Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [49]
The maneuver also gained him a few more French officers. Those of royalist leanings, especially, could make themselves more comfortable in Toussaint's command than in the republican camp of Laveaux, and Toussaint found them very useful for shaping the growing number of his followers into an organized and disciplined army. In the end, Brandicourt himself went over to the Spanish side. Commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel interpreted his forced surrender as an act of premeditated treachery. There had been other events of that kind; Brandicourt's predecessor at Dondon, Monsieur de Nully, had willingly gone over to the Spanish not long before, and Captain de La Feuillee had done the same at Ouanaminthe.
The Cordon de l'Ouest protected the Spanish Central Plateau in the interior, including the towns of Saint Raphael and Saint Michel. In the fall of 1791, Toussaint had sent his wife and sons into this area, where they would be safe from the anarchy spreading all over the Northern Plain. Probably it was during this period that he acquired the livestock ranchland he later told the interrogator Caffarelli that he owned. In the same 1793 campaign which captured Marmelade and Dondon, Toussaint also secured the region of Ennery and made a triumphal entry into GonaiVes, where the inhabitants treated him to “magnificent festivals,” though a Spanish colonel remained at least nominally in command there.7 In response to all these piercing advances, Commissioner Polverel is supposed to have exclaimed, “What! This man makes an Opening everywhere”8 —one of the origins proposed for the name Louverture.
By 1793, the Saint Michel region was also hosting numerous French emigres whom the Spanish authorities were encouraging to return there. It was one of these, a Monsieur Laplace, who wrote the letter complaining about Toussaint's “useless little posts” along the Cordon de l'Ouest and also accused him of plotting to “assassinate the whites.” In fact, Toussaint preferred, during this period as throughout his whole career, to win whenever possible through diplomacy rather than force of arms. Although many of his positions in the Cordon de l'Ouest were challenged by Chanlatte, among others, Toussaint proved more capable than anyone else of providing real security to inhabitants of the region. His claim to “receive everyone with humanity” and to work with “gentleness” rather than violence is couched, interestingly, in terms like those of charismatic Christianity—and is also justified by his actions. In less than a year Toussaint expanded his personal command from a few hundred to several thousand increasingly well disciplined troops, and he continued to pick up stray French officers who helped him train his force of nouveaux libres. His men were better and better equipped, mainly thanks to Toussaints successes in capturing arms and ammunition from the enemy. Both white and free colored landowners in the region found a genuinely humane reception if they were willing to offer genuine loyalty to him.
Still, Toussaint was not universally popular. Laplace, who styled himself “the deputy of the French emigres residing at Saint Michel, all planters and land-owners of the parishes of Gona'ives, of Ennery, Plaisance, Marmelade and Dondon,” complained to the Spanish governor that Toussaint “preaches disobedience” and “kidnaps and arms all the slaves from their plantations, telling these wretches that they will be free if they want to assassinate the whites.” In his conclusion, Laplace declaims “we demand that the head of the guilty party fall.”9 This letter is dated April 4, 1794—a moment when as hindsight shows, Toussaints loyalty to his Spanish commanders really had