Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [148]
Toussaint's movements during the next couple of days are open to question; no one can prove with certainty just where he was. In the memoir he claims that “I hastened to render myself to Cap, in spite of the flooding of the river at Hinche, hoping to have pleasure of embracing my brothers in arms from Europe, and at the same time to receive orders from the French government.”12 En route he encountered General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who told him that more ships had appeared before the port of Saint Marc. These had been detached from the French fleet, but in the memoir Toussaint pretends to believe that they might have constituted some foreign invasion force. He continued on his way toward Cap Francais, until from an observation post on the height of a mountain called Grand Boucan he saw—to his shock and horror!—that the city had been set on fire.
In his memoir, Toussaint argues that Christophe was forced to resist the French landing and burn down the town because “if the commander of the fleet had really had peaceful intentions, he would have waited for me.”13 Now that the French had landed in force, Toussaint, according to his memoir, approached their line with the idea “to have a conference” but “they fired on us at twenty-five paces from the gate. My horse was pierced with a ball; another bullet tore off the hat of one of my officers. This unforeseen circumstance forced me to abandon the high road, to cross the savannah and the forests in order to reach Hericourt plantation, where I waited three days for news from the commander of the fleet, but always uselessly.”14
In fact, Toussaint's army was by then resisting Leclerc's multi-pronged invasion with all its power. Full-scale war had broken out, and Toussaint in his memoir does his very best to blame Leclerc for all the hostilities: “if the intentions of the government had been good and peaceful with respect to me and with respect to all those who had contributed to the happiness which the colony then enjoyed, General Leclerc would surely not have followed or executed the orders he had received, for he debarked in the island as an enemy, doing evil for the pleasure of doing it, without addressing himself to the commander [Toussaint himself] and without communicating his powers to him.”15
Toussaint's interview with Leclerc's envoy the Abbe Coisnon should have resolved the question of Leclerc's authority, but Toussaint's description of their conversation explains why it didn't:
After the conduct of this general, I could have no confidence in him, that he had landed as an enemy, that in spite of that I had believed that it was my duty to go before him in order to hinder the progress of evil, but that then he had caused me to be fired on, that I had run the greatest dangers, that finally, if his intentions were as pure as those of the government that sent him, he would have taken the trouble to write me to inform me of his mission; that he should have sent me a fast boat ahead of the fleet, with you, sir [Coisnon], and my children, as it is ordinarily done, to announce his arrival to me and make me party to his powers, that since he had not fulfilled any of these formalities, the evil was done and that thus I definitively refused to seek him out; that however, to prove my attachment and my submission to the French government, I consented to write a letter to the General Leclerc.16
Toussaint also wrote a reply directly to Napoleon, requesting that Leclerc be recalled and reprimanded—a futile effort since there was no one but Leclerc himself to forward this message to the first consul. Diplomacy failed and the war went on. With three French columns advancing on him from different directions, Toussaint could easily recognize a plan to encircle him on his plantations at Ennery and, if he could not be trapped and captured there, force