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By Root 865 0

to Laveaux, then in a truly difficult siege situation at Port de Paix, offering him a bribe of fifty thousand ecus to yield his position and change sides. Perhaps the British thought that Laveaux, as a hereditary nobleman serving in the republican army, would welcome the invitation to abandon the Jacobins (as a fair number of officers had already done)—but Laveaux took enormous offense. “You have sought to dishonor me in the eyes of my brothers in arms,” he wrote to the British colonel Whitelocke. “It is an outrage for which you owe me personal satisfaction; I demand it in the name of the honor which must exist among nations. In consequence, before there should be a general engagement, I offer you a single combat, up to the point that one of us falls. I leave you the choice of arms, be it on horseback or afoot.”13 Whitelocke apparently judged it impractical to accept the challenge.

Kerverseau claims that Toussaint turned down a similar offer from the British, for no reason of honor but because the price was too low— yet that may have been a simple slander. If the British did try to approach Toussaint, no document of the effort has survived. It is possible that they did not yet understand his importance, for at this stage of the game they seemed to have only a vague idea of the “Negroe, Tusan.” On the other hand, Toussaint himself was extremely secretive and seldom left any trace of unconsummated negotiations behind him.

Sonthonax, of course, and then the more reluctant Polverel had meant for their abolition of slavery to win the nouveau libre rebel slaves to their side. As of April 1794, little had happened to justify this hope. A few bands of maroons here and there, notably the one led by Halaou in the region surrounding Leogane, formed queasy alliances with the commissioners. But most such bands were simply out for themselves, roaming mountainous areas which none of the three colonial powers could honestly claim to control, while the vast majority of nouveaux libres were opposing the republican French as Spanish auxiliaries. When General Laveaux tried to persuade Jean-François to embrace the republican cause in the fall of 1794, his reply was fully as contemptuous as the one Laveaux made to the British envoy—and was also keenly perceptive: “Although I might very well reply to all the chapters of your letter, I omit them because they are almost all detailed in a manifesto which I have circulated among my compatriots in which, without artifice, I let them know the fate which awaits them if they let themselves be seduced by your beautiful words … Equality, Liberty, &c &c &c … and I will only believe in all that when I see that Monsieur Laveaux and other French gentlemen of his quality give their daughters in marriage to negroes. Then I will be able to believe in the pretended equality.”14

The question put so sharply in this letter was whether the French Revolution really meant to put its money where its mouth was with regard to freedom and equality for the blacks. Toussaint was certainly considering this same question closely by April 1794.

At the same time he had several pragmatic, not to say Machiavellian, reasons to switch sides. Hindsight shows that his chances for advancement in military rank were better with the French than with the Spanish. Toussaint (who didn't take up arms until he was over fifty) had discovered a surprising tactical ability and no doubt wanted to see it recognized and rewarded. Certainly he knew that in the Spanish military he had hit an impenetrable ceiling. But though in the end he would emerge as the highest-ranking French officer in Saint Domingue, in the beginning he accepted a lower rank in the French service than he'd had in the Spanish.

His brother Pierre had just been killed by his ostensible allies, and given his frosty relationship with the Spanish command, his wife and sons were no longer safe in their haven on the Central Plateau. Toussaint seems to have moved them briefly to the area of Trou du Nord on the Northern Plain, but this location was not very secure either. An alliance