SIX

Toussaint in Chains

During the ten years of his ascendancy, Toussaint preserved Breda Plantation and its white managers from the bloody slave rebellion that broke out all over the Northern Plain in the summer of 1791, then joined the rebel slaves in the fall of that year. Next, along with many of the rebel slaves of the region, he became part of the Spanish colonial army and began to do battle with French Revolutionary forces in Saint Domingue on behalf of pan-European royalism. In 1794 he changed his name from Toussaint Breda to Toussaint Louverture and flabbergasted all observers by suddenly switching the four thousand men he now commanded from the Spanish to the French Revolutionary side of the conflict. France abolished slavery in 1794, and Toussaint permanently cast his lot with the French. As a brigadier general, fighting on several fronts at once, he expelled the Spanish and the British from Saint Domingue. As governor general of the colony, he won an ugly civil war with the mulatto faction, then took over the Spanish side of Hispaniola in the name of France. By 1801 he had emerged as the de facto ruler of the entire island. He had either militarily defeated or politically outma-neuvered all the great powers of Europe that meant to claim this rich prize for themselves. In the first months of 1802 he had fought an invasion force sent from France to a draw, and then retired with full honors from the army and the government. In the summer of that year he was arrested by the French and shipped to a prison in the heart of France, from which he would never return.

Only one other man of that time could rival Toussaint's meteoric trajectory, with its dizzying climb and precipitous fall: Napoleon Bonaparte, who in so many ways resembled the black leader whose nemesis he became.

“If I wanted to count all the services of all kinds that I have rendered to the government,” Toussaint Louverture dictated in his prison cell at the Fort de Joux, “I would need several volumes, and still I wouldn't finish it all. And to compensate me for all these services, they arrested me arbitrarily in Saint Domingue; they choked me and dragged me on board like a criminal, without any decorum and without regard for my rank. Is that the recompense due to my work? Should my conduct make me expect such treatment?”¹

These lines are drawn from a seventy-five-page memoir which Toussaint composed, with the help of a French secretary, in the prison cell where he was doomed eventually to die without ever hearing any reply to any of his arguments. The Fort de Joux was a dismal place, at least from the point of view of the black general. High in the Jura mountains, in the region of Franche-Comte, near the French town of Pontarlier in one direction and the Swiss frontier in another, the ninth-century chateau is about as remote as one can get from ports and the ocean while remaining on French territory—a feature of real importance to Toussaint's captors. The man who had ordered his deportation from Saint Domingue, Bonaparte's brother-in-law Captain General Emmanuel Leclerc, wrote to the home government not long after: “You cannot possibly keep Toussaint at too great a distance from the sea, nor put him in a prison too sure; that man has fanaticized this country to such a point that his presence here would set it on fire all over again.”²

The mountains surrounding the Fort de Joux are capped with snow eight months out of twelve. The fortress has a well over five hundred feet deep, intended for use during sieges; most of the serfs who were forced to cut the shaft through the solid rock died somewhere down in those depths, never allowed to return to the surface. One of the chateau's medieval masters returned from a Crusade to find his seventeen-year-old wife, Berthe de Joux, engaged in a love affair. He locked her into a three-by-three-by-four-foot cavity, where somehow she survived for ten years. She did not have space to stand erect but she could look out through two sets of bars to see the corpse, then the skeleton of her lover, hanging from a gallows on the opposite cliff.

By the time Toussaint arrived there, the defenses of the Fort de Joux had been evolving for nearly eight centuries. The fortress was ringed by five concentric walls and three moats, each with its own drawbridge. Toussaint was imprisoned in the oldest and innermost enclosure, behind five heavy double doors at the end of a long vaulted corridor. His cell was also a low barrel vault, built with colossal blocks of Jura limestone. The floor measured twenty feet by twelve. The window embrasure, at the opposite end of the cell from the door, had been bricked in for greater security; a narrow space at the top of the brickwork admitted a little daylight through a grille beyond. Toussaint, who had been carried across France in a closed coach with a large military escort from the ship that had taken him from Saint Domingue, was brought to a prison in nearby Besancon sometime during the night of August 22,1802, then transferred to the Fort de Joux dungeon at two in the morning of August 23. He would never leave his cell.

