the same region and promised freedom for fighting for the mulatto—grand blancs Confederation of Croix des Bouquets. When the fighting was finished, the Swiss were betrayed, shipped first to the Mosquito Coast, then stranded in Jamaica, then returned to Saint Domingue by the British. Most of them were slain on board ship in a Saint Domingue harbor. Toussaint had always been outraged by this episode and knew how to share his outrage with his listeners.