Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [100]
When the USS General Greene joined the blockade, Jacmel's situation became truly desperate, and when the General Greene finally bombarded the harbor forts, the defenders held out for less than an hour. Petion managed to evacuate the women from the town, then led the male survivors on a sortie to rejoin Rigaud on the Grande Anse. Broken elsewhere in the colony, the Rigaud rebellion was now confined to the southwest peninsula. Dessalines soon followed up the Jacmel victory by taking the town of Miragoane, and from there he pursued Rigaud's remaining forces into the plain of Fond des Negres. Toussaint, meanwhile, made a triumphal visit to Jacmel, where he addressed the survivors in evangelical terms: “Consider the misfortunes which threaten you; I am good and humane; come and I will receive you all … If Rigaud presented himself in good faith, I would receive him still.”69
New delegates from the French Consulate arrived in Hispaniola in June 1800: the experienced Julien Raimond, General Jean-Baptiste Michel, who had been part of the Hedouville mission, and Toussaint's friend and partisan Colonel Vincent. The armed force meant to accompany them proved unavailable at the last minute, so these three took the precaution of landing on the Spanish side of the island (as Hedouville had done). Vincent traveled separately from the other two, accompanied by false rumors that he had orders from the home government for Toussaint's arrest. He was supposed to have been halted by an insurrection in Arcahaie, but the riot was forestalled when a local commander who either had been left out of the loop or pretended to be arrested the officer in charge of stirring up the rising before he could trigger it. Vincent continued north along the coast, passing unmolested through Toussaint's stronghold at Gona'ives, but at Limbe he was seized by an angry mob of nouveaux libres, beaten, and stripped of the papers he carried. The crowd took his epaulettes from him too, and dragged him several miles over the mountains on foot. During one halt he was blindfolded and led to believe he was about to be shot. “I will never forget,” Vincent wrote later, “another black man named Jean Jacques, commander of the northern plain; he had never seen me before, but seeing me mistreated by these Revolting Negroes who seemed very much decided to take my life, he covered me with his own body, in the desert to which I had been taken.”70
Michel, who took a different route to Cap Francais, suffered similar treatment. In both cases the apparent object was to confiscate the envoys' papers and make sure they had no secret mission. Meanwhile (as Dessaliness army smashed into the Grande Anse in pursuit of Rigaud), Toussaint was making a triumphal progress north from Jacmel. When the people of the towns along his way came out to honor him as Saint Domingue's sole ruler, he seemed much less shy of accepting such accolades than when he had first taken over Port-au-Prince from the British.
In fact, though the new emissaries brought news that Napoleon had confirmed Toussaint in his position as general in chief (which, given the Hedouville controversy, should have greatly relieved the black leader), and a reassuring proclamation from Bonaparte to all the nou-veaux libres (“Brave blacks, remember that only the French people recognize your liberty and the equality of your rights”),71 they were also under orders to forbid Toussaint to occupy Spanish Santo Domingo. Furthermore, the new emissaries were supposed to bring the civil war to an end, but Toussaint, who was not immediately to be found in either Port-au-Prince or Le Cap, was intent on taking care of that matter himself. When he finally met Vincent and Michel, on June 25, he did not seem overjoyed by the confirmation of his rank, and he declined to have the sentence (“Brave blacks, etc.”) embroidered in gold on