“When I got down from the ship,” he wrote, “they made me climb into a coach. I hoped then that they would bring me before a tribunal, there to make an account of my conduct, and there to be judged. But far from that; without giving me an instant of repose, they took me, to a fort on the frontiers of the Republic, where they have shut me into a terrible cell.'³ At times, Toussaint's plaints in his memoir strike a tragic note: “They have sent me to France naked as a worm; they have seized my property and my papers; they have spread the most atrocious calumnies on my account. Is this not to cut off someone's legs and order him to walk? Is it not to cut out his tongue and tell him to talk? Is it not to bury a man alive?”⁴

First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte made no direct reply to any of these messages. At the same time he was receiving frequent letters, with a weirdly similar tone, from Captain General Leclerc, whose ostensible mission had been to relieve Toussaint Louverture of his post as gover-nor general of Saint Domingue, and who had done so at the cost of most of the men in his very large command, not to mention the ruin of his own health. “As for myself,” wrote Leclerc,

I have always served you with devotion; I will continue, I will execute all your orders to the letter. I will justify the good opinion that you have of me, but I cannot resign myself to stay on here next summer. Since I have been here I have had nothing but the spectacle of fires, insurrections, assassinations, the dead and the dying. My soul is shriveled, no mirthful idea can make me forget these hideous scenes. I struggle here against the blacks, against the whites, against poverty and penuriousness in money, against my discouraged army. When I have spent another six months in this style, I will have the right to claim repose. As for Madame Leclerc, she is ill, and a model of courage; she is very much worthy to be your sister.

Let me know, I beg you, what measures you have taken to come to my rescue; but do not send me my army in pieces; send me some good corps and no more debris like the greater part of the battalions I have so far received.⁵

Dated October 7, 1802, this letter was Leclerc's last. By the time it reached France, he was already dead—along with some fifty thousand of the eighty thousand troops who had been sent to subdue the Negro rebellion in Saint Domingue. Though outmaneuvered by his enemy, Toussaint Louverture managed to outlive him, hanging on in his frigid cell till April 1803.

What Toussaint wanted and, in his prison, did his best to lobby for, was Napoleon's judgment of the case between himself and Leclerc. Sometimes he put the request with a naive simplicity that may have been feigned: “If two children fight each other, shouldn't their father or mother stop them from doing so, find out which is the aggressor, punish that one or punish them both, in the case that both of them are wrong? By the same token, General Leclerc had no right to have me arrested. The government alone could have had us both arrested, could have heard and judged us. Meanwhile General Leclerc enjoys liberty, while here I am at the bottom of this cell!”⁶

Though Napoleon declined to render any judgment of the case that Toussaint was trying to construct between himself and Leclerc, he did finally admit, in the memoir written at Saint Helena after his definitive fall from power, that he had been wrong to oppose the revolution in Saint Domingue: “I have to reproach myself for the attempt at the colony during the Consulate; it was a great mistake to have wanted to subdue it by force; I should have contented myself to govern it through the intermediary of Toussaint.'⁷ And he went on to say that he had all the more reason to regret the error because he saw it even at the time, and acted “against his own inclination.” He “did nothing but yield to the opinions of his State council and his ministers, dragged along by the howling of the colonists, who formed a large party in Paris and who moreover were almost all royalists and sold out to the English faction.”⁸ The extent of his error may have begun to dawn on him in the summer and fall of 1802, but that did not influence him to show mercy to his prisoner, Toussaint Louverture.

If Napoleon's descriptions of his judgments and misjudgments regarding Toussaint and Saint Domingue come across as a little queasy, Toussaint confronted an even trickier task as he set about constructing his Fort de Joux memoir as a brief for the military trial he hoped would be held. Somehow he had to make it plausible that a war which had devastated the colony from one end to the other and already caused some twenty thousand deaths had all been brought about by errors of protocol on the part of Captain General Leclerc. A big challenge certainly, but he gave it his best shot.

