Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [130]
The first week of hostilities left both sides in a state of shock. The French were stunned by the destruction of Le Cap and by anarchy all over the Northern Plain, where the field hands had uncached their guns and begun to burn, pillage, and slaughter the white population. (Old friend to liberty though he was, the Abbe Delahaye was among the slain.) For his part, Toussaint must have been rattled by the speed and extent of his losses and by the betrayals of so many of his officers. In a week's time the invasion had practically reduced him to his original “arrondissement” in the Cordon de l'Ouest.
Around Port de Paix, on the Atlantic coast west of Le Cap, General Maurepas was putting up a brilliant resistance to an assault led by the French general Humbert. Port de Paix was so well defended that Vincent had warned Leclerc that it was not worth the danger and difficulty of attacking it and that the artillery defending the harbor was exceptionally well placed. Maurepas, whom Vincent characterized as “extraordinarily hard,”59 killed a third of Humbert's twelve hundred men before blowing up the forts, setting the town on fire, and retreating up the valley of Trois Rivieres with his Ninth Regiment still intact. But for the moment Toussaint was out of communication with Maurepas. When Leclerc decided to revert to diplomacy, Toussaint was willing to entertain the idea. Belatedly, Coisnon got the chance to try his hand.
Toussaint had gone to ground at Ennery, a secure pocket in the mountains just northeast of Gona'ives where he and his wife owned several plantations. Ennery was a crossroads controlling not only the ways to the Gona'ives port but also the length of the Cordon de l'Ouest via Marmelade to Dondon, the way to Borgne via the heights of Limbe and Port Margot, and the way to Port de Paix via Gros Morne. On the night of February 8, Toussaint's sons, twenty-one-year-old Placide and twenty-year-old Isaac, arrived there with their tutor, Coisnon. It had been almost six years since their parents had seen them; their reunion was a tearful one.
Some effort had been spent on cementing the young men's loyalty to France. Before the fleet sailed, they had been entertained by Napoleon Bonaparte in person: a grand dinner at the Tuileries, where Colonel Vincent, Captain General Leclerc, and other dignitaries were among the guests. After presenting Isaac and Placide with fancy dress uniforms and richly ornamented swords and pistols, Napoleon charged them with a message: “When you arrive in your country, you will make it known to your father that the French government accords him protection, glory and honor, and that it is not sending an army into the country to battle him, but only to make the French name respected against enemies of the country.”60
Placide, who had not long before been used as a decoy by Napoleon—he had embarked on an Egypt-bound ship to make observers and spies believe the fleet was sailing for Saint Domingue— seems to have taken these instructions with a grain of salt. At Ennery, it was Isaac who presented Napoleon's argument. “While he spoke, Toussaint kept the most profound silence; his features no longer had the expression of a father who listened; they expressed the withdrawal of an impassive Statesman.”61 Whereupon Coisnon presented the letter which Napoleon had written to Toussaint. This missive, both firm and friendly in tone, announced that Captain General Leclerc was to be appointed as “first magistrate” of the country—a position superior to Toussaint s. It reminded the black leader that Leclerc came with “sufficient forces to make the sovereignty of the French people respected.” It hoped that “you are going to prove to us the sincerity of the sentiments