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By Root 1965 0

plantation, and had some knowledge of both native and European medicine. He served the rebel leaders as a doctor first, then began to assemble his own fighting force—small at first, but unusually well trained and well disciplined. When he learned that the French National Assembly had abolished slavery, he turned on the other black leaders who were still in the service of royalist Spain, drove them over the border, and made himself master of the chain of mountain forts called the Cordon de l’Ouest, which controlled the passages between the Northern and Western Departments of Saint Domingue. That much accomplished, he offered his services to General Etienne Laveaux, who commanded for Revolutionary France in the colony.

Toussaint’s volte-face turned what had seemed inevitable defeat for the French in Saint Domingue into victory. Acting as Laveaux’s second-in-command, Toussaint repelled both Spanish and British invasions from the colony between 1794 and 1798. Laveaux hailed him as “the Black Spartacus,” and made him Lieutenant Governor of Saint Domingue. Meanwhile, Toussaint proved himself to be as adept in politics as on the battlefield. Outmaneuvered by the black leader, Commissioner Sonthonax returned to France in 1797; Laveaux followed him not long after. A new commission headed by General Thomas Hédouville, sent to reassert the authority of the French government, succeeded only in fomenting a bloody civil war between the blacks led by Toussaint and the mulatto faction.

When Toussaint’s forces had won this struggle, Toussaint stood unchallenged as the de facto ruler of Saint Domingue. He seems never to have intended to make the colony independent (when offered a British alliance if he would crown himself king, he refused it), but rather to govern it as a French protectorate. By 1801 he had done much to stabilize the war-ravaged territory and had made real progress in restoring the economy, inviting the exiled white planters, whose expertise was needed, to return and manage their properties with free labor. The foundation of a society based on liberty and on genuine equality and brotherhood among Saint Domingue’s three races appeared to be in place. Toussaint consolidated these gains by creating a constitution for the colony which, among other things, appointed him governor for life, with the right to choose his own successor.

France, meanwhile, had passed through the Terror into reaction. When Toussaint sent his constitution to the capital for ratification, Napoleon Bonaparte, though not yet Emperor, ruled under the title of First Consul. The story that Toussaint began his letter to Napoleon with the phrase “from the first of the blacks to the first of the whites” is apocryphal, though inspired by real similarities between these two extraordinary self-made men, who each had risen to power through the military. Napoleon would certainly have recognized their likeness, though perhaps he was mistaken to measure Toussaint’s ambition by his own. The strongest ideological objections to slavery had been swept away with the Terror, and Napoleon was under serious pressure to restore the slave system in the French colonies, from factions of dispossessed Caribbean planters who included his own consort, Josephine. No doubt his vanity was pricked by the temerity of Toussaint’s constitution, which could easily have appeared to be a declaration of independence in all but name. But Napoleon was very much a pragmatist, and he saw the attraction of accepting Toussaint’s cooperation so as to use his forces and the base of Saint Domingue not only to threaten the English in the Caribbean but also to secure or even expand the French presence on the North American continent, via Louisiana, then still a French possession. So the decision would not have been an obvious one for him.

Part One

DEBAKMEN

December 1801–February 1802

J’ai à me reprocher une tentative sur cette colonie, lors du consulat; c’était une grande faute que de vouloir la soumettrepar la force; je devais me contenter de la gouverner par l’intermédiaire de Toussaint.