Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [143]
Those effects were already rampant. In a separate letter of the same date, Leclerc put it bluntly: “If the First Consul wants to have an army in Saint Domingue in the month of October, he will need to send it from the ports of France, for the ravages of disease here are beyond all description.”100 And yet, reinforcements were practically useless; so severe was the fever season of 1802 that troops were said to march from the ships directly into the grave.
It was not yet known in the early 1800s that malaria and yellow fever were mosquito-borne illnesses, but the military did understand that the mountains were healthier than the ports—which may have provided a pretext for sending large numbers of troops into the region of Plaisance and Ennery during the first week of June 1802. “Toussaint is of bad faith,” Leclerc wrote on June 6, “as I very well expected of him, but I have gained from his submission the goal which I hoped, which was to detach Dessalines and Christophe from him, with their troops. I will order his arrest, and I believe I can count on Dessalines, whose spirit I have mastered, enough to charge him to go arrest Toussaint.”101 Events would soon prove that Leclerc had not mastered Dessalines's spirit in the slightest, but probably he would not have dared arrest Toussaint without some assurance from the black generals that the move would not provoke a revolt on their part.
Toussaint's behavior during this fatal period has puzzled most observers, who find it difficult to understand why he walked into the fairly obvious trap which Leclerc had prepared for him. The bait was a pair of letters, one from the regional commander, General Brunet, the other from Leclerc himself: “Since you persist in thinking that the large number of troops found at Plaisance frightens the cultivators there, I charge General Brunet to concert himself with you concerning the placement of a part of these troops.” Brunet followed up in silkier tones: “We have, my dear general, some arrangements to make together which it is impossible to discuss by letter, but which a conference of one hour would settle.”102
Toussaint clung to these two letters till his last days as a prisoner in France. It seems almost impossible that he did not see through them, though Pamphile de Lacroix argues that he was simply duped. “He cried out when he received General Brunet's letter, ‘You see these Whites, they don't suspect anything, they know everything—and still they have to come consult old Toussaint.'103 “ In this version, vanity, and a susceptibility to flattery which nothing else in his whole career suggests, were the weaknesses whereby Toussaint let himself be lured out of his stronghold at Ennery where it would have been much more difficult if not impossible to capture him, to a meeting with Brunet at Georges Plantation. There the small escort which Toussaint had brought with him was overpowered, and Toussaint was seized, rushed the short distance to Gona'ives, and hustled aboard La Creole, which sailed to the harbor of Le Cap, where he was transferred to L'Heros for deportation to France.
But never in his whole life had Toussaint shown himself to be so gullible. More plausible is the idea that his last moves were forced—or that, through the same sort of small miscalculations that had moved him to surrender a month before, he believed