“It is my duty,” he began, “to render to the French government an exact account of my conduct; I will recount the facts with all the innocence and frankness of an old soldier, adding such reflections as naturally present themselves. Finally, I will tell the truth, if it be against myself”⁹

This opening sally is rhetorically impressive without being especially credible; Toussaint, far from being a simple old soldier, possessed such sharp political acumen that he might well have given lessons to Machiavelli.

“The colony of Saint-Domingue, of which I was commander, enjoyed the greatest possible tranquility; agriculture and commerce were flourishing there. The island had reached a degree of splendor never before seen. And all that—I dare to say it—was my doing.”¹⁰

This paragraph is really the cornerstone of Toussaint's whole defense. He could claim with perfect justice that he had restored the colony from the ruins of the early 1790s to something approaching, if not actually exceeding, its magnificent prosperity before war and revolution ravaged it. Moreover, he had reason to believe that Napoleon was aware and at least to some extent appreciative of this achievement. The difficulty lay in finessing the fact that everything Toussaint rebuilt he later, and just as deliberately, tore down.

“However, since we were on a war footing, the commission had rendered a decree which ordered me to take all necessary measures to prevent the enemies of the Republic from penetrating into the island. In consequence, I had given the order to all the commanders of the seaports not to allow any warships to enter any harbor if they were not recognized by me and had not obtained my permission. Be it a fleet of whatever nation, it was absolutely forbidden to enter the port or even the anchorage, unless I had recognized for myself where it came from and what port it had sailed from.”¹¹

Regarding this “decree,” it should be noted that the remnants of the civil commission in question were completely under Toussaint's thumb at this time. Roume, the last French representative still on the island, had been released from his Dondon chicken house just shortly before the decree was issued. Toussaint's strategy, however, is to argue that his resistance to the landing of Captain General Leclerc and his army derived from orders he had received from the French government itself.

The French fleet made its first landfall off Point Samana, at the easternmost extremity of the island. It is likely that Toussaint got his first glimpse of the warships there, though in his memoir he does not admit it. Instead he claims that he was on an agricultural tour in the interior of what had been until quite recently the Spanish region of the island—Toussaint had occupied it for France just a year before—and that the first news he had of the fleet's arrival was the dispatch from General Henry Christophe at Cap Francais.

Toussaint's movements during the next couple of days are open to question; no one can prove with certainty just where he was. In the memoir he claims that “I hastened to render myself to Cap, in spite of the flooding of the river at Hinche, hoping to have pleasure of embracing my brothers in arms from Europe, and at the same time to receive orders from the French government.”¹² En route he encountered General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who told him that more ships had appeared before the port of Saint Marc. These had been detached from the French fleet, but in the memoir Toussaint pretends to believe that they might have constituted some foreign invasion force. He continued on his way toward Cap Francais, until from an observation post on the height of a mountain called Grand Boucan he saw—to his shock and horror!—that the city had been set on fire.

In his memoir, Toussaint argues that Christophe was forced to resist the French landing and burn down the town because “if the commander of the fleet had really had peaceful intentions, he would have waited for me.”¹³ Now that the French had landed in force, Toussaint, according to his memoir, approached their line with the idea “to have a conference” but “they fired on us at twenty-five paces from the gate. My horse was pierced with a ball; another bullet tore off the hat of one of my officers. This unforeseen circumstance forced me to abandon the high road, to cross the savannah and the forests in order to reach Hericourt plantation, where I waited three days for news from the commander of the fleet, but always uselessly.”¹⁴

In fact, Toussaint's army was by then resisting Leclerc's multi-pronged invasion with all its power. Full-scale war had broken out, and Toussaint in his memoir does his very best to blame Leclerc for all the hostilities: “if the intentions of the government had been good and peaceful with respect to me and with respect to all those who had contributed to the happiness which the colony then enjoyed, General Leclerc would surely not have followed or executed the orders he had received, for he debarked in the island as an enemy, doing evil for the pleasure of doing it, without addressing himself to the commander [Toussaint himself] and without communicating his powers to him.”¹⁵

Toussaint's interview with Leclerc's envoy the Abbe Coisnon should have resolved the question of Leclerc's authority, but Toussaint's description of their conversation explains why it didn't:

