Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [80]
Ill at ease with the military predicament, Sonthonax began trying to persuade Toussaint to decommission many of his troops and send them back to work on the plantations, while at the same time requesting more European troops from France. Naturally, Toussaint's suspicions were aroused. Moreover, the effectiveness of Sonthonax's rhetorical gestures, along with the sincerity of his commitment to permanent general liberty, made him a serious rival for Toussaint's popularity among the nouveau libreblack majority. Field hands had begun to address Sonthonax as “Father,” and among them his name had the force of a magical talisman.
In this rather uneasy situation (in September 1796), elections were held to choose colonial representatives to the French National Assembly. In a curiously double-edged letter, Toussaint urged Laveaux to stand as a candidate:
My general, my father, my good friend,
As I foresee, with chagrin, that in this unfortunate country, for which and for whose inhabitants you have sacrificed your life, your wife, your children, something disagreeable will happen to you, and as I would not wish to bear the pain of being witness to that, I would desire that you should be named deputy, so that you will be able to have the satisfaction of seeing your true country again and all that you hold most dear, your wife, your children—and so you can be sheltered and not be the pawn of the factions which are gestating in Saint Domingue—and I will be assured, along with all my brothers, of having the most zealous defender of the cause we are all fighting for. Yes, general, my father, my benefactor, France possesses many men but where is the one who would be forever the true friend of the blacks, like you? There will never be one.13
This tortuously mixed message undoubtedly springs from an equally complex mixture of motives. Who is really threatening Laveaux in those ominous opening phrases, the “factions which are gestating in Saint Domingue” or Toussaint Louverture himself? Either way, the warning to leave or face dire consequences would have been difficult to miss.
It's also difficult to understand just why Toussaint wanted Laveaux off the Saint Dominguan scene, for Laveaux was his strongest, most loyal ally in the French administration, one whom he could sincerely call a benefactor. But Laveaux had been a long time in the colony, and did indeed miss his family in France. And Toussaint, whose information from overseas tended to be quite current, was aware of a counterrevolutionary movement brewing in France, and thus he saw a need for a faithful friend in Paris—a “zealous defender” not only of general liberty but also, especially, of Toussaint Louverture. Laveaux departed to take up his office in France in October 1796, but Toussaint continued to write to him regularly for the next two years, filing the same minutely detailed reports on military and political events that he had done when Laveaux was his immediate superior in the colony.
Sonthonax was also elected deputy to the French National Assembly in the September 1796 election—whether under pressure from Toussaint or not is less clear. As his conflicts with Sonthonax worsened, Toussaint had a stronger motive to get the commissioner out of the colony, but while some accounts claim that Toussaint threatened to destroy Cap Francais (again!) if Laveaux and Sonthonax were not elected, others say that Sonthonax campaigned for his own election, to the point of ordering Toussaint out of town and sending a friend “through the streets armed with a sword, distributing the list of those who were supposed to be named to the legislature.”14