Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [112]
Dessalines's enthusiasm for enforcing labor policies was an extreme case, but many members of the black officer corps probably agreed with Toussaint's larger thinking: it was necessary to restore productivity in order to stabilize trade relationships with neighbors like Jamaica and the United States and, still more important, to raise money for the purchase of arms and the maintenance of a large army for the defense of general liberty—the universal goal. But there was at least one officer who did not agree.
Toussaint had an unusually close and personal relationship with General Moyse, whom he had adopted as a nephew during slavery time. Moyse commanded at Fort Liberte and had been instrumental in Hedouville's expulsion. In Moyse's company, Toussaint was less guarded than usual; in October 1800 he declared: “Does Hedouville believe he can scare me? I have been making war for a long time, and if I have to keep on with it, I am ready. I have had business with three nations and I have beaten all three. Also I am calm in the knowledge that my soldiers will always be firm in the defense of their liberty. If France has more people, let her keep them to fight the English—she won't have too many. She has already lost twenty-two thousand men in our country, and if she sends any more they may very well meet the same fate. I don't want to go to war with France. I have saved this country for her up to now, but if she comes to attack me, I will defend myself.”22 It is an exceptionally frank and quite accurate statement of Toussaint's attitude at this time: his preference was to keep the colony under French rule, so long as general liberty for all and his personal position were not threatened—but he was prepared to fight to the bitter end if these conditions were not met.
Moyse, who hated whites even more bitterly than Dessalines, had a still more intransigent attitude. “The French are no good in this country, and there is no one but them who trouble us, but I will do so much to them that I will oblige them all to leave and abandon their properties. If it was in my power, I would soon be rid of them. That would be one less job to do; what one has begun, one must finish. Let France send her forces here, what will they do? Nothing. I wish she would send three, four, or five hundred thousand men; that would be so many more guns and ammunition for our brothers who are not armed. When we first began to fight for our liberty, we had only one gun, then two, three, and we finished by having all the guns of the French who came here.”23
In the fall of 1801, Moyse became the focal point of a gathering discontent with Toussaint's draconian labor policy and gathering suspicion of his friendliness with the white planter class. As usual, there was tremendous instinctive resistance among the African-born majority of the former slaves to cooperating with the laborious requirements of the French-model society Toussaint and the other Creole black leaders were trying to create. The natural preference of the Africans was to revert to subsistence farming, which was not very demanding in Saint Domingue (one observer calculated that in this fertile zone three months of work would produce the necessities for twelve), and to the manners and mores of African village life—a tendency which would persist in Haiti for the next two hundred years. In 1801 there was plenty of land available for such use, especially on the thinly populated Spanish side. To prevent