After the conduct of this general, I could have no confidence in him, that he had landed as an enemy, that in spite of that I had believed that it was my duty to go before him in order to hinder the progress of evil, but that then he had caused me to be fired on, that I had run the greatest dangers, that finally, if his intentions were as pure as those of the government that sent him, he would have taken the trouble to write me to inform me of his mission; that he should have sent me a fast boat ahead of the fleet, with you, sir [Coisnon], and my children, as it is ordinarily done, to announce his arrival to me and make me party to his powers, that since he had not fulfilled any of these formalities, the evil was done and that thus I definitively refused to seek him out; that however, to prove my attachment and my submission to the French government, I consented to write a letter to the General Leclerc.¹⁶

Toussaint also wrote a reply directly to Napoleon, requesting that Leclerc be recalled and reprimanded—a futile effort since there was no one but Leclerc himself to forward this message to the first consul. Diplomacy failed and the war went on. With three French columns advancing on him from different directions, Toussaint could easily recognize a plan to encircle him on his plantations at Ennery and, if he could not be trapped and captured there, force him down to the coast at Gonai'ves.

“These new hostilities brought me new reflections,” he wrote from the Fort de Joux. “I thought that the conduct of General Leclerc was very much contrary to the intentions of the government, since the First Consul, in his letter, promised peace, while he, Leclerc, made war. I saw that instead of trying to stop the evil, he did nothing but augment it. ‘Does he not fear,’ I said to myself, ‘in persisting in such conduct, to be blamed by his government? Can he possibly hope to win the approval of the First Consul, of that great man whose equity and impartiality are so well known, while I myself shall be condemned?’ So I took the course of defending myself in case of attack, and in spite of the fact that I had few troops, I made my dispositions accordingly.”¹⁷

Toussaint next mentions, rather casually, “I ordered the town of Gona'ives to be burned, and marched at the head of the column directed toward Pont-de-1'Ester.”¹⁸ What follows is a brief but essentially accurate report of what had turned into an all-out war which lasted three months and which ended only when both sides were depleted and exhausted, whereupon negotiations were opened by Leclercs and Toussaint's subordinates.

“General Christophe, upon his return, brought me back a letter from General Leclerc, which said that it would be a beautiful day for him if he could convince me to cooperate with him and to submit myself to the orders of the Republic. I replied right away that I had always been obedient to the French government, since I had constantly borne arms for it; that if, according to principle, they had comported themselves with me as they should have done, there would never have been a single shot fired; that peace would never even have been troubled in the island, and that the intentions of the government would have been fulfilled.”¹⁹ This passage is the closing argument of the least plausible phase of Toussaint's defense: the idea that in battling the French expedition tooth and nail, until he had exhausted every resource in his reach, he actually believed himself to be enacting the intentions of the French government.

Thereafter he is on much firmer ground, for the peace settlement he reached with Leclerc included a complete amnesty for all events of the bloody conflict that had just ended. In his Fort de Joux cell, Toussaint quotes Leclercs proffer from memory, which proves that his memory was a good one, for though he does not recall the original document verbatim, all the essential points are preserved: “Never fear, you nor the generals under your orders, and the inhabitants who are with you, that I will pursue anyone for his past conduct; I shall draw the veil of oblivion over the events which have taken place in Saint Domingue. In that I imi-tate the example ‘which the First Consul gave to France on 18 Brumaire.* In the future, I desire to see nothing but good citizens on this island. You ask for repose; ‘when one has commanded as you have, and supported for so long the burden of government, repose is your due. But I hope that during your retirement, you will, in your moments of leisure, share your enlightenment with me, for the prosperity of Saint Domingue.”²⁰

By the terms of this arrangement, all hostilities officially ceased. Toussaint retired to his plantations at Ennery; his officers retained their rank and were incorporated, along ‘with their men, into Leclerc's force. Leclerc needed them desperately by then, for more than half the soldiers he'd brought from France were dead, and his officer corps had been decimated. There was more fighting to be done, for all hostilities had not in fact ceased. Guerrilla bands ‘who'd never been ‘wholly under Toussaint's control were still resisting in the mountains, and the French suspected that Toussaint might secretly be controlling some of them.

