Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [67]
“At seven o'clock in the evening, Etienne presented himself in conformity to the order which I had Sent him, with about five hundred men of whom a great Part were armed. I had my horse saddled and Gave the order to Etienne To have all the citizens who had come with him form a circle, as well as those who had just come in with the forage.” With these directions, Toussaint managed to mingle Datty's men, whose intentions and loyalties were uncertain, with the field hands who had turned up earlier and had demonstrated their loyalty to Toussaint.
“I mounted my horse&entered into the Circle.” To address the throng from horseback increased Toussaint's air of authority; he was also ready for a swift departure if anything should go wrong.
After having Preached to them the morals of reason and having reproached them for the assassinations which they had committed, I told them that if they wanted to save their liberty, they must submit to the laws of the Republic&be docile—that it was not by such [violent] conduct that they would enjoy their freedom, that if they had some claim or complaint this was no way to get it recognized, and that Jesus had said, ‘Ask and you shall receive, knock at my door and it shall be opened to you,’ but he did not tell you to commit crimes to demand what you Need.
I asked them if they knew me and if they were happy to see me; they replied, yes, they knew I was the father of all the blacks, that they also knew that I had never ceased laboring for their Happiness and for their freedom, but that they prayed me to Listen to them and Perhaps I would see that they were not so far in the wrong as I said that they were.49
At this point the encounter (as steered by Toussaint) had become a sort of court proceeding, African style, where grievances could be aired before the assembled community and resolved by the judgment of the patriarch. “I was silent,” Toussaint wrote to Laveaux,
and listened to them. One Among them said, “My General, we all regard you as our father, you are the most precious to us after God, and in you we have the greatest confidence.” I hushed him&told him that if they had considered me so, they would not have behaved as they did; that if they were afraid to address themselves to the Governor-General [Laveaux], whom we must all regard as our father and defender of our liberty, they should have addressed themselves to me&and that I would have worked to obtain satisfaction from the Governor-General of whatever claims of theirs I found to be just&that I would have Avoided their plunging into Crime.50
Here Toussaint is reinforcing a chain of command running down from Laveaux through himself to his subordinate officers and thence to individual soldiers and citizens. Though the hierarchy is orthodox, his style of asserting it is not. For the abstraction of European military organization, where all individuals can be replaced in their ranks, is substituted an alternative where the whole apparatus is held together by Toussaint's personal, paternal relationship with all the people under his authority—though he wields his authority in the name of Laveaux and the French republic.
“They replied that all loved the Governor-General, but that it was unfortunate that everyone was not like him.” And then they got down to the real complaint:
Since the beginning of the revolution Etienne has always been our Chief; it is he who has always commanded us; he has eaten all our misery with us to win our liberty—Why did they take the command away from Etienne to give it to someone else against our wishes&why do they treat him as nothing?