Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [77]
From the moment of their recall to France, Sonthonax and Polverel had lobbied for a substantial force of European troops to be sent to the colony, but without success. In 1796, Sonthonax arrived in Saint Domingue armed mainly with his powers of diplomacy; he had to obtain military support from the commanders already in place—chiefly Toussaint Louverture and Andre Rigaud. Sonthonax did, however, receive a shipment of twenty thousand muskets, which he distributed with great gusto among the nouveaux libres, saying to each recipient: “Here is the liberty which Sonthonax gives you; whoever would take this gun from you means to make you a slave again.”9 The prodigious rhetorical effect of this gesture made Sonthonax again a rival for the immense popularity of Toussaint Louverture. And when he urged the field hands to work, Sonthonax told them in the same breath, “Don't forget that nobody has the right to force you to dispose of your time against your will.”10 Meanwhile, most of the guns Sonthonax passed out wound up in the hands of Toussaint's men, while some, unwisely given to uncommitted supporters of the recently departed Jean-François, were immediately used against the French republican forces.
Sonthonax needed the cooperation of both Rigaud and Toussaint, and he needed them to cooperate with each other. The latter goal was difficult to achieve, though both generals were persistent in attacking their common enemy, the English. Sonthonax sent a delegation to the south, seeking to confirm French governmental authority there. At first, the field hands turned to the delegates (Kerverseau, Rey, and Leborgne), protesting the slavery-like labor conditions they suffered and showing the irons and isolation boxes with which they were punished. However, Rey and Leborgne seemed to have been poorly chosen for a sensitive mission; these two were notorious for their debauchery even before they arrived in Les Cayes—where Leborgne went so far as to seduce Rigaud's fiancee, then boast of the conquest all over town. Justly infuriated by this sort of outrage, Rigaud and his partisans managed to rouse a popular rebellion on the rumor that it was really the commissioners who intended to restore slavery. After considerable violence, the delegates fled to Spanish Santo Domingo, followed by some fifteen hundred French families from the region. Rigaud and his group managed to turn a nice profit by selling them passports. Mulatto domination of the military, the civil service, and the plantation economy continued unchecked in the south. A proclamation from the commissioners defending the conduct of their delegates and rebuking the mulatto leaders was paraded through the streets of Les Cayes—pinned to the tail of a jackass.
The breakdown of relations with Rigaud made Sonthonax and the Third Commission ever more dependent on the military power of Toussaint. Both Sonthonax and Laveaux urged the black general to make a move against the English at the oft-disputed town of Mirebalais, which was in fact a key point in Toussaint's whole strategy along the south bank of the Artibonite River. Mirebalais was the principal town of a fertile valley which produced many commercial crops and which also offered access to horses and cattle on the formerly Spanish ranches of the Central Plateau. Toussaint needed to secure a route from Mirebalais to a west coast port, and after his failure to capture Saint Marc he had shifted his sights to Arcahaie, a smaller coastal town to the south. Arcahaie was the stronghold of Lapointe,