Toussaint Louverture Read online

  Louverture did not have to act upon his threats. By the time he made them, French liberals had already arrested the main royalist conspirators in Paris, including Vaublanc, and deported seventeen of them to French Guiana, a backwater colony at the northern end of the Amazon rainforest that France used as a penitentiary. The French government immediately reassured Louverture that emancipation was still official policy and that he had nothing to fear.21

  Though it ended well, the episode made clear that eliminating rivals in Saint-Domingue was not enough to secure Louverture’s political future: he also had to shape public opinion in Paris. His initial forays into lobbying (three deputies sent to Paris after the 1795 colonial debate, another three sent after Sonthonax’s expulsion) now became systematic as Louverture established a permanent presence on the Parisian political scene. Every time a boat sailed from Saint-Domingue, it took with it letters to the French government that emphasized Louverture’s achievements. Every time he made a controversial decision, which was often, he distributed printed reports justifying his actions and dispatched trusted associates to the colonial ministry in Paris.

  Equally effective were the fluff pieces planted in the French and US press that outlined Louverture’s genius and moderation. One article, ostensibly based on the testimony of a person who had recently met Louverture in Saint-Domingue, described his life in idyllic terms to the Parisian reading public. “It is I,” Louverture explained, “who picked my wife. My masters wanted to marry me to young and alluring women,” but he was more interested in a “happy marriage,” and so selected Suzanne as his bride. Louverture made of course no mention of the fact that he was still legally married to Cécile. The article did much to soften Louverture’s public image at a time when he was starting to challenge French authority. “This is how public opinion is shaped,” one of Louverture’s envoys reported triumphantly from Paris. “We defeated [your enemies] and easily remained masters of the battlefield.”22

  After the departure of Sonthonax, Louverture governed northern Saint-Domingue for seven months with minimal interference from France. He also scored a great coup when the British, whose invasion of Saint-Domingue had proved one of the worst fiascos in British military history, appointed a new commander to oversee an orderly withdrawal. Victory, both domestic and international, was on the horizon.

  Then, as March 1798 was drawing to an end, yet another French representative arrived. Gabriel de Hédouville bore the official title of “agent” of the French Republic, which gave him broad authority over all matters in the colony. Accompanied by fewer than two hundred troops, he immediately wrote to express his goodwill, but Louverture took his unannounced arrival and his decision to land on the Spanish side of the island as proof of France’s lack of trust in his loyalty. Still reeling from the painful colonial debate of 1797, he had begun to second-guess every French policy move. The fresh-faced idealist of 1794 was gone; suspicion and recrimination were now the order of the day.23

  Hédouville was a veteran of the republican civil war in the Vendée and a genuine son of the French Revolution, yet Louverture disliked him from the outset, most likely because he resented the presence of a civilian who officially outranked him. He found one excuse after another not to meet Hédouville. He had to fight the British, he wrote; a flood had cut off the road; he was simply too busy. It was only after he had overseen the British evacuation from Port-Républicain and nearby Saint-Marc that in June 1798 Louverture finally visited Cap, where Hédouville had been awaiting him for well over a month.

  Hédouville presented Louverture with fine gifts—a carbine, a scarf, and a saddle from the best workshops in France—but Louverture remained on his guard, remembering that experience had taught him that “some men seem to love liberty on their lips, even though they are its sworn enemies inside.” To a French frigate captain who suggested that he might enjoy retiring in France, Louverture allegedly replied, “Your boat is not large enough for a man like me.” He later added, while pointing to a shrub, “I will only leave when this provides enough wood to build a ship-of-the-line.”24

