Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [104]
The benefit was not accepted without some resistance. Don Garcia received Toussaint's ultimatum on January 6, and was able to mobilize some fifteen hundred men toward the border (one of their commanders was Toussaint's old adversary Antoine Chanlatte). Meanwhile, Toussaint had sent two columns into Spanish territory. Three thousand men commanded by Moyse crossed at Ouanaminthe, while forty-five hundred led by Toussaint and Paul Louverture came via Mirebalais. The Spanish defense soon crumpled; Chanlatte was defeated by Paul Louverture at the Nisao River; and Toussaint received a delegation letting him know that since both Chanlatte and the French general Kerverseau had abruptly fled on a boat bound for Venezuela, there would be no further opposition to a peaceful takeover. By that time, Moyse's force was two days' march from Ciudad Santo Domingo, where civilians feared a repetition of Jean-François's massacre at Fort Liberte.
On January 26, Toussaint accepted the keys of Ciudad Santo Domingo from Don Garcia—his former commander in the Spanish service. These two did a little verbal fencing over Toussaint's previous career in the Spanish military, but in the end the settlement was friendly enough. Though Toussaint refused to take a conventional Spanish loyalty oath, he did solemnly swear to amnesty all Spanish colonists who chose to remain and govern them according to their newfound rights as French citizens. A month later Don Garcia took most of the remaining Spanish troops to Cuba.
In accordance with current French law, Toussaint announced the abolition of slavery in formerly Spanish Santo Domingo. The importation of African slaves to the Western Hemisphere had been first conceived and carried out in Hispaniola; now a son of African slaves had put an end to it on the same spot.
Who was the man who had done these things, and what were his ultimate intentions? If Toussaint had meant to declare independence, now would have been the time. Maitland, speaking for Britain, and the John Adams administration in the United States had made it sufficiently clear that they would support an independent Saint Domingue. But Toussaint resisted this temptation. Though he had begun to behave in many ways as the chief of an independent state, he stopped well short of any open declaration. So long as Saint Domingue remained French at least in name, she could better elude complete dominance by either Britain or the United States, whose presence in the region was much more imposing. As François “Papa Doc” Duvalier would do in twentieth-century Haiti, Toussaint was charting a separate course among the much greater powers that surrounded him, careful never to become a satellite of any one of them.
His enemies, of whom there were plenty, saw him as a dictator in the making. It was even rumored that the British had encouraged him to crown himself king. But Toussaint seemed to prefer a republican government, at least in form. To be sure, that was a fledgling system in Saint Domingue, where the vast majority of the population had left slavery less than a decade before. If Toussaint's actual methods of government were a long way from pure democracy, the same could certainly be said of France.
Both his private character and his public style combined elements of ruthlessness and benevolence so extreme that it is hard to imagine just how they could coexist in the same person. His