Toussaint Louverture Read online

  FOURTEEN

  POLITICIAN

  1796–1798

  ON THE MORNING OF 30 VENTÔSE in year IV of the French Republic (March 20, 1796), Etienne Laveaux began his 890th day as governor of Saint-Domingue. His office, located in the government house of Cap (the former headquarters of the Jesuit order), overlooked the city and the shimmering bay below. He still had, he later wrote, his slippers on.

  Laveaux’s morning was brusquely interrupted when six mixed-race officers barged into his office and assaulted him. The first of the group landed a punch; Laveaux fought him back, yelling, “No, you do not represent the people! I see no black or white citizens among you, you are assassins!” His foes overpowered him, grabbed him by his hair, and dragged him from his office. Before he could understand what had happened, the governor of Saint-Domingue was in a prison cell alongside his chief financial officer and two black army officers. Haiti’s presidential seat is cursed, Haitians like to say; so was, apparently, the governor’s chair.

  Laveaux soon learned that the plot to unseat him had originated with General Jean Villatte, the mixed-race commander of the northern province. The coup attempt did not entirely surprise Laveaux, since his relationship with the mixed-race elite had been steadily deteriorating for over a year. Luckily for him, black officers in nearby towns remained on his side. Within two days, they demanded and obtained his release, after which Laveaux fled to the hamlet of Haut-du-Cap and prepared his counterattack. To Toussaint Louverture, who was in Gonaïves fighting the British, he made an urgent plea: “My friend, you need to send me forces at once so that I can subdue the rebels.”1

  There was little question which side Louverture would support. Villatte and his coconspirators were known in the colony as the “formerly free” community because they had been free before the Haitian Revolution. Louverture was technically a member of their group, as he had been freed in the 1770s, but he claimed to be one of the “newly free,” the slaves who had been emancipated by the Haitian Revolution and who represented the majority of the colony’s population. Louverture had fought a clandestine battle with Villatte and the “formerly free,” going as far as arresting a mixed-race friend of Villatte’s who had then died of a mysterious “bilious choler” in his cell, or so Louverture claimed.2

  Villatte’s arrest of Governor Laveaux was the most daring episode of their political rivalry yet. Villatte apparently had acted with the knowledge and support of André Rigaud, the mixed-race commander of the southern region, so Louverture had reason to fear that the “formerly free” elite was planning to band together and relegate recently minted black freedmen like himself to subordinate roles. Villatte and Rigaud could not be allowed to succeed; otherwise, Louverture’s area of command in the central region of Saint-Domingue would be surrounded by enemies, his political future compromised.

  Louverture likely learned of the Villatte plot ahead of time thanks to his network of informers in Cap, which included his ally Father Jacques Delahaye and his son-in-law Janvier Dessalines, who now worked as a concierge in the government house. But he let Villatte proceed and then took his time before intervening in order to give Villatte enough rope to hang himself. It was only one week after Laveaux was attacked that Louverture finally sprang into action. Taking with him Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Moïse, and Charles Bélair (all of them relatives or old acquaintances), he headed for Haut-du-Cap, where he issued a proclamation to the population of Cap to win them to his side. Then he entered the city with an imposing force. Villatte, whose leadership throughout the crisis had been less than forceful, stepped down at once, and Laveaux reclaimed the governorship.3

  To the victor went the spoils. On April 5, 1796, Laveaux held a public ceremony in Cap to publicly thank Louverture for saving his seat. Just two years earlier, Laveaux had treated Louverture’s defection to the French Army with suspicion; he now made him his lieutenant governor. He also celebrated Louverture as “the Man predicted and foreseen by Father Raynal”—that is, the black Spartacus who was destined to liberate the slaves of the Caribbean. Louverture would purchase several busts of Raynal and place them in his various residences to remind everyone of the prophecy he had come to fulfill.4

