Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [56]
On August 25, Toussaint sent an open letter to a camp of free mulattoes fighting for the French republic from their base in Le Cap— Chanlatte and also Villatte were part of his intended audience. Not long before, Chanlatte had tried to win Toussaint over to the republican cause. In the August 25 letter Toussaint tried to persuade Chanlatte's troops to leave the republic and join him.
“The idea of this general liberty for whose cause you do battle against your friends, by whom was its basis first formed? Were we not ourselves its first authors?”17 (This last sentence may be the only case where Toussaint identified himself, in writing, with the relatively small population of affranchis who had gained freedom under the old colonial system, rather than with the great mass of slaves in the process of freeing themselves.) He exhorted the mulatto troops to shake free of those who had hypnotized them with “a host of very vague promises”— Sonthonax and Polverel, that is, “two individuals charged with the title of Delegates of the Republic, which itself is not holding up.”
Here, at the end of August 1793, Toussaint put plainly his belief that the French republic would not endure, that the monarchy would return, and that the rebel slaves must look to the restored French monarchy for ratification of the liberty they had claimed for themselves. In the next breath, however, he invoked the most famous passage of French Revolutionary rhetoric, albeit with a particular interpretation of his own: “Recall the sentiments to which your General Chanlatte bears witness, in favor of liberty and equality; liberty is a right given by Nature; equality is a consequence of that liberty, granted and maintained by this National Assembly.”
Like so many of his generation, whether at first or second hand, Toussaint seems to have imbibed the idea of liberty as a natural right from Rousseau. Equality, in his view of things, may be more of a legal matter (and one which had for a long time preoccupied the free gens de couleuf). If liberty is a right to be claimed, equality must then be socially constructed. Toussaint ‘was for both, and by any means necessary: “It's for me to work toward them as the first to be swayed by a cause which I have always supported; I cannot give way; having begun, I will finish. Unite yourselves with me and you will enjoy your rights all the sooner.”18
The colored troops were no more moved by this call than Toussaint had been a fortnight before by Chanlatte's appeal to join the republic. The reference to Chanlatte in Toussaint's August 25 letter is civil, at least, but perhaps Chanlatte sent a testy reply, for by August 27 Toussaint was denouncing Chanlatte in foot-high letters of flame as a “scoundrel, perfidious deceiver,” and so on. No longer temporizing, he was again at all-out war with the forces of the French republic. “The ways of reconciliation” had failed.
Toussaint's letter of August 25 seems designed to preempt Sonthonax's abolition of slavery, proclaimed four days later. On August 29, when Sonthonax issued his edict in a page of dense prose (written in the phonetic Creole of the period, a language spoken by most of the slaves but read by practically no one), Toussaint was ready with his own proclamation from Camp Turel, which in a succinct five sentences boiled his August 25 letter down to its essentials: / am Toussaint Louverture; perhaps my name has made itself known to you. I have undertaken vengeance. I want Liberty and Equality to reign in Saint Domingue. I am working to make that happen. Unite yourselves to us, brothers, and fight with us for the same cause.
Toussaint was no longer addressing the gens