Toussaint Louverture Read online

  Just then, Thomas Maitland, the British officer who had negotiated the British evacuation in 1798, returned to Saint-Domingue with orders from Britain to sign a formal treaty of amity and nudge the colony toward independence. Negotiating with the United States, a longtime ally with which France was not officially at war, was one thing; negotiating with archrival Britain was another matter altogether. Roume vociferously opposed any agreement. The very act of meeting a British envoy was seditious, he informed Louverture.

  Louverture proceeded discreetly. Leaving Roume in Cap, he headed for the city of Gonaïves, where in June 1799 he signed a secret agreement by which he promised not to invade Jamaica as long as Britain agreed not to interfere with Saint-Domingue’s commerce. Well aware that Paris would react strongly if word of his private diplomacy ever got out, Louverture asked that British ships trade under a neutral flag and that the man appointed to represent Britain’s interests not bear the official title of consul.

  Roume learned of the agreement nonetheless and warned Louverture that he was veering dangerously close to high treason. Louverture’s retaliation was swift. Within days, Stevens wrote, Roume was “no better than a dignified prisoner at the Cap.” From then on, Louverture only kept him as agent so that he could sign his decrees in France’s name and write sycophantic reports to Paris. In case his forceful advocacy on behalf of Louverture seemed suspicious, Roume’s reports ended with mentions that he had written them “entirely in my hand,” with “my handwriting,” and “my signature.”10

  The US and British governments were each convinced that they had scored a major diplomatic coup. Soon, Pickering insisted to his superiors, Louverture would drop all pretense of serving France and declare independence under Anglo-American tutelage. Alexander Hamilton, a native of the Caribbean island of Nevis and the presumed half-brother of Consul Stevens, even began drafting a constitution for an independent Saint-Domingue. Louverture “is taking his measures slowly but securely,” Stevens wrote. “He will preserve appearances a little longer. But as soon as France interferes with this colony he will throw off the mask and declare it independent.”11

  Stevens spent many hours discussing independence with Louverture and was convinced that it was an end he sought. But this was the same Louverture who consistently assured France of his loyalty and confided that he was “proud to be [France’s] adoptive son.” It is not rare when reading Louverture’s correspondence to find two, three, or even four letters written on the same day on the same topic but addressed to different recipients, each one convincingly making a different argument for the recipient’s benefit. Deceit was his forte: he liked to quip that if his left arm ever became aware of what his right arm was doing, “then he’d have it chopped off.”12

  While assuring his various partners that he was on their side, Louverture followed his own plan of action, which was to reduce France’s authority without completely severing his ties with the mother country. Going any further on the path to independence would have put his sons in danger. Independence would also have been too politically sensitive at a time when he faced the most serious crisis of his political life.

  The last official act of Roume’s predecessor, Hédouville, before leaving Saint-Domingue had been to denounce Louverture as a “rebel” and encourage André Rigaud, the commander of the southern region, to reject his authority. General Rigaud, who had been freed by his white father prior to the Revolution, was the leader of the “formerly free” community and Louverture’s last major rival in Saint-Domingue. A goldsmith by trade, he had traveled to France, Guadeloupe, and the United States (as part of the 1779 Savannah expedition) when Louverture was still a homebound muleteer in Haut-du-Cap. Rigaud was of mixed race, while Louverture was black. Rigaud disliked priests, whereas Louverture courted them. Rigaud was a southerner; Louverture was a northerner. At once racial, religious, social, and regional, the Rigaud-Louverture dispute was first and foremost personal: each of these two ambitious generals aspired to govern all of Saint-Domingue now that white power had almost vanished. Britain’s final departure and Hédouville’s ouster, both of which took place in October 1798, brought into the open a rivalry that had been largely private for years.13