  “After God comes Laveaux,” a beaming Louverture declared to the crowd gathered before him as the ceremony drew to a close. The Villatte affair was indeed a godsend for him. It underscored the vulnerability of French officials, who had no local power base and had to rely on his military support for survival. The ill-advised coup attempt also wiped out mixed-race power in the North. Villatte lost his generalship, and then, at Louverture’s insistence, was deported to France and court-martialed. Within two months, France promoted Louverture to division general and three other black officers to brigadier general to thank them for saving the French governor. The era of the black generals had begun.5

  Political feuds like the Villatte affair were frequent occurrences from 1796. Though Louverture had yet to defeat the British, he was already planning for their withdrawal, when Saint-Domingue would be up for grabs. Mixed-race officers like Rigaud, French administrators like Laveaux, the “newly free” majority—who would prevail was an open question. It was not even certain that Louverture would emerge as the champion of the “newly free”: to eliminate black rivals, he fought several campaigns that year against Joseph Flaville, who was popular with plantation workers near Port-de-Paix, and Pierre Dieudonné, who commanded significant support among plantation workers near Port-Républicain. This slave turned freedman turned rebel turned general had begun yet another career, that of a politician of the French colonial empire.

  Shortly after Louverture’s triumphant promotion to Laveaux’s second-hand man, an unwelcome guest sailed into the harbor of Cap. It was Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, the commissioner who had abolished slavery in Saint-Domingue in 1793. After being cleared in France for abolishing slavery without authorization, he returned in May 1796 as one of five members of yet another French commission.6

  Louverture could not help but fear Sonthonax, not because he was an enemy of racial equality, but precisely because he embodied it. Sonthonax never let anyone forget what he had done. “I founded liberty in Saint-Domingue and I have returned to strengthen it,” he grandiosely declared after landing in Cap to the former slaves he had freed. He was a master at using proclamations in Kreyòl to reach out to black field hands, to whom he also distributed 20,000 muskets so that, he explained, they could defend their freedom. Louverture found his appropriation of a revolution he had initiated deeply grating. “I am white but I have the soul of a black man,” Sonthonax once told Louverture. “And I am black but I have the soul of a white man,” Louverture replied testily. He tended to be unusually candid when was he was angry, which probably explains this rare moment of introspection.7

  Sonthonax’s return brought Louverture’s political rise to a sudden halt. Although Louverture retained his rank of division general, he had to yield his lieutenant-governorship and his political duties when the new commissioners claimed primacy over civilian affairs. The leadership structure of French colonies, with its gouverneur and its intendant, had always been prone to internal conflicts; it only became more so during the Haitian Revolution. The groups of commissioners sent by France frequently clashed with the gouverneur/intendant duopoly as well as with the black generals, who had become powerful figures in their own right.

  Concluding that it was too soon to use force to impose his authority, Louverture discreetly positioned his pawns on the chessboard. When the colony held legislative elections in the summer of 1796, he arranged for Governor Laveaux to be selected as deputy of Saint-Domingue in the Council of Ancients, the upper chamber of the Directory in Paris. He wanted “a true friend of the Blacks” to defend the cause of abolition in the French legislature. The promotion conveniently required that Laveaux leave the colony at once. Louverture reminded Laveaux that France was his “true fatherland” and that he had not seen his wife and children for years. A homesick Laveaux agreed and le
ft for France in October 1796. What became of Marianne, the common-law wife who had shared his life since 1792, is unknown.8

  In September 1796, Sonthonax announced that he would also leave for France to become deputy to the Council of Five Hundred, the Directory’s lower chamber. Louverture must have been overjoyed to rid himself of his rival so easily, but Sonthonax quickly recanted. He was so popular with the black population of Saint-Domingue that they could not bear to see him leave—or so he claimed.