However, there was no proof at all of those suspicions, and so the complaints in Toussaint's memoir about the manner of his arrest seem extremely well justified. The fact of the matter is that, from the start, Leclerc carried secret orders from Napoleon to arrest all the senior black officers and deport them to France. These were difficult to carry out, however, even after the war had supposedly ended. Once Leclerc had merged the black army with his own drastically weakened force, he didn't dare arrest any black general. Toussaint had been allowed to take some two thousand men of his honor guard into retirement with him; these men had supposedly laid down their swords and taken up implements of agriculture, but an attempt on Toussaint in his stronghold at Ennery seemed a poor risk.

So Toussaint was invited to “share his enlightenment” ‘with General Brunet on a nearby plantation. Just ‘why he chose to stick his head into this trap has mystified most students of his story, but whatever his motives, he was easily made prisoner there, ‘while a simultaneous raid on Ennery captured his family. The arrest really was a treacherous ploy, as well as a clear violation of the terms for peace that had been agreed, and Toussaint's exclamations of shock and dismay have a more sincere ring than many other protestations in his memoir. He was especially offended at being treated as a common criminal and denied the respect to which, as a general in the French army, he clearly was entitled.

If you had no more need of my services and if you wanted to replace me, shouldn't you have behaved with me as you always behave with regard to white French generals? You warn them before divesting them of their authority; you send a person charged with making them aware of the order to turn over command to this one or that; in the case that they refuse to obey, then you take extreme measures against them, then you can justly treat them as rebels and ship them to France … Shouldn't General Leclerc have sent for me and warned me himself that people had made this or that report to him, true or not, against me? Shouldn't he have said to me:? have given you my word and promised you the protection of the government; today, since you have made yourself culpable, I am going to send you before that government, to make an account of your conduct.' Or else: ‘The government orders you to place yourself before it; I transmit that order to you.’ But nothing of the sort; on the contrary he acted toward me with means one has never employed even with respect to the worst criminals. No doubt I owe this treatment to my color; but my color … has my color ever hindered me from serving my country with fidelity and zeal? Does the color of my body tarnish my honor and my courage?²¹

With that, Toussaint had struck into the heart of the matter.

Well before the Leclerc expedition, proofs of the honor and courage of his service to France were written all over his body: “I have spilled my blood for my country; I took a bullet in the right hip, which I have still in my body, I had a violent contusion to the head, occasioned by a can-nonball; it rattled my jaw so severely that the greater part of my teeth fell out and those that are left to me are still very loose. Finally, I have received on different occasions seventeen wounds whose honorable scars remain to me.”²²Toussaint's self-description as a naively frank old soldier may have been difficult to take at face value, but the service record his scars could show was much, much more convincing.

On September 15, 1802, one General Caffarelli appeared at the Fort de Joux. Napoleon considered Caffarelli to be one of his very most skillful interrogators, a man from whom nothing could finally be withheld. Caffarelli grilled Toussaint for twelve days and learned practically nothing at all.

“I committed myself to fulfill this mission,” Caffarelli wrote to Napoleon,

in such a manner as to attain the goal that you desire, and if I have not arrived at that goal, it is because this profoundly double-dealing and deceptive man, master of himself, precise and adroit, had his theme well prepared in advance and said nothing except what he wanted to say.

From the first day he broached a conversation during which he treated me to a very long narrative about what had happened in Saint Domingue. This conversation, which lasted a long time, ended up nowhere and taught me nothing. I left him, putting him on notice that I would return the next day to know if he didn't have anything else to tell me.²³

Napoleon, who had absolutely no interest in judging the dispute that Toussaint presented between himself and Leclerc, had instructed Caffarelli to question him closely on three points: “what treaties he had made with the agents of England,” “his political views,” and “information about his treasure.”²⁴ A rumor had traveled from the colony to Paris that Toussaint, shortly before he settled the peace with Leclerc, had buried a fortune in gold on one of his properties at Ennery then, in classic pirate style, murdered the men who had done the digging. In two hundred years no evidence to support this legend has ever turned up.

