Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [119]
Napoleon was a self-invented and self-made man, in much the same style as the black general across the Atlantic Ocean in Saint Domingue, whom he was now obliged to study. Perhaps he was not flattered to see a version of himself in blackface there—though the oft-told tale that Toussaint provoked him with a letter addressed “To the First of the Whites from the First of the Blacks” appears to be false; no such document has ever been found. The view that Napoleon took of Toussaint in 1801 was in fact quite similar to the view that Toussaint was apt to take of the men against whom he had to measure himself: analytic, dispassionate, and often utterly ruthless.
In deciding whether to consider Toussaint Louverture as ally or adversary, Napoleon had many reports and opinions to digest. The extremes of the case were represented on the one hand by the French general Kerverseau, one of Toussaint's most hostile critics, and on the other by Colonel Vincent, one of Toussaint's closest white friends and one of his greatest supporters in the French camp. Kerverseau had made his first tour of Saint Domingue in 1796, soon after Toussaint was named lieutenant governor of the colony by Governor General Laveaux. Suspicious of Toussaint's elevation (and perhaps jealous of his status as second in command), in 1799 Kerverseau filed a memo with the French minister of marine, denouncing “the tricky genius, the hypocritical moderation, the real and pretended fanaticism, and the delirious vanity of the general Toussaint.” Kerverseau went on to claim that Toussaint “loves mystery, requires a blind obedience, a devout submission to his will. He wants to govern the colony like a Capuchin convent … He loves to wrap himself in clouds; he only moves by night.”36
In 1801, as Napoleon contemplated how best to deal with Toussaint's ascendancy in Saint Domingue, Kerverseau filed a longer report, claiming that under the old colonial regime Toussaint had been regarded by Africans as a sort of magical being, but by most whites as an “energetic, industrious and honest person”—until the revolution “transported him into another sphere, giving wings to passions thus far enchained, and creating in him a new man.” He belittled Toussaint's military ability, claiming that he “prays on the mountain while his soldiers fight on the plain.”37 More damningly, Kerverseau accused Toussaint of disregarding or subverting the authority of representatives of the French government to whom he should have been subordinate, and of making arrangements with the Americans and the British which might have been considered treasonable from the point of view of France. He singled out the better-known compliments of Toussaint's admirers, like Laveaux's hailing him as a “black Spartacus,” for a contemptuous debunking. At the same time, Kerverseau could not always restrain himself from a grudging admiration: “in the particular relations I then had with him, I had often occasion to admire the justice of his judgment, the finesse of his repartee, and a combination of ideas truly astonishing to find in a man born and grown old in slavery, whose principal occupation for forty years had been the care of mules and horses, and the whole of whose studies had been limited to learning to read and to sign, but poorly, his name.” But a few lines later he reminds himself and his readers that “we cannot forget that he was one of the principal authors of the disasters of the colony and one of the most notable chiefs of those bands of rebel Blacks who, dagger and torch in hand, made of the most opulent country in the universe