  Sonthonax and Louverture maintained an outwardly cordial work relationship at first. They shared a commitment to abolition and a distrust of mixed-race generals, most notably Rigaud, who had set up a quasi-autonomous regime in the southern province. In February 1797, Sonthonax publicly handed to Louverture a ceremonial saber and two pistols; he promoted him to general-in-chief of the colonial army three months later, Louverture’s third promotion in as many years. But Sonthonax’s blunt style had a way of irking Louverture. It had become fashionable during the French Revolution to address one another as “citizen” instead of “sir,” and to use the informal tu instead of vous. In keeping with the egalitarian spirit of the times, Sonthonax addressed Louverture by his first name, but Louverture, who had fought long and hard to become a monsieur, considered this insulting. He smiled and seethed.9

  British military setbacks sparked new tensions because they allowed Sonthonax to shift his attention from the short-term urgency of war to the long-term recovery of the colonial economy. As the French conquered the last British-held areas and colonists fled with them, Louverture and other officers were eager to lease their vacant estates cheaply and to benefit financially from the revolution they had sponsored. But the incorruptible Sonthonax insisted that they pay market rates, and the would-be planters had to dance to his tune while dreaming of a day when he would leave and they could enrich themselves in peace.

  A doctrinaire Jacobin, Sonthonax refused to let exiled planters return to the colony, seeing them as counterrevolutionaries. This position put him at odds with Louverture, who was more inclined to cultivate alliances with the exiles. The matter came to the fore when Louverture’s former boss, François Bayon de Libertat, returned unexpectedly in July 1797. Louverture begged Sonthonax to allow him to settle in the colony, but Sonthonax refused to pardon a person so tied to the old royalist clique; he even told Louverture that he ought to have Bayon shot as a counterrevolutionary. Bayon, who had already tried to return during the Spanish invasion, only to have a close brush with death during the July 1794 massacre of Fort-Liberté, had to leave the colony yet again. In the new Saint-Domingue, the label of “big white” was no longer a desired one.10

  The friction between Sonthonax and Louverture increased. As the five commissioners sent from France divided their responsibilities, Sonthonax took on the task of overseeing military affairs. That gave him an excuse to appropriate some of Louverture’s troops, and he sent instructions to Louverture’s subordinates in an infuriating breach of the chain of command. Sonthonax also re-created the national guard and the rural police, both of which could challenge the supremacy of the regular army, which was headed by Louverture. In July 1797, Sonthonax even proposed to disband one of Louverture’s regiments as a cost-saving measure.

  It is not clear which one of these events pushed Louverture over the edge: Bayon’s exile? The dissolution of the 2nd Regiment? Rumors that France would soon send an army to Saint-Domingue? Or, more simply, personal ambition? But in August 1797, Louverture decided to rid himself of the overbearing commissioner. Sonthonax received advanced warning of Louverture’s intentions, but he disregarded it. He thought that Louverture was a man “of limited intellect” and the puppet of royalist conspirators.11

  All those who underestimated Louverture during the Revolution did so at their own risk. When Louverture traveled to Cap in August 1797 for the commemoration of the fifth anniversary of Louis XVI’s overthrow, he brought a contingent of troops with him, ostensibly for a general review. Then, once his men were positioned all over town, he informed Sonthonax that it would be best if he left for France at once to finally take up his seat as deputy in the French parliament. Any delay, Louverture warned ominously, would lead to unrest, “which might cause some bloodshed.” Sonthonax left two days later, taking his mixed-race wife and children with him.12

  Louverture feared that Sonthonax might land somewhere else in the colony and start a civil war, but Sonthonax headed straight for France and caused no further trouble. Perhaps he missed his French daughter enough to make the best of a bad situation. That officials like Sonthonax (and Laveaux before him) had no personal connection to Saint-Domingue greatly facilitated Louverture’s political rise. A strong nudge was often enough to convince rival officials to leave the war-torn, disease-ridden colony and rejoin their loved ones in France.13

  Because Louverture’s own sons were in France, he immediately set to work on presenting Sonthonax’s forced departure in a positive light, lest they find themselves paying the price for their father’s actions. To that effect, he published a verbatim transcript of his conversations with Sonthonax, which he claimed to remember word for word because “they have remained etched in my memory.” According to the transcript, Louverture had deported Sonthonax after learning of a most extraordinary plot: the French commissioner planned to kill white planters and proclaim the independence of Saint-Domingue.14

  Sonthonax: “We should declare our independence from France. What do you think? Such is my project.”