However, Toussaint avows in his memoir that at the opening of the French Revolution he was worth 648,000 francs. This very substantial value would have put him on par with the grands blancs of Saint Domingue in all respects save the all-important racial one. Napoleon, whose government was as usual strapped for cash, was very interested to know what had happened to this money and if it could possibly be recovered.

Caffarelli got nowhere with this line of questioning. Toussaint had introduced the sum of his worth into the memoir as a prelude to saying that he had invested most of the money in wartime efforts, especially against the English invaders. His memoir insists that while he had found the public treasuries empty when he was first appointed as governor general, he had done much to fill them during his tenure. However, the Leclerc expedition had the good luck to get control of most of this money in the early days of the invasion. An unnamed homme de couleur, entrusted with the treasury of the Northern Department at Cap Francais, turned it over to Leclerc when the French general occupied the ruins of the town. The treasury kept at Gonai'ves, probably comprising all revenues from the Artibonite region if not the whole Western Department, was intercepted in the Cahos mountains by Rochambeau's division when it crossed diagonally from Fort Liberte to Gonai'ves. Toussaint told Caffarelli that his and his wife's combined resources amounted to 250,000 francs at the time of the French landing (thus greatly depleted from ten years before) and that part of these private funds had been kept with the Gonai'ves treasury, the other part with the treasury of Le Cap, and so had been lost to the French with the rest.

When Caffarelli quizzed him on the tale that six men sent to bury Toussaints treasure before Rochambeau crossed the Grand Cahos had been “massacred upon their return,” Toussaint protested that it was “an atrocious calumny invented by his enemies”²⁵ and insisted that as soon as the rumor began to spread he had produced, alive and well, the guards who were supposed to have been slain.

Toussaint and Suzanne were rich in land, not money, or at least they had been reduced to such a situation after the French invasion and Toussaint's retirement. Their holdings were large, and probably included more than those Toussaint admitted to Caffarelli: Hericourt, the sugar plantation in the Northern Plain; three contiguous plantations at Ennery, and sizable tracts across the Spanish border on the Central Plateau, which were used for raising cattle and horses. Some of these lands Toussaint had certainly bought before the revolution; others, like Hericourt, which had been owned by the comte de Noe, and the Central Plateau ranches, which were outside French Saint Domingue's territorial limits until 1801, he must have annexed sometime after 1791. As for any liquid capital, he gave no answer to any of Caffarelli's questions but the one already recorded in his memoir: he had spent his last sou in defense of the colony. The story is likely to be true, considering the heavy traffic Toussaint had with arms merchants in the United States throughout the months preceding Leclerc's invasion.

Napoleon was just as acutely interested in Toussaint's dealings with the English who had invaded Saint Domingue in 1793. After many extremely costly battles, most in the area of the port of Saint Marc, Toussaint had managed to engineer their final departure by diplomatic means. The fact that he had signed treaties with a foreign power without full authorization of the French government could be interpreted as treasonable—there were rumors too that the English might have lured Toussaint in the direction of independence.

Again, Caffarelli's interrogation could get no traction on this subject. Toussaint admitted only to two treaties concluded with General Maitland, one of which simply settled the British evacuation of the couple of points on the island they still occupied at the end of 1798. The second treaty covered British trade privileges with Saint Domingue, along with the nonaggression pact: Maitland promised not to interfere with Saint Domingue's shipping in Caribbean waters, Toussaint undertook not to attack Jamaica. This last commitment was a special nuisance for Napoleon, who had been entertaining a plan to use Saint Domingue as a base for just such an attack.

Caffarelli probed Toussaint concerning the suspicion that Toussaint had somehow “sold” himself to the English, but Toussaint insisted that he had received nothing from them other than a saddle and trappings for his horse, which he at first refused but was persuaded to accept as a personal gesture from General Maitland, and twenty barrels of gunpowder which Maitland also offered him. Otherwise he had no supplies or guns or munitions from the English; his war materiel was purchased from the United States or (quite frequently) captured from his enemies.

