Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [76]
To a considerable extent, Sonthonax and Toussaint Louverture shared a similar agenda at the point that the Third Commission arrived in Saint Domingue. Sonthonax's abolitionism was completely sincere, and he was enthusiastic about his assignment to level the society of the ancien regime, uprooting the old divisions of race and of class, even to the point of empowering the black majority (since Sonthonax felt he had been burned, during his first tour in the colony, by the mulatto race and the class of anciens libres). Toussaint could meet Sonthonax on the ground of this egalitarian social project, and of their common commitment to general liberty for all. And Sonthonax could meet Toussaint on the ground of ultimate loyalty to the French republic. There is no evidence that Toussaint was nurturing any scheme for independence during this period. All his public proclamations insisted that the nouveaux libres owed a debt and obligation to France as the sponsor of general emancipation and supporter of the Rights of Man, and his actions reinforced his words. On the practical plane, Toussaint and Sonthonax had roughly the same program: to reestablish the plantation system with freedmen's labor.
Sonthonax was wise enough to court Toussaint's personal goodwill—the strong friendship that already existed between Toussaint and Laveaux was helpful in this regard. In July 1796, Sonthonax wrote to Toussaint: “As a private individual, you have all my friendship; as a general, all my confidence.”7 During the same summer Sonthonax helped arrange for Toussaint's oldest sons, Placide and Isaac, to travel to France for their education—a project apparently favored, if not initiated, by Toussaint, who wrote to Laveaux on June 16: “Receive, I beg you, my sincere thanks for the goodness you have wished to have for my children; count in advance upon my gratitude; I assure you it is without limit. The Commissioner Sonthonax has written me the most obliging letter in that regard; he will give them passage to France on board the Wattigny. How many obligations I have to him and to you!”8
Placide and Isaac Louverture sailed for France on the same ship that had brought the Third Commission to Cap Francais, and afterward Sonthonax bestirred himself to ensure that their passage into the French educational system was smooth (the costs were assumed by the French government). Under the ancien regime it had been traditional for the more prosperous (and mostly mulatto) freedmen to send their children for education in France, and this move would help Toussaint's sons to advance as French citizens under the new world order. But Toussaint was too canny not to have realized that his sons would also be hostages; perhaps the formality of his thanks was slightly strained.
Sonthonax and Toussaint were also in basic agreement about the two most serious threats to the French republic as it existed in Saint Domingue: the English, who in their collaboration with the royalist grands blancs frankly intended to restore slavery along with all other aspects of the ancien regime; and the potential for a colony-wide mulatto revolt, of which Villatte's rebellion might have been only a harbinger. The mulatto class (traditionally a property-and slave-owning class) was less than wholly enthusiastic about Sonthonax's project for eradicating all class and racial distinctions and for the empowerment of the largely black nouveau libre majority.
In the north, open resistance to this program had been scotched by Sonthonax's deportation of Villatte and his cohorts. The most powerful colored general in the south, Rigaud, was fighting on the republican side and threatening the British positions in the Western and Southern departments. Rigaud had emerged as the most important military leader for the gens de couleur; in