Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [102]
Toussaint would stop at practically nothing to secure himself—and the principle of general liberty for all the former slaves—from present or potential enemies, within and without. As important as eliminating any possibility for further rebellion on the part of the mulatto caste was the extension of his authority over the entire island. The last two delegations from the French government had penetrated Toussaint's realm via Spanish Santo Domingo, and with next to no military force at their disposal. Observing the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte had caused Toussaint to begin considering the possibility of a serious armed incursion by the same route.
Vincent, Michel, and Raimond had arrived with an order forbidding Toussaint to take possession of the Spanish side of the island. In this first week of November, Minister of Marine Forfait reiterated this order. In a separate letter to Roume he requested that the latter remain in his role as agent of France in Saint Domingue and give Toussaint the benefit of his counsel—pending Napoleons planned reorganization of the colony's administration which (Forfait assured Toussaint) “will convince you of the special esteem he has for you and for your brave Blacks.”78
Given the earlier promise, or menace, of “special laws” being once more applied to French colonies, Toussaint was not much comforted by Forfait's dispatches, except in that they confirmed the authority of Roume. Not long before, a French fleet carrying reinforcements to an army in Egypt had published a false destination: Saint Domingue. Toussaint had been spooked by this carefully deployed rumor and moved to believe that the next expedition supposedly bound his way might actually arrive where it was advertised.
Roume had always been a reluctant partner inToussaint's project to take over Spanish Santo Domingo. Toward the end of November 1800, Toussaint accused him of sabotaging that plan. On this and other less specific charges (like Sonthonax and Hedouville before him, Roume was said to have “sowed discord among us and fomented trouble”), Toussaint had Roume arrested. Instead of deporting him to France, he had Moyse escort him to Dondon, to remain with his family, guarded by twenty men, in a mountaintop shack sometimes described as a chicken house, “where he will stay until the French government recalls him to make an account of himself.”79 Nine months later, Toussaint sent Roume to the United States, where he lingered a while in Philadelphia before finally returning to France.
Roume had come to Saint Domingue with the First Commission in the early 1790s, which gave him much longer experience than most of his French counterparts there; moreover, the family relationships he described in his admonitory letter to Rigaud gave him special insight into the culture of the colony's blacks and gens de couleur. To Kerver-seau, Roume praised Toussaint as fervently as he did to Rigaud, writing in January 1799, “Whatever high opinion I had of his heart and his spirit, I was still a long way from the reality. He is a philosopher, a legislator, a general and a good citizen. The merit of Toussaint Louverture is so transcendent that I have a lot of trouble understanding why so many intelligent people don't see it, and only try to mock and slander him. If, after the justice I have just rendered to this astonishing man, I was not afraid of seeming too vain, I would add that since we have been together, two things are one: either he tells me just what I was about to tell him, or it's I who advances just what he wanted to propose to me. The same zeal for the Republic, the same love for Saint Domingue, the same urgency for the reestablishment