Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [136]
Dessalines, who never failed to inspire both moral and mortal terror, had returned to the fort on the night of March 11 to exhort the garrison: “I want no one with me but the brave; we will be attacked this morning; let those who want to be slaves of the French leave the fort, but those who are willing to die as free men stand by me.72 No one accepted the offer to escape. Standing by the door of the powder magazine with a blazing torch, Dessalines promised to blow up the fort if the French managed to enter it, but during Boudet's charge that morning he chose to climb the ramparts bare-chested and lay waste to assaulting Frenchmen with his sword. As previously, the honor guard cavalry led by Monpoint and Morisset rode out from the woods to deliver a coup de grace. A black militia commander, Gottereau, led a troop of armed cultivators onto the field from the bank of the Artibonite, took a large number of French and slew them with bayonets. That night, packs of dogs came out to eat the corpses that no one could remove from the field. Later on, Pamphile de Lacroix, lacking tools enough to have the rotting bodies buried, ordered them burnt, an attempt that succeeded poorly and created an “odor still more unbearable than the first,'73 which permeated everyone's wool clothing and suffocated the French camps.
The situation at La Crete a Pierrot devolved into a siege. Following the bloodbath of March 12, Dessalines ordered the fortification of a small rise just to the east above the main fort, then departed in search of fresh munitions from a depot at Plassac which, unfortunately for the black resistance, Boudet's division had blown up a few days before. At Morne Nolo, Dessalines lost an engagement with a French force led by General Hardy, who cut Dessalines's communications with Lamartiniere at the fort; Hardy's arrival also forced the honor guard cavalry to retreat from the area, seeking to rejoin either Dessalines or Toussaint.
On March 22, the impetuous Rochambeau appeared on the scene, hastily recalled from the ruins of Mirebalais. Andre Rigaud had been assigned to Rochambeau's staff. When he saw the situation at La Crete a Pierrot, he feigned illness and excused himself to Port-au-Prince. Rochambeau was not so prudent. Before Leclerc could countermand him, he tried to charge the small redoubt Dessalines had erected before his departure, now occupied by Lamartiniere with two hundred men and a few cannon. This futile effort cost him three hundred men. However, General Lacroix managed to establish mortar batteries from which the colored commander Petion, an experienced artilleryman, was able to drop shells into the main fort. From March 22 to March 24, the bombardment was constant.
Toussaint Louverture, meanwhile, had slipped north through whatever French lines still existed; on March 2 he flushed a light French garrison out of Ennery set fire to the town, made a feint toward Gona'ives, then began to circle through Saint Raphael, Saint Michel, Marmelade, and Dondon, raising resistance among the cultivators everywhere he could—as Christophe was doing all over the Northern Plain. Sentiment was not universally in favor of Toussaint in this region, however; the French propaganda in support of general liberty continued to erode his base, and some inhabitants sarcastically suggested, “Let him raise Moyse from the dead to fight the Whites.”74
Toussaint did not yet know that Maurepas had surrendered, and he hoped to relieve and rejoin Maurepas's Ninth Regiment—but first he had to attack and defeat General Desfourneaux at Plaisance. In the midst of this engagement, to his great dismay, he saw that the French had been reinforced by a portion of Maurepas's regiment now under command of Lubin Golart. Toussaint rode before them, shouting out, “Soldiers of the Ninth, do you dare fire on your general and your brothers?” By the account of Isaac Louverture, “These words had the effect of a thunderbolt on those soldiers; they fell to their knees, and if the European soldiers had not fired on him and pressed forward, all