Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [151]
Napoleon, who had absolutely no interest in judging the dispute that Toussaint presented between himself and Leclerc, had instructed Caffarelli to question him closely on three points: “what treaties he had made with the agents of England,” “his political views,” and “information about his treasure.”24 A rumor had traveled from the colony to Paris that Toussaint, shortly before he settled the peace with Leclerc, had buried a fortune in gold on one of his properties at Ennery then, in classic pirate style, murdered the men who had done the digging. In two hundred years no evidence to support this legend has ever turned up.
However, Toussaint avows in his memoir that at the opening of the French Revolution he was worth 648,000 francs. This very substantial value would have put him on par with the grands blancs of Saint Domingue in all respects save the all-important racial one. Napoleon, whose government was as usual strapped for cash, was very interested to know what had happened to this money and if it could possibly be recovered.
Caffarelli got nowhere with this line of questioning. Toussaint had introduced the sum of his worth into the memoir as a prelude to saying that he had invested most of the money in wartime efforts, especially against the English invaders. His memoir insists that while he had found the public treasuries empty when he was first appointed as governor general, he had done much to fill them during his tenure. However, the Leclerc expedition had the good luck to get control of most of this money in the early days of the invasion. An unnamed homme de couleur, entrusted with the treasury of the Northern Department at Cap Francais, turned it over to Leclerc when the French general occupied the ruins of the town. The treasury kept at Gonai'ves, probably comprising all revenues from the Artibonite region if not the whole Western Department, was intercepted in the Cahos mountains by Rochambeau's division when it crossed diagonally from Fort Liberte to Gonai'ves. Toussaint told Caffarelli that his and his wife's combined resources amounted to 250,000 francs at the time of the French landing (thus greatly depleted from ten years before) and that part of these private funds had been kept with the Gonai'ves treasury, the other part with the treasury of Le Cap, and so had been lost to the French with the rest.
When Caffarelli quizzed him on the tale that six men sent to bury Toussaints treasure before Rochambeau crossed the Grand Cahos had been “massacred upon their return,” Toussaint protested that it was “an atrocious calumny invented by his enemies”25 and insisted that as soon as the rumor began to spread he had produced, alive and well, the guards who were supposed to have been slain.
Toussaint and Suzanne were rich in land, not money, or at least they had been reduced to such a situation after the French invasion and Toussaint's retirement. Their holdings were large, and probably included more than those Toussaint admitted to Caffarelli: Hericourt, the sugar plantation in the Northern Plain; three contiguous plantations at Ennery, and sizable tracts across the Spanish border on the Central Plateau, which were used for raising cattle and horses. Some of these lands Toussaint had certainly bought before the revolution; others, like Hericourt, which had been owned by the comte de Noe, and the Central Plateau ranches, which were outside French Saint Domingue's territorial limits until 1801, he must have annexed sometime after 1791. As for any liquid capital, he gave no answer to any of Caffarelli's questions but the one already recorded in his memoir: he had spent his last sou in defense of the colony. The story is likely to be true, considering the heavy traffic Toussaint had with arms merchants in the United States throughout the months preceding Leclerc's invasion.