Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [125]
With the news of a French-English treaty on the wind, Toussaint was rushing to bring the thirteen demibrigades of his army to full strength at fifteen hundred each. With the addition of his honor guard, his force would reach twenty-five thousand; the military budget was 35 million livres. More field hands were drafted into the army, and some of the guns that had been distributed to civilians were now appropriated for use by the military. Recruits now included boys between the ages of eight and twelve. At Saint Marc, Dessalines shot two children, eight and nine years old, when they resisted this draft.
Toussaint's strategy involved the fortification of the most inaccessible points of the mountainous interior, where European troops would be most challenged, exhausted, and bewildered, and where Toussaint's fusion of conventional European tactics with African-style guerrilla warfare would work to best advantage. He closed off most of the roads and passes into the interior to all but the military, in part to block random migration of fugitive field hands into the formerly Spanish territory but still more to conceal his war preparations from all but his own soldiers. The area of the Cordon de l'Ouest, now reorganized as the Canton Louverture and embracing Toussaint's personal stronghold at Ennery was sealed in this way, along with another region further to the south, at the end of the Cahos mountain range overlooking the Artibonite River.
Unfortunately for the secrecy of Toussaint's war plan, Colonel Vincent had personally supervised most of the fortifications all over the colony, was well acquainted with the black army's various headquarters and habits of moving between them, and knew Toussaint well enough that he could predict preparations and maneuvers he had not seen with his own eyes. Much of the information he furnished Leclerc was based on direct observation, but a lot of his guesswork also proved accurate.
Vincent foresaw that the most dangerous theater of war would be a very sizable region of the interior whose limits were, to the north, the mountain towns of Valliere, Dondon, and Marmelade; to the east, Hinche on the Central Plateau; to the southeast, Mirebalais; with a line west of Mirebalais along the Artibonite River to the region of Petite Riviere at the westernmost extension of the Cahos mountain range. He knew that Toussaint had secretly built a road for supply wagons from Dondon to several of these other interior points, many of which lay along the original frontier between the French and Spanish colonies. He knew that Toussaint had long maintained a headquarters at Boche Plantation just outside Marmelade, and he expected—correctly, as it turned out—that the blacks would have cached much of their ammunition there and also along the Ravine a Couleuvre, a long, deep defile which provided a route from Hinche and the Central Plateau to the main road a few miles south of Gonai'ves.
The black army would certainly have placed cannon in the forts of this broad area, but Vincent was confident that the cannon would not be very well positioned and that the skills of the artillerymen would be poor. He recommended that the French land in force on the Spanish side of the island, secure Hinche, and use that town as a base for attacking the rest of Toussaint's positions in the interior from the rear. At the same time it would of course be necessary to take the significant ports on the coast, Le Cap, Port-au-Prince, and Gonai'ves—but Vincent believed it essential to have a substantial French force already present on the Central Plateau, threatening the whole mountainous region along the old frontier, where Toussaint's army would have planned its retreat from the coasts.
All these measures were to be undertaken if, and only if, diplomacy failed. Vincent had put as much energy into the diplomatic strategy as into the military one.
Toussaint had his own informants