Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [23]
On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was guillotined in France. Within the next few weeks France found itself at war with England, Holland, and Spain, and the latter conflict could now express itself openly across the border between French Saint Domingue and Spanish Santo Domingo. The white colonial response to the passionate letter sent by the black rebels in July 1792 could be summarized thus: “We did not fetch half a million savage slaves off the coast of Africa to bring them to the colony as French citizens.”20 Early in 1793, the warriors led by Jean-François and Biassou were incorporated into the Spanish army as auxiliaries; their presence in the French colony now constituted an invasion, and they were joined by a few Spanish troops and officers. Both Biassou and Jean-François were elevated to the rank of general in the Spanish service and copiously, gaudily decorated by Spanish officialdom.
At this point Jean-François and Biassou had divided the free zone into two spheres of influence, with Jean-François claiming Ouanaminthe, Valliere, much of Grande Riviere, and the area along the Spanish border. Biassou established a headquarters and a sort of government at Grand Boucan, on the heights above Grande Riviere, identified by Gros as one of the two best fortified posts in the free zone (the other being La Tannerie, where Toussaint was based). Biassou's command extended from La Tannerie in the gorge of Dondon along the mountainous border of the Northern Plain all the way through Ennery and Limbe to Port Francais on the north Atlantic coast, a point only a few miles west of Cap Francais itself. The western extension of this line meant that Le Cap could be isolated, surrounded, and attacked from all sides; Biassou had used those positions as a base for the raid that rescued his mother from l'Hopital des Peres.
Toussaint, who was not quite yet Toussaint Louverture, remained nominally subordinate to Biassou, but quietly began to develop a certain autonomy. Not only did he command at La Tannerie, he was also involved in the western end of Biassou's line, and he took a particular interest in maintaining a string of small posts called the Cordon de l'Ouest, which ran from Gonai'ves on the west coast across the mountains through Plaisance and Marmelade to Dondon, at the pass to the Central Plateau. Upon the first outbreak of rebellion in the north, Governor Blanchelande had tried to occupy this line and use it as a cordon sanitaire to keep the insurrection from spilling over into the west. This measure was roughly half-successful, though white occupation of these mountain posts was always hotly contested by the rebel blacks.
Gonai'ves, though smaller than Cap Francais or Port-au-Prince, ‘was a significant seaport. Toussaint understood its strategic worth very'well, and he also grasped the importance of the line through the mountains that connected Gonai'ves to the island's inaccessible interior—and also to the town of Saint Raphael on the Central Plateau, where he had stationed his wife and children, just across the Spanish frontier from Dondon. When he joined the Spanish army in 1793, Toussaint had already begun to accumulate troops who really were answerable only to him; they were attracted because Toussaint ran a more orderly camp than Jean-François or Biassou. A few French regular army officers, unhappy with the revolutionary trends in their barracks, had drifted into Toussaint's region, and he used them to train his black soldiers in European military discipline and in the European style of war. Most likely based at La Tannerie, these troops also patrolled the Cordon de l'Ouest