Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [114]
In the case of Moyse himself, Toussaint—most uncharacteristically—seemed to hesitate. At Dondon, the revolt had been subdued by Moyse himself. At Marmelade, the next town west along the Cordon de l'Ouest, Toussaint received Moyse as if his nephew might possibly still be a loyal subordinate commander. “Everything leads me to believe that you are the author of this revolt,” he told Moyse. “Everywhere the rebels have been putting it out that they act in your name—your honor depends on your j ustifying yourself, and the first way to do it is to bring everything back into good order, because if you are guilty your general's rank will not save you—You are coming from Dondon—how many rebels have you punished there? None. How many have you had arrested?—No one. How can it be that you, commander of the Northern Department, come from a quarter where horrible assassinations have been committed and you have not had anyone arrested or punished! Go back to Dondon, have the guilty parties arrested, but don't have anyone shot—let them be brought to me alive and under sure guard.”25
By the look of these orders, Toussaint was trying to give Moyse an out. If he was doing it for reasons of sentiment, it was a highly unusual move—never before or after did Toussaint leave anyone standing who had threatened him. Agent Roume, whose analysis of the Moyse affair has a distinctly paranoid flavor, suggests that Toussaint might have been behind the Moyse rebellion himself, and that he meant to leave Moyse free and in feigned rebellion against him, so that when a French military expedition arrived in Saint Domingue, Moyse could lead the white soldiers into fatal ambushes. Far-fetched, yes—but as Roume justly points out, it was unlike Toussaint to let Moyse go, and unlike Moyse to put himself back in Toussaint's power without a struggle.
Returning to Dondon, Moyse obeyed Toussaint's orders, up to a point. He arrested twenty-four men, shot thirteen of them, and sent eleven back to Toussaint—but it was the dead men, presumably, who would have implicated him more certainly in the revolt. Nevertheless, Toussaint still left Moyse at large. But Dessalines appeared at Marme-lade to let Moyse know he had no business there. Now part of the Canton Louverture, the town was under Dessalines's command. Moyse passed briefly through Le Cap, without finding much of a welcome; when he returned to Dondon the inhabitants shuttered themselves in their houses.
Toussaint may have hoped that Moyse would flee the colony; if so, Moyse was too stubborn to depart. During a conference at Hericourt Plantation, Christophe and Dessalines persuaded the general in chief that Moyse must be disposed of—Dessalines insisted that Toussaint must get rid of him altogether. Toussaint ordered Moyse's arrest and had him confined in the fort of Port de Paix. By that time all of his secretaries, aides, and junior officers had been executed for their part in the revolt—so Moyse was convicted on the testimony of these dead men. Brought before a firing squad, Moyse himself gave the order to fire.
This episode caused the violent deaths of the two men to whom Toussaint had probably been closest: Moyse and Bayon de Libertat. It also left a dangerous fault line in the reconstructed social fabric of the colony. The violence of the repression silenced Moyse's sympathizers, but it did not make them disappear.
Immediately after asserting control over Spanish Santo Domingo, when “from Cap Samana to Cap Tiburon the authority of the chief of the Blacks extended its sovereign power,” Toussaint had hastened to secure his position politically