  Hédouville was careful not to offend Louverture, whom he viewed as the most capable of all the black officers who had been promoted during the Revolution, but political and financial quarrels soon began to emerge. A decree preventing officers from leasing vacant estates below their market value did not go well with the black officers, Louverture included, who wished to invest in the plantation economy. Appalled by the embezzlement of army funds, Hédouville also proposed to reduce the size of the colonial army to 6,000 men as the war with Britain wound down. “If there are no soldiers, there won’t be any more generals,” complained Louverture’s nephew Moïse. Louverture “reacted strongly to this project,” Hédouville reported in code back to Paris. “He fears that the government will send forces to restore slavery.” Far from demobilizing his troops, Louverture incorporated into his army two regiments of men of color left behind by the British during their evacuation.25

  In keeping with French revolutionary doctrine, Hédouville took a hard line against the nobles who had collaborated with the enemy or fled Saint-Domingue (the so-called émigrés). But Louverture disobeyed him and issued blanket amnesties to most of the planters who stayed behind when the British evacuated Port-Républicain and Saint-Marc in May 1798. One of them was none other than Bayon de Libertat, who had snuck back to Saint-Domingue for a third time. Louverture jumped at the opportunity to become the patron of his former boss and unilaterally allowed Bayon to settle in the colony so that “this poor old man will finally enjoy the happiness that has eluded him for so long.”26

  The émigré controversy reemerged in August 1798, when Britain evacuated the southern town of Jérémie, and planters flocked to Port-Républicain to beg Louverture for his forgiveness. Defying Hédouville’s orders, he again issued a general amnesty. “You are guilty in the eyes of the Republic,” he told the repentant whites from the pulpit one Sunday after Mass. But “I will imitate Jesus Christ who is being worshiped in this temple. He forgave in the name of his Father, I will forgive in the name of the Republic.”27

  Louverture’s magnanimity gave Thomas Maitland, the general overseeing the British evacuation, a clever idea: what if he could turn Louverture against Hédouville and salvage something from Britain’s disastrous invasion of Saint-Domingue? When the time came to evacuate the port of Môle Saint-Nicolas, the last position still in British hands, Maitland insisted on negotiating directly with Louverture instead of Hédouville’s envoy. To drive a wedge between the two men, Maitland treated Louverture as if he were royalty and showered him with gifts and honors. “I was not expecting such deference,” Louverture wrote glowingly.28

  Louverture negotiating with General Maitland during the British evacuation of Môle Saint-Nicolas in 1798. [François Grenier?], Le Gal Toussaint-L’Ouverture . . . (c. 1821), courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

  By September 1798, the rupture between Louverture and Hédouville was complete. Their letters read like shouting matches. Louverture did not attend the Feast of the Republic in Cap, a celebration commemorating the beginning of the Republican calendar year, and instead prepared his next move. Hédouville had few French troops and even fewer local supporters, which made it relatively easy to oust him, but Louverture prepared the ground thoroughly anyway. He first offered to resign so as to deceive Hédouville; meanwhile, to ingratiate himself to the black population, he spread rumors that Hédouville’s labor regulations were a first step toward the restoration of slavery. Relying on the power of Vodou for the occasion, Louverture let cultivators organize dances and ceremonies in which priests made “horrible imprecations” in front of an ox’s skull.29

  Unwilling to break with France openly, Louverture sought some indirect means of exiling Hédouville. The French agent provided him with just the excuse he needed when in October 1798 he abruptly disbanded Moïse’s regiment in Fort-Liberté. Within days, 10,000 irate black soldiers and field hands were a
t the gates of Cap demanding justice. A terrified Hédouville appealed to Louverture, who declined to intervene; he had probably encouraged Moïse to revolt in the first place. Instead, he asked another subordinate, General Dessalines, to march on Cap to put even more pressure on Hédouville. Only after Hédouville set sail for France to save his own life did Louverture providentially appear to restore order.30

  To Moïse, whose brother had died during the incident of Fort-Liberté, Louverture began hinting at declaring independence outright. “Hédouville claims he will pick up troops in France and return; does he think he scares me?” he told his nephew. “I waged war with three countries, and I vanquished all three.” He reaffirmed his loyalty to France, however, and insisted that the departure of Hédouville was simply a misunderstanding. To defend himself, he sent envoys to Paris bearing copies of a memoir printed at his request and personal letters addressed to every person he knew in the city. He also asked each town of the colony to write a petition in his favor.31

