Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [120]
Colonel Vincent had served in Saint Domingue for ten years longer than Kerverseau, arriving as a brigadier general in 1786. Trained as an engineer, he was mainly responsible for the building of fortifications; his marriage to a Creole landowner rooted him in the colony. At an early date he became one of Toussaint's closest white confidants and advisers, and remained so to the bitter end. In 1799 he too had filed a memorandum with the French minister of marine: “The true leader of the colony, divisionary general and chief of all the armed forces, whom I should call to begin with truly illustrious, is Toussaint Louverture, by all measures a truly astonishing man, an unshakeable friend of France … the protector of Europeans and of all good men … Effectively, all must yield before the rare and healthy intelligence, the indefatigable zeal and the amazing level-headedness of this extraordinary man.'39 By 1801 his opinion of Toussaint had become somewhat more ambivalent, thanks to the arguments he and Toussaint had had over the constitution, but still he did his utmost to dissuade Napoleon from opposing Toussaint by force.
In his final exile on Saint Helena, Napoleon analyzed the matter thus:
The prosperous situation in which the Republic found itself in the present of 1801, after the Peace of Luneville, made already foreseeable the moment when England would be obliged to lay down her arms, and when we would be empowered to adopt a definitive policy on Saint Domingue. Two such presented themselves to the meditations of the First Consul: the first to clothe General Toussaint Louverture with civilian and military authority and with the title of Governor-General; to entrust command to the black generals; to consolidate and legalize the work discipline established by Toussaint, which had already been crowned by happy success; to require the black leaseholders* to pay a tax or a rent to the former French proprietors, to conserve for the metropole the exclusive right to trade with the whole colony, by having the coasts patrolled by numerous cruisers. The other policy consisted of reconquering the colony by force of arms, bringing back to France all the blacks who had occupied ranks superior to that of battalion chief, disarming the blacks while assuring them of their civil liberty, and restoring property to the [white] colonists. These projects each had advantages and inconveniences. The advantages of the first were palpable: the Republic would have an army of twenty-five to thirty thou-sand blacks, sufficient to make all America tremble; that would be a new element of power and one that would cost no sacrifice, either in men or in money. The former landowners would doubtless lose three quarters of their fortune; but French commerce would lose nothing there, since it always enjoyed the exclusive trade privilege. The second project was more advantageous to the colonial landowners, it was more in line with justice; but it required a war which would bring about the loss of many men and much money, the conflicting pretensions of the blacks, the colored men, and the white landowners would always be an object of discord and an embarrassment to the metropole; Saint Domingue would always rest on a volcano: thus the First Consul was inclined toward the first policy, because that was the one that sound politics seemed to recommend to him—the one that would give more influence to his flag in America. What might he not undertake, with an army of the twenty-five to thirty thousand blacks, in Jamaica, the Antilles, Canada, the United States even, and the Spanish colonies?40
The wistful strains of hindsight suffuse these lines. If Napoleon had foreseen just how destructive the policy of retaking Saint Domingue by force of arms would turn out to be, he almost certainly would have adopted the option of conciliating the black leadership. He was too politically astute not to have seen, even as he made the decision to commit himself to the opposite course, what an extraordinary opportunity for expansion was the