Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [155]
During this time, Napoleon Bonaparte also seemed to be governed by a strange fatality. On May 20,1802, he had proclaimed a law which made his intentions regarding slavery quite unmistakable: according to Article 3, “The trade in blacks and their importation into the said colonies will take place in conformity with the law and rules existing before the said epoque of 1789.”6 By this clause the status quo before the French Revolution was to be restored, so far as the colonies were concerned.
Resistance had never completely stopped among leaders like Sylla and Sans-Souci, but when news of the restoration of slavery in Guadeloupe reached Saint Domingue, the rest of the officer cadre built by Toussaint began to desert French ranks and raise rebellion: Charles Belair, Clervaux, Christophe, and finally Dessalines. The blow to the French, already drastically weakened by the fever season and further compromised by near-total dependence on “colonial troops” (that is to say the black troops of Toussaint's army), was fatal. A couple of weeks after Dessalines turned on him, Leclerc was dead of the fever.
The extravagant cruelties of his successor in command, General Donatien Rochambeau, were futile, except to inspire reprisals in kind. Rochambeau had black prisoners torn apart by dogs in the public squares, as if in a Roman amphitheater, and held a macabre ball for the femmes de couleur, at whose climax the fresh-slain corpses of their male relations were unveiled to them. If this kind of atrocity was meant to terrify the black and colored revolutionaries into submission, it had the opposite effect. In May 1803, when England declared war on France again, the position of the French in Saint Domingue became absolutely hopeless. Once it was clear that Dessalines would capture Cap Francais, Rochambeau wisely put to sea, with the last remnant of an army that had once numbered eighty thousand, and let himself be captured by the British fleet.
On January 1, 1804, the independence of Haiti was declared. Later in 1804, Dessalines became emperor of Haiti. During the same year, on Dessalines's order, and mostly under his personal supervision, the slaughter of the surviving grands blancs of the old colony began.
A French survivor, Pierre Chazotte, describes Dessalines's tour of the killing grounds at Jeremie: “When they entered the prisons, they viewed many corpses, besmeared with gore; in every apartment the floor was two inches deep, encrusted with coagulated blood; the walls were dark crimsoned with the gushes of human blood, suddenly rushing from inflicted wounds. Having viewed this slaughterhouse of human bodies, they again mounted their horses, and rode to the place on the Western road, where upwards of 1,400 corpses lay, heaped one upon another, and formed two very high mounts. The blood flowing beneath had made an issue crossing the road, and formed a bar of coagulated blood 40 feet wide. The negroes from the country would not stamp their feet on that blood; they had practised a bypath, reaching the blockhouses on the southern hill, and thereby manifested their horror at Dessalines's deeds.'7
Two hundred years later a Haitian friend told me, with a matter-of-fact solemnity, that there are certain injuries—it was understood that the abuse of slavery was definitely among them—which can be washed away only by blood.
Appalling as it may have been, Dessalines's course of action was nothing if not logical. When Toussaint had tried to incorporate the white property owners into his vision of a new reformed society founded on universal recognition of the Rights of Man, the whites had done nothing but betray him. By comparison with Toussaint, Dessalines has often been denounced as a savage. Where the conciliatory Toussaint liked to say, “Dousman ale Iwen, “(The gentlest way goes furthest), Dessalines snarled a harsher order: “Koupe tet, boule kay! “ (Cut off their heads and burn their houses!).
Severe as it was, Dessalines's consolidation of power contained an extraordinary progressive element. The massacres of 1804 were atrocious, but in