  Shortly after taking over as French agent, Roume brought Rigaud and Louverture together in a final attempt to avoid an armed conflict. The date, February 4, 1799, was well chosen: it coincided with the five-year anniversary of the French law of abolition and reminded the two rivals of their shared ideological agenda. The two men made a public show of reconciliation, but the war of words resumed as soon as Roume left for Cap. To the mixed-race population of Port-Républicain, which Louverture suspected of pro-Rigaud sympathies, Louverture warned that “he only had to raise his left arm and they would be done for.” This was no empty boast. Louverture, who could draw from the superior demographic resources of the North and West, amassed an army of 15,000 to 20,000 men in Port-Républicain; Rigaud was only able to muster about 5,000. The only thing Louverture lacked was supplies, which explains his eagerness to sign a commercial treaty with Britain and the United States in the spring of 1799. Accounting for ratification delays, commerce was scheduled to resume on August 1, 1799.14

  Rigaud chose not to wait. In June, he struck first and attacked the town of Petit-Goâve, located southwest of Port-Républicain, at the junction of the western and southern provinces. Although Louverture’s army vastly outnumbered Rigaud’s, his men were poorly equipped, and Rigaud had the superior strategy. While Louverture’s lumbering army marched south to meet the enemy, Rigaud sponsored insurrections all along the northwestern coast, deep inside Louverture’s territory.

  When Rigaud’s supporters threatened Cap itself, Louverture had to double back to avoid losing the war before it had even started. For the first time since 1792, he was in real danger of being on the losing side. As he approached Gonaïves, he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt when two bullets passed through his hat; two of his followers were killed by his side. Outraged, he ordered the suspects torn to shreds by cannon fire on the town square. He also ordered mass executions of Rigaud sympathizers, many of them of mixed race. Shooting, bayoneting, drowning: the War of the South, also known as the War of the Knives, had started as a power struggle between two generals, but was now turning into a racial war of untold brutality. A desperate Roume reminded everyone that Dominguans were united in their diversity and that he was himself the white “husband of a mulattress, the father of a quadroon, and the son-in-law of a negress.” His plea for unity fell flat, and the colony sank under a sea of blood.15

  Hoping to put Louverture’s martial spirit to more productive uses, Roume next tried to revive long-standing French dreams of attacking British Jamaica. A young merchant named Isaac Sasportas provided him with just the plan he needed. The scion of a wide-ranging family of Sephardic Jews, Sasportas revered the French Revolution because it had proclaimed the civil emancipation of the Jews. He felt proud to “fight for liberty and the French” at a time when discrimination was the norm for Jews in the Americas and Europe. Sasportas presented Roume with a radical idea: not only should France invade Jamaica, but it should also start a slave revolt there. Roume was initially concerned by the fate of Jamaica’s white planters, but Sasportas’s enthusiasm won him over.16

  Over the following months, Roume put together a 4,000-man expeditionary force. Meanwhile, Sasportas traveled to Jamaica to gather information and cultivate contacts. Sasportas planned to poison the governor’s coffee on Christmas Day 1799, at which point Jamaica’s slaves, the powerful Maroon communities of Jamaica’s Blue Mountains, the many French exiles living in Kingston, and the town’s Irish community would rise simultaneously. The French expeditionary force would then make the short dash from Saint-Domingue to Jamaica, proclaim the general emancipation of the slaves, and seize the colony for France and freedom.

  The plan was on the verge of being put into effect when Louverture leaked it to his US and British contacts. Louverture’s active opposition to a s
lave revolt in Jamaica is perplexing but well documented: “Toussaint may fairly claim credit for affording to [British agent Charles] Douglas the perusal of the several projects for the attack on Jamaica,” noted the governor of Jamaica, who immediately ordered Sasportas arrested in Kingston and put on trial. He was convicted of treason and sentenced to death.17

  For several days, Sasportas was left alone in his cell next to a coffin. “Nature shuddered within me when I learned of my upcoming destruction,” the young man wrote touchingly. The governor of Jamaica rejected his pleas for clemency, and Sasportas was hanged two days before Christmas 1799. The French invasion quickly unraveled. Jamaica’s slaves would not be fully freed until 1838.18

