Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [65]
With Villatte, the mulatto commander who'd been the supreme authority at Le Cap until Laveaux moved there from Port de Paix, friction came sooner. As early as September 1794 Toussaint began bickering with Villatte over control of posts in the area of Limbe. Toussaint insisted to Laveaux that these must remain under his authority—he felt that his natural cordon extended not only from Dondon through Ennery to Gona'ives but also from Ennery through Limbe, Gros Morne, and Port Margot to Borgne. An unspoken part of Toussaint's grievance against Blanc Cassenave was that the latter was more loyal to Villatte than to himself. Since both Toussaint and Villatte claimed authority around the edges of the Northern Plain, some contention between them was perhaps inevitable. Not long after the death of Blanc Cassenave, another mulatto commander, Joseph Flaville, rebelled against Toussaint's authority. Luckier than his predecessor, Flaville tucked himself under Villatte's wing at Cap Francais long enough for Laveaux to broker a truce between him and Toussaint.
On July 23, 1795, the French National Convention had recognized the services of Toussaint Louverture by promoting him from colonel to brigadier general. Villatte, Rigaud, and Louis-Jacques Beauvais (a third colored officer who was based in the southern coastal town of Jacmel) received the same rank on the same day. Because of the distinction Sonthonax had conferred on him, Toussaint might have seen Dieudonne as just as serious a potential rival as the three mulatto generals. With the maneuver that disposed of Dieudonne, Toussaint also stole a march on Rigaud: Laplume was promoted to colonel by Laveaux on Toussaint's recommendation; thereafter Laplume and the force of three thousand he had wrested from Dieudonne reported to Toussaint.
Although Toussaint had done much to consolidate his personal power and to place it at the disposal of Laveaux and thus of France, the stability he was trying to bring to the colony was not as solid as it might have seemed. A lengthy report he made to Laveaux on February 19, 1796, reveals much about the problems of local dissension which Toussaint confronted, and also about his methods of solving them.
On February 13, while camped at his Artibonite outpost, Verrettes, Toussaint received two letters delivered by a white messenger, Gramont L'Hopital, informing him that the soldiers and field hands had revolted in the mountains above Port de Paix, the town so recently vacated by Laveaux. One of those letters had been dictated by the black commander of the region, Etienne Datty who claimed that he had no idea of the cause of the rebellion. Toussaint wrote back to Datty at once, exhorting him to restore order. But soon after, “two citizens of the mountain of Port de Paix, more clear-eyed and more reasonable than the others,”45 approached Toussaint at Verrettes and let him know that “many assassinations had been committed” in the region they had come from.
“Believing that all this might spread into neighboring parishes,” Toussaint reported to General Laveaux, “I decided to leave myself to go to that area and try to remedy, if it should be possible, all the disorders.” He put the fort he had just constructed at Verrettes into a “state of defense” and rode north to Grande Riviere, where he met a third deputation come to let him know that “the Disorder at Port de Paix was at its height,” and that many had been killed. Toussaint had left Verrettes at eight in the evening; after circling through Grande Riviere, he rode southwest to Petite Riviere and halted at his headquarters on Benoit Plantation, where he arrived at eleven at night—in three hours he had covered an astonishing distance, given the difficulty of the terrain.
At six a.m. he rode on to Gona'ives, and stopped at his headquarters there to write letters and to ready a small detachment of dragoons for his expedition to Port de Paix. With