Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [134]
As Cap Francais was for the time being uninhabitable, Leclerc established a temporary headquarters in Port-au-Prince. Among the surviving white population, the first flush of enthusiasm for the French arrival was rather quick to fade. Though glad to be relieved of the more tyrannical aspects of Toussaint's rule, the proprietors of Port-au-Prince were concerned that the French army might treat them and their territory not as fellow citizens and French ground to be defended, but as a conquered land to be exploited and looted. Napoleon's armies had formed such habits all over Europe, and stories of their predatory style had already circulated in Saint Domingue.
To a considerable extent, such fears were proved true. Of the 2.5 million livres General Boudet found in the Port-au-Prince treasury, he immediately scattered a million and a half among his troops—nor did he forget himself in this redistribution. The locals accused him of a spirit of pillage. Leclerc had seen some version of Toussaint's tax rolls (the government was supposed to have taken in some 20 million livres during the past year), so he had a notion of how much money he ought to be able to find. When he learned that 1.5 million livres were still in the treasury of Les Cayes, Leclerc dispatched Admiral Latouche Treville to confiscate it. He arrested Bunel, Toussaint's diplomat and paymaster, and seized a ship bound for the United States with 3 million livres, undoubtedly intended for the purchase of more arms.
Port-au-Prince civilians found themselves under a military rule at least as harsh as Toussaint's had been. Their animals and supplies were requisitioned for the army—but never paid for. As they had feared, the inhabitants were treated as a conquered people. They had to make a full declaration of all their means or be accused of collaboration with the black enemy. Eager to restore sugar and coffee production (for the profit of the army), Leclerc ordered the landowners back to their plantations, accusing them of harboring groundless fears—while he himself went nowhere without a heavy guard. In reality, the outlying areas were far less secure than they had been under Toussaint, and the planters began to recognize that despite his shortcomings, their chances of restoring their fortunes might have been better with him than with Leclerc.
Dessalines had intended to destroy the fortifications at La Crete a Pierrot before pressing further into the interior, but after his conference with Toussaint he ordered the walls to be repaired instead, and hastily had new trenches dug outside of them. The day after Toussaint's departure, March 1, Dessalines executed all the white inhabitants of Petite Riviere and all the white prisoners he had brought there from the plain of Cul de Sac, with the exception of a doctor named Descourtilz and a handful of musicians from a band maintained for Toussaint's formal entertainments. He left these survivors in the fort under guard of Lamartiniere and a small garrison, while he himself led a force to the interior with the idea of razing and burning Mirebalais.
Toussaint, so far as the French were concerned, had disappeared. Leclerc, whose boots must have begun to chafe by then, believed that, having been forced south from Ravine a Couleuvre, Toussaint must be somewhere in the area of Petite Riviere. He changed the focus of the French maneuvers with the idea of trapping him there—a strategy Toussaint had apparently anticipated. A noose was gradually drawing tight on La Crete a Pierrot, but