  Louverture’s betrayal of the Sasportas plan was the clearest violation of his abolitionist ideals to date, but it was consistent with his diplomatic and political priorities. He only pretended to go along with Roume’s plans because he wanted an excuse to ask Spain and France for weapons, which he really intended to use against Rigaud. He denounced the invasion of Jamaica to endear himself to British and US authorities and obtain their commercial support, but he kept the denunciation secret to avoid offending France and his black supporters. The measures he took to hide his actions were so effective that they even deceived later generations: while celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of Louverture’s death in 2003, a Haitian president cited the Sasportas plot as an example of Louverture’s “solidarity with all the slaves, no matter what countries they were in,” without realizing that Louverture had actually been responsible for the plot’s failure.19

  Louverture’s political skill was worthy of a Machiavelli or a Talleyrand, but his decision to pursue revolution in one country alone, which remained a bedrock principle of the postindependence Haitian state, meant that Saint-Domingue’s slave revolt never exported itself beyond the shores of Hispaniola. From Brazil to the United States, planters feared a second black revolution of the same scale. But the impact of the Haitian Revolution was actually limited, and the willingness of black statesmen like Louverture to trade pledges of nonaggression for diplomatic acceptance is largely responsible for that.20

  Louverture did not have time to second-guess his strategic choices. As the War of the South raged on, he and Rigaud each appealed to the French government and the population of Saint-Domingue for support. Printing presses spewed out a slew of proclamations in French in which each side accused the other of being an enemy of liberty. As a former slave, Louverture had more credibility than Rigaud, but his closeness to the British left him vulnerable to accusations that he was secretly favoring slave owners. He did not hesitate to resort to racially charged rhetoric to win the argument. “Like you I was a slave,” he explained in a proclamation to the black population on July 19. Rigaud and his ilk wanted “the enslavement of the blacks and the unchallenged domination of the men of color,” he added on July 30. Rigaud massacred babies still “sucking on their mother’s tits,” he continued on August 23. Rigaud had rebelled because “he felt humiliated, as a mulatto, to obey a black man,” he concluded on September 9.21

  Remembering his roots, Louverture also turned to oral culture to reach out to black laborers in the South. “Am I not a negro like you?” he asked one group in Kreyòl. “We are all brothers. . . . It is Rigaud, it is the mulattoes who want to make slaves of you. They had you as slaves and they are unhappy to see you free, not me, who was a slave just like you.” After promising an extra weekly day of rest to plantation workers to boost his popularity, he organized calendas (parties) and looked on as African-born Igbos staged war dances for him. Meanwhile, he organized processions and Masses to win fellow Catholics to his side.22

  But his mobilization efforts encompassed much more than propaganda and high ceremony. Louverture drafted every man above the age of sixteen and bought food, uniforms, and weapons from US merchants. One by one his generals extinguished the rebellions that Rigaud had started in the North, until, in November 1799, Louverture was finally able to shift his focus back to the southern part of the colony.

  Because the southern peninsula is narrow and its interior mountainous, there were only two gateways from Port-Républicain to the South: Léogane and Jacmel, towns located on the peninsula’s northern and southern coasts, respectively. Heavily fortified by Rigaud, Léogane held out for months. The siege of Jacmel proved bloody and equally indecisive.

  To break the stalemate, Louverture dispatched the flotilla initially intended for the Sasportas expedition to take Jacmel by sea. But the British, who proved remarkably ungrateful for Louverture’s help in forestalling the invasion of Jamaica, seized the ships before they could reach Jacmel. “Long ago they did not cease telling me that the English were deceivers, their promises, their words were never to be depended upon,” an aggrieved Louverture exploded with unusual candor.23

  Louverture realized over time that the British, despite all their declarations of support, actually wanted Rigaud to fight on so that Saint-Domingue would be ravaged by an endless civil war. They never considered Louverture a partner worthy of their respect: their main negotiator feared compromising “the character of the British nation” by dealing with a black man, while the admiral of the Jamaican squadron denounced “the ambition of this man with thick lips and frizzy hair.”24

