Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [101]
On July 7, Dessalines handed Rigaud a crushing defeat on the plain of Aquin. In light of this event, it meant little for Toussaint to permit Vincent to carry the “olive branch of peace” into Rigaud's last redoubt in Les Cayes. Indeed, when Rigaud learned that Napoleon and the Consulate had confirmed Toussaint in his military functions, he tried to stab himself with his own dagger.
On August 5, Toussaint himself entered Les Cayes, and Rigaud took flight, first to Guadeloupe and then to France. Toussaint announced an amnesty for his erstwhile mulatto opponents but left General Dessalines to administer it in the south. Dessalines exercised very little restraint in his reprisals. The French general Pamphile de Lacroix described the result as a “human hecatomb,” with some ten thousand colored persons of all ages and both sexes left dead, often by mass drownings, “if one can believe the public voice,”72 though biographer (and staunch Toussaint defender) Victor Schoelcher objects that if all the alleged slayings had really occurred, the known mulatto population would have been exterminated three times over. But it is clear the amnestywas something of a sham. Toussaint had once mocked Rigaud because “he groans to see the fury of the people he has excited,”73 but now, when he saw what Dessalines had done, he groaned on quite a similar note: “I said to trim the tree, not uproot it.”74
The instigation of “spontaneous” riots by the sector of the citizenry sometimes called the “Paris mob” had become a tried-and-true strategy for French revolutionaries during the late 1780s. According to some theories, the royalist conspirators in Saint Domingue were following that model when, with the help of trusted commandeurs like the Toussaint who had not yet become Louverture, they planned the first slave insurrection on the Northern Plain in 1791. The gens de couleur understood this method: Villatte's brief overthrow of Laveaux was marked by a riot in the town, and Rigaud planned one in the Southern Department to give himself an emergency exit from his first meeting with Hedouville. Toussaint, always a savvy observer of such events, almost certainly adapted the strategy for his own use—using popular uprisings to restore Laveaux to his governorship, to drive out both Sonthonax and Hedouville, and to intimidate Roume, Michel, and even his good friend Vincent. He was more careful than most not to let his own hand show in the instigation—instead he entered those anarchic scenes (even those of his own devising) to rescue the victims and restore order. “I won't tolerate the fury,” he said. “When I appear, everything has to calm down.”75
Vincent, who had opportunity to observe this “great art of the chief” from several angles, described it with a grudging admiration: ‘with an incredible address he uses every possible means to stir up, from afar, misfortunes which only his presence can make stop, because, I think, for the most part it is he alone who has engineered them.”76 For better or worse, the same strategy has been used in Haitian politics from Toussaint's time to ours.
In October 1800, Toussaint gave thanks for the victory over Rigaud and his faction before the altar of the principal Port-au-Prince church. Among other things this orison shows how well he had mastered the priestly language of his time—and how smoothly he could blend it with his own political messages:
What prayers of thanksgiving, O my God, could be equal to the favor which your divine bounty has just spread out over us? Not content to love us, to die for us, to pour out your blood on the cross to buy us out of slavery, you have come once again to overwhelm us with your blessings, and to save us another time. They have been useful to me, your celestial bounties, in giving me a little judgment to direct my operations against the enemies of the public peace who still wanted to spoil your creation: thus my gratitude is without limit, and my life would not be enough to thank you for it…
Make me to know, O my God, the way that I must