Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [71]
Toussaint was black, as he would often remind the nouveaux libres, but he was also (unlike the majority of them) a Creole, born in the colony and adapted to its ways from birth, and furthermore (unlike all the nouveaux libres) he had been a prosperous land-and slave-holding freedman well before the revolution whose principal leader he was now becoming. Much as he labored to disguise them, those differences did create a fissure between Toussaint and the roughly half million people he was trying to mold into a new black citizenry, competent to defend its own freedom on both the political and the military fronts.
The unrest in Port de Paix, settled in Toussaint's favor, is one example of this problem. In the Western Department, the uncertain loyalty of Dieudonne's force was another. This issue too was settled in Toussaint's favor by his letters and intermediaries, at roughly the same time that he himself was halfway across the colony managing the business of Datty. Toussaint wrote his crucial letter to Dieudonne on February 12, the day before he received the first news of the uprising at Port de Paix. Just ten days later, Toussaint was writing to Laveaux about similar trouble in La Souffriere “since Macaya went there with Chariot after having escaped from the prisons of Gona'ives.” Another tribal leader, Macaya had been a far more prominent figure than Toussaint when rebellion erupted in 1791, and with Pierrot had helped Sonthonax wrest control of Le Cap away from Galbaud in 1793. “I only had Macaya arrested because he was corrupting my troops and taking them to Jean-François,” Toussaint wrote to Laveaux.62 Perhaps it would be cynical to suppose that he also saw Macaya (like Blanc Cassenave, Dieudonne, and others) as a potential rival for advancement in the French military.
Certainly Toussaint and Macaya were of different breeds. After Macaya's escape from Gona'ives, Toussaint complained to Laveaux, “Every day he holds dances and assemblies with the Africans of his nation,* to whom he gives bad advice. As long as these two men remain at La Souffriere, people of ill intention will find them easily disposed to help them to do evil … It would be most suitable to have Macaya and his cohort Chariot arrested, for they are staying too long in these neighborhoods … [Macaya] will now do all the harm he can so as to revenge himself on me. I pray you, my General, to pay careful attention to that, for if you don't cut the evil off at its root, it may grow very large.”63
The episodes of Datty Dieudonne, and Macaya show that unrest among the enormous African-born contingent of the nouveaux libres was very widespread. At the same time a completely different sort of outbreak was brewing among the gens de couleur. Toussaint's letter about Macaya is sprinkled with equally urgent complaints about Joseph Flaville, the mulatto commander who had vexed him not long before by making certain posts which Toussaint considered to be part of his own command report instead to Villatte at Le Cap. Indeed, Villatte's power and influence there were not only becoming more and more vexatious to Toussaint, but also more and more dangerous to Laveaux and to all French authority in the colony.
Toussaint's situation vis-a-vis these anciens libres was tricky. Like most in Villatte's colored contingent, he had been free well before 1791, and like them, he had prospered in the prerevolutionary plantation economy. His interest in political rights for freedmen was similar to that of the gens de couleur. Unlike them, however, he was black. It seems unlikely that the antipathy between Toussaint and men like Flaville and Villatte was altogether racially based, for Toussaint had mulattoes among his most trusted officers to the very end of his career (on terms like brothers born of the same mother, as Dattys men observed). However, it is likely enough that some colored officers were loath to accept a full-blood Negro as