  Louverture’s written offensive worked. The minister of the navy expressed his “surprise” that a second French representative had been forced to leave in a year, but after much lobbying by Louverture’s emissaries, the minister eventually condoned his conduct. As long as the war with Britain continued in Europe, France could not do much against its wayward general in Haiti anyway.32

  In two years, Louverture had defeated his most serious rivals: a mixed-race general (Villatte), three colonial officials (Laveaux, Sonthonax, Hédouville), one French deputy (Vaublanc), and half a dozen lesser local rivals of all colors. For the first time in his career, in northern and western Saint-Domingue he had no superior to answer to and no local enemy to defeat. Over the next two years he would also eliminate the mixed-race general governing southern Saint-Domingue and the last of the French agents, systematically removing all his rivals until there were none.

  FIFTEEN

  DIPLOMAT

  1798–1800

  JOSEPH BUNEL ARRIVED at the Philadelphia residence of US Secretary of State Timothy Pickering the day after Christmas in 1798. Bunel was the personal envoy of Toussaint Louverture—in effect, his ambassador. Pickering was hosting a dinner party; other guests included two congressmen and the Speaker of the House, but it was Bunel whom Pickering really wanted to see.1

  The diplomatic background to Bunel’s visit was a sensitive matter. The alliance between France and the United States dated back to the American Revolution, but the relationship had recently deteriorated after questionable seizures of US merchantmen by French privateers. Neither country had declared war; but by 1798 they were waging an unofficial conflict known as the Quasi-War.

  Most of the fighting took place in the Caribbean, where the US Navy waged and won the first battles in its history. French officials considered a daring response: invading the United States with an army of freedmen from Saint-Domingue. The continental army had melted away after the War of Independence, so Haiti was the superior land power at the time. A panic ensued when word got out that a black army might soon ravage the US South. In retaliation, the US Congress passed an embargo that banned all trade with France and its colonies, and commerce to and from Saint-Domingue came to a standstill.

  The timing of the Quasi-War was particularly bad for Louverture. Now that the last of the British had finally left Saint-Domingue, he was eager to begin the arduous process of rebuilding the plantation economy. Meanwhile, a civil war with his mixed-race rival André Rigaud seemed increasingly likely, and he needed to restock his arsenals. He could not pursue either of these goals without the commercial support of the United States, which had replaced France as the colony’s main trading partner during the French Revolution.

  Convincing the United States to lift its trade embargo was the mission of Louverture’s diplomatic envoy to Philadelphia. In a personal letter Bunel brought to President John Adams, Louverture expressed his “great surprise and utmost sadness to see the ships of your nation abandon the ports of Saint-Domingue.” Well aware of the causes of Adams’s ire, Louverture promised that “orders will be given to our privateers to protect the flag of the United States.” He also opposed French plans to invade the United States.2

  Bunel’s arrival caused a stir. Louverture had selected a white man as his ambassador to avoid offending local racial sensitivities, but Bunel was married to a black woman and represented the first black leader in the Americas, either of which was controversial enough on its own. Yet Adams, who was neither a Virginian nor a slave owner, proved more willing to engage Haitian revolutionaries than his predecessor, George Washington, and his successor, Thomas Jefferson.3

  One week after dining with Pickering, Bunel obtained a personal audience with the president. It went well, and in February 1799 the US Congress authorized Adams to exempt from the trade embargo any French territory that did not harass US commerce. The law was so transparently intended for Saint-Domingue and Louverture that it was nicknamed “the Toussaint clause.”4

