Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [128]
Toussaint's movements during these first days of the invasion are occluded. By his own generally disingenuous account written in the Fort de Joux, Le Cap was already burning by the time he got his first glimpse of the situation from the height of Grand Boucan. However, almost a week elapsed between Leclerc's first landfall at Point Samana and his landing in force at Le Cap on February 4, and Toussaint, renowned for the speed of his movement, would hardly have taken so long to cover the distance between those two points. Leclerc's messenger noticed that during their parleys General Christophe stood near the cracked door of an inner office, and suspected that Christophe's responses were controlled by someone on the other side. Vincent had predicted that such would be the case—that Toussaint would try to manipulate Christophe without showing his hand to the French, and that under Toussaint's close surveillance, Christophe would not be able to act freely.
Leclerc sent a testy letter to Christophe (whom the civilian authorities and numerous whites in the town were imploring not to oppose the French landing), advising him that eight thousand men were landing at Port-au-Prince and four thousand at Fort Liberte,* and summoning him to surrender the harbor forts immediately. Christophe's reply was intransigent: “You will not enter the city of Le Cap before it has been reduced to ashes, and even on the ashes I will fight you still.'54
Rochambeau, an undiplomatic individual whom a later phase of the invasion would prove to be alarmingly sadistic as well as hotheaded, forced the issue on February 2 by attacking the harbor posts at Fort Liberte, not troubling himself with any peaceful preliminaries. Toussaint's concluding remark at Point Samana had been “France is deceived; she comes to defend herself and enslave the blacks.'55 In the same spirit, the defenders of Fort Liberte shouted, “Down with the whites! Down with slavery!” The battle was bloody, and cost the life of at least one noble French officer. Rochambeau butchered all the prisoners he took. Once this news reached Le Cap there was no turning back and the war was on.
On February 4, Leclerc sailed with General Hardy and a detachment of troops for a landing at Limbe, west of Morne du Cap on the Bale d'Acul, hoping that a convergence movement on Cap Francais might also preserve the rich plantations of the Northern Plain. On the road toward the town this detachment met stubborn resistance, commanded in person, according to one of Hardy's memos, by Toussaint Louverture (whose presence at this place and date suggests that he might well have been in Cap Francais earlier, directing Christophe and stalling for time). In town, as the French forced their way ashore, Christophe set an example by setting fire to his own magnificent residence with his own hands. Soon the whole town, so recently restored from the disaster of 1793, was again ablaze. A doleful procession of civilian refugees climbed to the height of Morne Lavigie to watch the conflagration. Christophe did not offer battle on the scale that he had promised, but instead (probably in obedience to Toussaint's recent order and certainly in conformity with Toussaint's overall strategy) preserved his demibrigade by retreating. On February 6, Leclerc's force, marching north from Limbe, joined one of Rochambeau's columns crossing the plain from Fort Liberte, and the next day Leclerc entered Le Cap to find that Christophe had kept the first part of his vow: the town was nothing but a smoldering ruin.
There were others besides Vincent who had tried to dissuade Napoleon from the invasion; a colonist named Page had warned him, “You will throw eight thousand men into Saint Domingue; they will take up their positions; doubtless Louverture will not have the impudence to fight them; he will retreat into the mountains and leave them to be consumed by the temperature of the towns and the want of fresh provisions.'56 And in an amiable postmortem talk with Pamphile de Lacroix, Christophe remarked that