Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [54]
From a distance, the British looked strong in the areas they occupied. They had several thousand redcoats on the ground, and the grand b fane—mulatto confederations of the west and the south were operating on behalf of the British invasion with some success. But Toussaint knew the value of intelligence, and he probably had intelligence of the weakening of the British force by disease. Also, the British positions were far distant from Toussaint's own areas of strength. The British were strongest on the southern peninsula, and at Mole Saint-Nicolas. They had occupied Saint Marc, the next important port down the coast from Gona'ives, and in April 1794 they looked likely to capture Port-au-Prince. All these areas, except for Saint Marc, were well away from Toussaint's current sphere of influence. Meanwhile, the Cordon de l'Ouest, which he personally controlled, formed a perimeter around the French republicans in the north, and Toussaint considered the string of posts from Limbe through Port Margot to Borgne to be a logical extension of this line. To unite these positions with those currently in the hands of the French republicans would be a strategic thunderbolt. From the British post at Mole to Spanish-occupied Fort Dauphin, the whole north Atlantic coast would become, without interruption, French republican. Thanks to the Cordon de l'Ouest, the republicans could then secure the Northern Plain and practically all of the Northern Department except for a few points on the periphery. Suddenly they would become a serious threat to the British in the south and the west.
Then there was the question of general liberty. Toussaint claimed it had always been dear to his heart. Politically, it was now essential that he embrace it wholeheartedly whatever he may have thought before. There was no other way to assure the loyalty of the great majority of nouveaux libres, who would henceforth be his power base.
Toussaint knew enough of European politics to doubt whether Sonthonax's proclamation of emancipation would prove durable. He knew that what really counted was the abolition of slavery by the National Convention in France. In fact, Sonthonax's proclamation had been ratified months before, in an ecstatic session of the legislature and in the presence of a delegation from Saint Domingue which included the white Louis Dufay, the mulatto Jean-Baptiste Mills, and a full-blooded African, Jean-Baptiste Belley who like Toussaint had earned his own freedom from slavery under the ancien regime. On February 4, 1794, the convention passed, with no opposition, a law which “declares that slavery is abolished throughout the territory of the Republic; in consequence, all men, without distinction of color, will enjoy the rights of French citizens.”15 With that, the French Revolution had put its money where its mouth was. The decree did away not only with slavery but also with the whole structure of institutionalized racial discrimination that had plagued free blacks and free men of color until 1791.
However, the convention's decree was not officially proclaimed in Saint Domingue until June 8,1794. The usual interpretation is that no news of this momentous event had reached the colony before this date, but such a long delay seems highly unlikely. The transatlantic voyage from France to the Caribbean took more or less six weeks, depending on wind and ‘weather. Thus it is probable that rumors of the national decree ‘would have begun to seep into Saint Domingue and the other French colonies no later than the end of March.
Officially, Toussaint Louverture is not supposed to have known of the decree until June. Yet in his letter to Chanlatte almost a year earlier, he boasted of the quality of the information he got directly from France. It is possible that he had his first inkling of the emancipation decree by the last days of March 1794, just as he was coming to blows with Jean-François, Biassou, and the Spanish military commanders.