  As winter gave way to spring, Pickering selected a Caribbean-born doctor, Edward Stevens, as the first US consul general to Saint-Domingue, sending him off to Cap to negotiate a formal treaty with Louverture. Stevens brought with him a full cargo of items for sale, which, in these days of fiscal restraint, would finance his stay in Saint-Domingue. He also carried his government’s official response to Louverture’s letter. President Adams had not drafted the response himself—this was precisely the kind of snub that Louverture was quick to notice—so Secretary of State Pickering had taken on the task, indicating that he was open to “a renewal of commercial intercourse.” He closed with an arresting flourish: “I am with due considerations, Sir, your obedient servant.” To a former slave, the niceties of diplomatic language must have had a peculiar ring: Louverture was not used to hearing prominent white men refer to themselves as his “obedient servant.”5

  Saint-Domingue was not officially independent, but the next two years saw Louverture conduct high-level negotiations with British Jamaica and the United States as if he were the master of his own domain. His diplomatic partners had yet to abolish slavery and the slave trade, or even give free blacks a political role, but Louverture proved so uniquely talented as a diplomat that they agreed to deal with him on almost equal terms—a remarkable achievement considering that the United States would not again establish formal diplomatic relations with Haiti until 1862. Meanwhile, Louverture targeted the last local rivals who stood between him and absolute power. He had to betray his abolitionist principles along the way, but by 1800 his status as all-powerful leader of Saint-Domingue would be secure.

  While Bunel was in Philadelphia, a new French agent, Philippe Roume, arrived in Saint-Domingue to take the post left vacant by Hédouville’s exile. Roume was a moderate white creole planter who had embraced the cause of abolition. He was, in short, the kind of man Louverture could live with. Louverture had in fact requested Roume’s presence for fear that France might appoint a more troublesome figure instead. Roume was nonconfrontational by taste and by necessity: instead of opposing Louverture head-on as his predecessors had done, his strategy was to channel his ambition by “deserving and earning his trust.”6

  Louverture had a plan of his own. As Roume made his way from Santo Domingo to Port-Républicain to meet him, demonstrators physically threatened him all along the route; each time, they stopped when Louverture sent orders to spare his life. By the time Roume completed his journey, he had gotten the point: he only lived at Louverture’s discretion. The agent immediately announced that he would “do nothing” without first consulting Louverture, thus upending the normal hierarchy between civilian and military authorities.7

  In an effort to placate Louverture, who often decried the colony’s libertine ways and wished to break down racial barriers, Roume formally divorced his estranged French wife, so that he could marry his longtime mixed-race mistress Marie-Anne Rochard. Louverture served as witness for the wedding as well as for the baptism of their daughter, which took place nin
e months later to the day. Their personal ties notwithstanding, Louverture did not ease up the pressure on the French agent. He again organized popular demonstrations to intimidate Roume when he left Port-Républicain to take up his post in Cap. Roume was cowed and powerless from the beginning of his tenure—and, judging by the rambling style of his letters, a little unhinged.8

  Over the previous months, France had sent instructions to Saint-Domingue officials to export the ideals of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, just as France had done on European battlefields. Specifically, Louverture was to attack the southern United States or Jamaica. The French agent in Guadeloupe had successfully invaded neighboring islands with black freedmen, and the French were hoping to continue the strategy elsewhere. But Louverture had a different reading of the diplomatic situation. He did not want to risk his life in some harebrained adventure overseas, even one that offered the promise of altering the course of world history. His long-term goal was not universal emancipation but abolition in Saint-Domingue, his political rise, and the colony’s economic recovery, none of which could take place if he needlessly provoked the two main naval powers of the Caribbean. He chose to pursue cooperation instead.

  Although French colonies like Saint-Domingue were not normally allowed to conduct diplomacy independent of the imperial capital, Louverture welcomed Stevens with open arms when the US consul general reached Cap from Philadelphia in April 1799. Roume reluctantly agreed to cancel the commissions of French privateers so that trade with the United States could resume. His mission completed in a matter of days, Stevens took up residence in Cap, where he rented a house owned by Louverture and developed a warm relationship with him. The French agent in Guadeloupe, who tried and failed to negotiate a similar treaty with the United States during the same period, could only admire Louverture’s diplomatic acumen.9