Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [70]
“ ‘You have a Secretary there who is a cunning, wicked man,’ “ Toussaint suggested to Datty. “ ‘He is deceiving you, I am sure of it,’ and I asked him if he had seen a postscript he had put in the margin of the Letter that he wrote to me and sent by the citizen Gramont [i.e., the first news Toussaint had of the insurrection at Port de Paix, delivered to him at Verrettes], in these terms: The bearer of the Letter is the citizen Gramont, I am in No Way guilty, I am forced to live with wolves.”59 Etienne Datty declared that he had not seen this bit of marginalia, which suggests that perhaps he could not read: many of the black officer corps were illiterate and thus at the mercy of their secretaries. With the scales thus fallen from his eyes, Datty told Toussaint “no doubt he [Maguenot] could have put other bad things into the letters which I had him Write to the Governor General and the Commandant of the province, Without my knowing anything of it.”60
It may well have been true that Maguenot helped stir up the trouble; it was certainly true that arresting him made it easier for Toussaint to reinstate Datty in his command without any punishment or reprimand—which, given the mood of Datty's men, was clearly the prudent thing to do. Maguenot was sent away under armed guard, while Toussaint and Datty dined together. After the repast, these two returned together to Andro Plantation.
“I arrived at Habitation Andro at four o'clock and found that everyone was there; I ordered Etienne to have them fall into line in front of the house. That being done I made them all Swear to put everything back into good order, to submit to the laws of the Republic, and I Gave them Etienne Datty To Command them.” Whereupon Datty's men cried, “Vive la Republique! Vive la Liberte et l'figalite! Vive le General Laveaux! Vive le General Toussaint!”61 Then they all began to dance, while Toussaint retired to his room for a long-overdue rest; in the previous seventy-two hours he had taken scarcely more than a catnap. The next day he had to gallop back to Verrettes, for the English had taken advantage of his absence to attack his post there. In partnership with Laveaux, Toussaint had done a great deal to restore stability to much of the colony, but what he'd achieved was still constantly threatened, from both within and without.
Resolving the Datty affair had taken six rather hectic days, and Toussaint had needed to walk delicately over a long line of eggshells to avoid coming to blows with his own people—to the extent that Datty's people were his. Even the style of address of their letters underlines the gap between them: Toussaint is brigadier general in the French army, while Datty (in his own signatures as well as in Toussaint's salutations) is “Commander of the Africans.” One is a French military officer who happens to be wearing a black skin; the other is a tribal leader. It is likely that all or most of Etienne's men really were “Africans” in the sense that, like the majority of the nouveaux libres, they had been born in Africa. The first instinct of these men was to trust the chiefs of their own group ahead of any Creole commander like Toussaint, though Toussaint, who knew how to operate both as a tribal leader and as a member of the French military hierarchy, was able to win Datty's men over, and without any serious show of force. His situation required him to shuttle constantly between these two roles, and he had a remarkable facility for doing just that, as his long report to Laveaux on the Datty affair is intended to demonstrate. A European officer in his place ‘would have been far less likely to grasp, for example, that the willingness of the locals to find hay for his horses meant that they