Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [103]
Once Roume was out of Toussaint's keeping, he wrote from Philadelphia, perhaps with a freer hand, frankly accusing him of a “project to make Saint Domingue rebellious against France and to usurp for himself the supreme power in the island.” Everything he had won up to now, “so far from slaking the insatiable Toussaint, has only increased his avarice, his pride, and his passion for conquest.”81 The latter passion, Roume suggested, might move Toussaint to launch his armies on Jamaica or Cuba or both. In a subsequent letter, Roume (who himself could never begin to control Toussaint) portrays him as the pawn of his white advisers: “In spite of the fanatical ambition and profound rascality of Toussaint, I affirm one more time that he is less guilty than those vile white flatterers, Age, Idlinger, Collet and the others. The most terrible of his passions, the desire to rule, had made this old negro, barely escaped from the chains of slavery, mad and enraged.”82 In a letter to the Spanish ambassador to the United States, Roume mentioned his feeling that Toussaint might soon be betrayed and overthrown by certain officers in the black army, and explored the notion of having him kidnapped for trial and imprisonment somewhere outside Saint Domingue.
The extreme contradictions in Roume's view of his subject over the years make one wonder if the Frenchman had himself been deranged by his experience with Toussaint—sometimes his picture of Toussaint's “Machiavellianism” seems downright paranoid—or if all his opposite statements were somehow necessary to cover the contradictory quality of Toussaint's actual character. Even in his most hostile letters, Roume remained fascinated. Toussaint is “an extraordinary being,” he wrote, and “he alone holds the thread through the labyrinth”83 of Saint Domingue's peculiarly complex story.
With Roume under wraps in his Dondon chicken house, Toussaint was not immediately concerned with what the French agent might think of him. He notified Governor Don Garcia that he meant to carry out Roume's order of April 27 by sending Moyse with a sufficient force to take control of the eastern portion of the island for France, ignoring not only the more recent orders of Forfait to the contrary, but also the fact that Roume himself had rescinded the April 27 order on June 16. Accounts of the progress of the black army across the formerly Spanish territory differ. Though Toussaint had promised that private property would be respected (a usual feature of his rhetoric which was usually supported by his actions), one Spanish observer claimed: “The flight of the Spaniards who abandoned their lands was found justified by the abominations committed by this army and especially by the General Maurepas, that execrable tiger, who, with impunity, behaved himself just like his bandits who went to the last excesses against people of both sexes and their property.”84 Moyse and Toussaint himself were accused of appropriating rich Spanish plantations for themselves and of looting livestock and other goods while leaving the rightful owners destitute.
By other accounts, the French administration and the fresh energy which Toussaint imported into the region were a shot in the arm for the former Spanish colony, which had languished for a long time in the doldrums. The French general Pamphile de Lacroix claimed that the union of the two territories was of mutual benefit, that it created a commerce in livestock badly needed on the French side which was very profitable to the livestock owners on the Spanish side; moreover, “the black soldiers, subject to an austere discipline, had done only a little damage; and there remained in the country