  Louverture (surprised and embarrassed): “That’s too much. . . . Give me some time to think before I respond.”

  [During a later meeting]

  Sonthonax (embracing Louverture and kissing him): “Blacks here are always worried about their liberty; there are some suspicious white colonists here, we need to kill them all; all is set, I only need your agreement.”

  Louverture: “Why would you want to kill all the whites? Aren’t you white yourself?”

  Sonthonax: “Yes. Not all the whites, only the enemies of liberty.”

  Louverture (with barely disguised impatience): “Let’s switch the topic.”

  The transcript read like a play, complete with scene breaks and stage directions. It was, in many ways, a work of fiction. It defies imagination that a passionate revolutionary like Sonthonax would advocate independence and re-enslavement; and it is doubtful that Louverture could remember every word of conversations held over several months. The style was awkward, the wording suspicious. “Toussaint only speaks Kreyòl, he barely understands French,” Sonthonax protested upon reading the flowery phrases attributed to him in the transcript. But the forgery allowed Louverture to portray the expulsion of a French representative not as an act of defiance, but as a desperate measure to save the colony. It worked. The Directory bought the story (or at least pretended to) and reaffirmed its confidence in Louverture. His legacy erased by Louverture, Sonthonax, the first man to abolish slavery in an American colony, became a footnote in history.15

  Of the five members of the third commission, only one, the mixed-race planter Julien Raimond, remained in Saint-Domingue by the time of Sonthonax’s exile. He was no threat, being primarily interested in enriching himself through land speculation, but Louverture eventually sent him back to France as a deputy anyway. The black general Etienne Mentor, who had dared criticize Louverture’s treatment of Sonthonax, also followed the well-trodden path from rival of Louverture to deputy of Saint-Domingue. Louverture also expelled Etienne Desfourneaux, a French officer and the only other division general left in the colony; he became the French agent in the island of Guadeloupe. Since Sonthonax had aggressively deported his own rivals during his tenure, no one remained in northern Saint-Domingue by 1798 who could realistically challenge him. France, however, was another story.16

  After his friend Laveaux left for France, Louverture received no letter from him for much of 1797. Laveaux’s silence gave him no inkling of the political situation in France, where the conservative colonial lo
bby, after suffering major defeats in 1794 and 1795, was again resurgent. In May 1797, Vincent de Vaublanc, a “big white” and a deputy from Saint-Domingue, declared to the French parliament that the colony had fallen under the yoke of “ignorant and brutish negroes” and that emancipation had been an economic disaster. His speech had a tremendous impact in conservative circles. By the summer of 1797, there were rumors of a counterrevolutionary coup in Paris.17

  Louverture was only informed of the threat in September when a copy of Vaublanc’s speech finally reached him via the United States. He “became somber and silent” after reading it, wrote a witness. “He was no longer the open and even gay man we had known earlier.” “The speech seems designed to upset the blacks,” Louverture immediately complained to Paris. Rumor had it that France intended to send an expedition to Saint-Domingue to restore slavery.18

  Laveaux did his best to defend Louverture’s name in France, but his enemies invoked technicalities to prevent him from taking his seat as deputy for most of 1797. It was up to Louverture to become the public voice of emancipation.19

  Louverture, for whom the world of print was uncharted territory, published a lengthy justification of the Haitian Revolution in October 1797, engaging with many of the central questions posed during the Enlightenment. It was the most sophisticated document he ever penned. One by one he listed Vaublanc’s accusations; one by one he took them apart. Blacks were not lazy and ignorant savages: slavery had made them so. Some violence had indeed taken place in the Haitian Revolution, but violence had also taken place in the French Revolution, he reminded his readers; the slaves had in fact proved remarkably merciful toward the planters who had so cruelly oppressed them. Black officers were not disloyal: they had defended Saint-Domingue while Vaublanc and his clique were encouraging Britain to invade the colony. In closing, Louverture reaffirmed black freedmen’s “right to be called French Citizens” and their desire to live “free and French.” He also warned that he would not hesitate to wage a new war for liberty if France ever dared to restore slavery.20