Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [107]
Toussaint sometimes said that the nasal tone of his voice was caused by a Vodou curse that had been cast on him. That was a reason for him to dislike Vodou, but it by no means suggested that he didn't believe in it. During the civil war with Rigaud, the mambo Mama Boudin and two houngans were arrested in Port-au-Prince for conducting a ceremony meant to inspire a violent rebellion. Up till that time, Toussaint had done no more than discourage Vodou assemblies and ceremonies (and that inconsistently, depending on how they might suit his own needs), but now he prohibited them altogether. He did not want the revolutionary spirits called to Bois Caiman—Ogoun Ferraille and Erzulie Dantor—to be summoned to revolts against his own regime. That Vodou cults differed according to tribe was also a factor. Tous-saint's Arada group was a minority in Saint Domingue, and so too were the Arada spirits.
The apparent contradictions of Toussaint's personality—the extremes of ruthlessness or beneficence he displayed on different occasions and under different circumstances—are most easily resolved in the terms of Vodou, ‘where the individual ego can disappear altogether, ceding control of the person and his actions to an angry or a gentle spirit. Toussaint's “secret voice” had something of this quality, and probably there was more than one such voice. Despite a certain grandiosity in this discourse, he knew the spirit he incarnated was something larger than himself. He would invoke it one last time, ‘when he had personally been overthrown, as the spirit of the revolution he had carried well past the point of no return.
In the first months of 1801, Toussaint Louverture was at the apogee of his military and political success; he looked to be invincible. He had, as Pamphile de Lacroix put it, “the aura of a prince.”2 He held a kind of court in the government buildings of Cap Francais and Port-au-Prince, but though his staff, guests, and courtiers wore the most elaborately formal garb, Toussaint himself preferred “simple dress in the midst of brilliant surroundings,” either a plain field uniform of his general's rank, or the clothing of a planter at home on his property, “that is to say, ‘white trousers and a ‘white vest of very fine fabric, with a madras around his head.”3 On the other hand, he was usually attended by officers of his honor guard, a group which grew to eighteen hundred strong and was mounted on the colony's best horses. The guardsmen wore silver helmets with an engraved French motto and red crests; Toussaint's formal arrivals were preceded by trumpets. Chosen for their height and good looks among other qualities, this troop included “names distinguished during the ancien regime”4 —implying that Toussaint trusted some white citizens of his new polity enough to place them in his bodyguard.
Yet he remained extremely cautious, even or especially at this height of his powers. After all, he had narrowly escaped several assassination attempts by ambush within the last year. He continued to ride all over the colony (on a splendid white stallion named Bel Argent) ‘with the speed of a thunderbolt,” making a mystery of his movements, arriving ‘where he was least expected, and “seeing everything for himself.”5 During this period he was constantly purchasing arms from abroad and caching them all over the country. The English had left him nearly sixty thousand muskets. Sonthonax had distributed fifty thousand guns to the nouveaux libres and Toussaint imported at least thirty thousand from the United States. Many of his arms deals were kept secret from his own administrators, but he liked to conduct frequent reviews in which the guns and ammunition were produced and inspected, and he liked to brandish a musket before an audience of field hands, exclaiming, “This is your liberty!”6
Toussaint slept for no more than two hours a night, and his endurance, both in the saddle and