Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [152]
Napoleon was just as acutely interested in Toussaint's dealings with the English who had invaded Saint Domingue in 1793. After many extremely costly battles, most in the area of the port of Saint Marc, Toussaint had managed to engineer their final departure by diplomatic means. The fact that he had signed treaties with a foreign power without full authorization of the French government could be interpreted as treasonable—there were rumors too that the English might have lured Toussaint in the direction of independence.
Again, Caffarelli's interrogation could get no traction on this subject. Toussaint admitted only to two treaties concluded with General Maitland, one of which simply settled the British evacuation of the couple of points on the island they still occupied at the end of 1798. The second treaty covered British trade privileges with Saint Domingue, along with the nonaggression pact: Maitland promised not to interfere with Saint Domingue's shipping in Caribbean waters, Toussaint undertook not to attack Jamaica. This last commitment was a special nuisance for Napoleon, who had been entertaining a plan to use Saint Domingue as a base for just such an attack.
Caffarelli probed Toussaint concerning the suspicion that Toussaint had somehow “sold” himself to the English, but Toussaint insisted that he had received nothing from them other than a saddle and trappings for his horse, which he at first refused but was persuaded to accept as a personal gesture from General Maitland, and twenty barrels of gunpowder which Maitland also offered him. Otherwise he had no supplies or guns or munitions from the English; his war materiel was purchased from the United States or (quite frequently) captured from his enemies.
Between September 15 and September 24, Caffarelli interviewed Toussaint seven times. Of their second encounter, Caffarelli reported, “I found him trembling with cold, and sick, he was suffering a lot and could hardly speak.”26 The climate of the high and frosty Jura mountains could hardly be expected to suit an elderly man with many war wounds, who had spent his whole life in the tropics. In lieu of conversation Toussaint offered Caffarelli the document he had dictated. “I shut myself up to read this memoir right away,” said the interrogator; “it was not difficult for me to recognize that the conversation of the previous day was nothing but an abridgment of this writing, on which he had built his whole defense.”27 In the subsequent interviews, Caffarelli could not get Toussaint to deviate by a hair from the defensive strategy which his memoir rehearsed. Despite his weakness, illness, and all the pressure Caffarelli could bring to bear on him, Toussaint said “nothing except what he wanted to say.”
Caffarelli was worth his salt as an investigator, and after several days of being stonewalled he shifted his own tactics, with the idea of “exciting his amour propre … I told him that everything he had declared up to the present was beneath a man like himself, who was the first man of his color, who had won glory as a soldier, who had governed for a long time, who actually fallen low, unfortunate, and without hope of raising himself back up, he could win a kind of glory heretofore unknown to him, but which could be useful to him, and which would consist of having the courage to break out of the circle of denial in which he had shut himself, to declare nobly that he had driven off the agents of the Republic, because they were an obstacle to his designs, that he had organized an army, an administration, had accumulated treasuries, filled the arsenals and warehouses to assure his independence. That by going in this direction he would win the kind of glory which suited his real courage, and could get himself pardoned for many faults.”28
This gambit was a cunning one, and suggests that Caffarelli had been able to discern aspects of Toussaint's character (pride in his achievements, outrage at the sorry way they'd been received) which Toussaint during their interviews was doing his best to conceal. If Toussaint had taken