Between September 15 and September 24, Caffarelli interviewed Toussaint seven times. Of their second encounter, Caffarelli reported, “I found him trembling with cold, and sick, he was suffering a lot and could hardly speak.”²⁶ The climate of the high and frosty Jura mountains could hardly be expected to suit an elderly man with many war wounds, who had spent his whole life in the tropics. In lieu of conversation Toussaint offered Caffarelli the document he had dictated. “I shut myself up to read this memoir right away,” said the interrogator; “it was not difficult for me to recognize that the conversation of the previous day was nothing but an abridgment of this writing, on which he had built his whole defense.”²⁷ In the subsequent interviews, Caffarelli could not get Toussaint to deviate by a hair from the defensive strategy which his memoir rehearsed. Despite his weakness, illness, and all the pressure Caffarelli could bring to bear on him, Toussaint said “nothing except what he wanted to say.”

Caffarelli was worth his salt as an investigator, and after several days of being stonewalled he shifted his own tactics, with the idea of “exciting his amour propre … I told him that everything he had declared up to the present was beneath a man like himself, who was the first man of his color, who had won glory as a soldier, who had governed for a long time, who actually fallen low, unfortunate, and without hope of raising himself back up, he could win a kind of glory heretofore unknown to him, but which could be useful to him, and which would consist of having the courage to break out of the circle of denial in which he had shut himself, to declare nobly that he had driven off the agents of the Republic, because they were an obstacle to his designs, that he had organized an army, an administration, had accumulated treasuries, filled the arsenals and warehouses to assure his independence. That by going in this direction he would win the kind of glory which suited his real courage, and could get himself pardoned for many faults.”²⁸

This gambit was a cunning one, and suggests that Caffarelli had been able to discern aspects of Toussaint's character (pride in his achievements, outrage at the sorry way they'd been received) which Toussaint during their interviews was doing his best to conceal. If Toussaint had taken the bait, Caffarelli might have tempted him to confess a plan to make Saint Domingue independent of France— a fault which certainly would not have been pardoned. Toussaint was impressed, but only into silence. When he spoke again, it was on the same lines as before.

“I saw him show spirit,” Caffarelli concluded, “on just two occasions.

“The one, when they brought him the clothing and underwear which they had prepared for him.” According to the program of small deprivations and humiliations designed by Napoleon for his prisoner, Toussaint was divested of his uniform and given clothing such as an ordinary peasant would wear; he was not insensible to the insult.

“The second, when they asked him to give up his razor. He said that the men who took that instrument from him must be very small-minded, since they suspected he lacked the necessary courage to bear his misfortune, that he had a family and that moreover his religion forbade him any attempt on his own life.”²⁹

There for once, however briefly Toussaint did show a flash of his true colors, those which Caffarelli had tried unsuccessfully to expose. Caffarelli, though frustrated as ever, was also grudgingly impressed. “He seemed to me, in his prison, patient, resigned, and expecting from the First Consul all the justice which he believes he deserves.” It's not far to the very last line of Caffarelli's report: “His prison is cold, sound, and very secure. He communicates with no one.”³⁰

Caffarelli's report does not go into Toussaint's “political views” in very general terms, though some specifics of his political dealings with the English are covered, and Toussaint gave the interrogator a fairly detailed report on the capacities and sentiments of many men in his officer corps who were still in Saint Domingue. So his overall political attitude must be deduced from what he said, and what he wrote, and from his actions. These show that he believed in the Rights of Man and of Citizen, as the French Revolution had proclaimed them not so very long before. And that he himself, regardless of race, was entitled to the rights and prerogatives of a French citizen and to those of a high-ranking officer in the French army. Therefore he believed with his whole being that he was entitled to his day in court. He could not have been fool enough to be certain that a trial would vindicate him, but he believed that a trial would give him a fair chance. He had composed the best defense he could, and he believed that he had an absolute right to present it, whatever the outcome might be.

In the silence following Caffarelli's departure, winter settled over the Fort de Joux. Naturally, Toussaints health began to worsen, in that extreme cold and at that unaccustomed altitude; no one could have expected any different. No word came of any trial; no reply to Toussaints memoir arrived from the first consul. In the last weeks and months of 1802, Toussaint must have begun to suspect that Napoleon did intend to bury him alive.

*November 9, 1799, by the French Revolutionary calendar, the date of the bloodless coup that elevated Napoleon to the consulate.