Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [59]
Upon the departure of the commissioners, General Laveaux became the senior French official in the colony. Perhaps Toussaint preferred it that way—he had early marked Sonthonax as a rival. His relationship with Laveaux waxed from the guarded respect of their first correspondence to a genuinely affectionate friendship and partnership. Between 1794 and 1798 Toussaint sent a ream of letters to Laveaux. He spoke standard French as well as Creole, but his spelling was purely phonetic, so he dictated his correspondence to several different secretaries, always reviewing the drafts with great care to make sure that his thoughts were exactly expressed. The letters to Laveaux amount to the largest body of Toussaint's writing that survives.
From the moment that he announced his shift to the republican side, Toussaint was exposed to attack on two fronts—or at least from two directions, as coherent fronts were hard to identify on Saint Domingue's difficult, mountainous terrain—from the English to the west at Saint Marc and from the Spanish and their remaining auxiliaries in the eastern mountains and the valley of Grande Riviere. By some accounts (unlikely as it sounds), Toussaint kept up some sort of diplomatic contact with the Spanish command for about a month after declaring his allegiance to Laveaux and the republic—the Spanish may have hoped he'd have another change of heart and mind—but that did not prevent hostilities from Jean-François and Biassou. On June 15 Toussaint reported to Laveaux an attack by Jean-François which actually succeeded in taking Dondon, an attack on La Tannerie by Biassou the next day, followed on June 11 by a British assault on his post at Pont d'Ester, the next town north of Saint Marc and at that moment the southern frontier of Toussaint's “considerable arrondissement.”
“You see, Citizen General, how I am surrounded by enemies,” he wrote, “on all sides, the right and the left.”25 In the same letter, Toussaint nevertheless proposes an attack on the Spanish force at Borgne, albeit in very coy terms: “I pray you, should it be an effect of your goodness to send out your army around Thursday or Friday, to appear before Borgne to threaten it as if you would attack it, I am sure that, by God's permission, we will have Borgne and Camp Bertin both together, by the maneuvers I will be there to combine.”26 This first joint operation between Toussaint and Laveaux, supported by a movement of Villatte's men from Le Cap, was a smashing success, and had the strategic importance of reestablishing republican control between Le Cap and Port de Paix, and further securing the Northern Plain.
On July 7, Toussaint reports his recapture of Dondon and decisive routing of Jean-François: “he owed his salvation only to the thickness of the brush into which he desperately hurled his body, abandoning all his effects … He saved nothing but his shirt and his britches.”27 Retreating to Fort Dauphin, Jean-François exercised his rage and disap-pointment by slaughtering the eight hundred unarmed refugee grand blancs planters who had been waiting there for a chance to fight for the Spanish royalists and the recovery of their lands. The Spanish garrison colluded in the atrocity, or perhaps felt it was too weak to prevent it; whatever their motive, the Spanish troops shut themselves into the fort during the massacre and refused entry to the helpless French victims, practically all of whom were slain, along with their families. This horrendous and almost inexplicable event, together with Toussaint's reoc-cupation of Dondon, crippled the Spanish project in French Saint