  Fortunately for Louverture, Consul Stevens and the US Navy proved more accommodating. The fabled USS Constitution and other warships transported Louverture’s troops, captured Rigaud’s barges, and blockaded his ports. Then, in March 1800, in the first case of US military meddling in another country’s internal affairs, the USS General Greene bombarded the forts of Jacmel and finally forced its starving defenders to surrender. An ecstatic Louverture gave the captain of the General Greene 2,500 pounds of coffee to thank him for his assistance; the captain returned the favor by inviting Louverture on board with full honors. Louverture, who had only stepped foot on a ship once before, was so impressed by the influence of sea power that he repeatedly tried in ensuing months to buy a frigate from Britain or the United States. Unwilling to give him the ability to project his forces overseas, both countries declined.25

  A three-man delegation arrived from France just after the fall of Jacmel. Its timing was poor. The delegates had been instructed to bring an end to the civil war, but Louverture had no interest in ending a conflict that was finally turning in his favor. Increasingly willing to employ force against France’s representatives, he arranged for the envoys to be heckled and roughed up. One of them, who had dared to criticize Louverture in the past, was subjected to three mock executions.26

  After the fall of Jacmel, Louverture’s generals, particularly the fearless Dessalines, swept across the southern peninsula, taking Rigaud’s positions one by one. By June 1800, they were besieging the southern capital of Cayes, from which Rigaud fled in July. The war was over. Louverture had emerged victorious from the bloodiest conflict in Saint-Domingue’s history.

  Louverture’s triumphant entry into Cayes was not only of political significance. Many years before, his half-sister Geneviève, the daughter of his father’s first wife, had been sold to a white planter and taken south. This old wound had apparently never healed: Louverture went searching for his half-sister as soon as the War of the South finally gave him the opportunity. She was still alive and had in fact done quite well, having married a white planter who had freed her. She had borne him nine children. She and Louverture spent many hours reminiscing about the bad old days, after which Louverture hired one of her sons as his personal aide-de-camp. He also asked her daughters to move in with him, and his niece Louise Chancy eventually married his son Isaac. While in Léogane, Louverture also fathered an illegitimate son with the wife of a local notable, his family network expanding alongside his military conquests.27

  The reunion did not soften him. At the end of the war, he presided over a second wave of massacres that eliminated the last remnants of Rigaud’s regime. Louverture delegated the task to Dessalines, who had a taste and talent for th
is sort of thing, and then made a public show of criticizing him for his bloodlust: “I told you prune the tree, not uproot it!” But in a clear indication that he approved of Dessalines’s conduct, he later promoted him to division general and commander of the western province. Nineteenth-century Haitian historians, many of whom were of mixed race, put the total number of Louverture’s victims during and after the War of the South at between 5,000 and 22,000. The higher estimates were likely inflated, since the free population of color was less than 30,000 at the outbreak of the Revolution, but the actual number was no doubt significant.28

  One Sunday before Mass, Rigaud’s last surviving supporters were lined up before Louverture. In a public display of contrition, they stood entirely naked. A delegation of young white women interceded in their favor. Louverture quizzed the women on their catechism (a habit of his) and delivered an impromptu sermon on the value of Christian forgiveness. He then turned to his prisoners and delivered his verdict: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Return to your duty, I have already forgotten everything.” Saint-Domingue’s lord and master was ready to move on.29

  Louverture’s foray into the world of diplomacy in 1798 and 1799 underscored the complexity of a man who was a former slave, a father, a brother, a planter, and a diplomat. A master of the gray area and the white lie, he pursued multiple goals simultaneously and had to make morally ambiguous compromises to achieve them all. One of these goals was the defense of emancipation in Saint-Domingue—as long as that liberty could be reconciled with the economic recovery of the plantations. It was a delicate balancing act that would occupy him for the next two years.