Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [81]
Though elected at the same time as Laveaux, Sonthonax seemed far less eager to leave Saint Domingue. Given his earlier experience of recall, it seems likely that he wanted to use the election to secure a line of retreat for himself in France in case he should be forced out of the colony a second time. On the other hand, some observers suspected that Sonthonax did not ever intend to leave the colony. Instead, he and his partisans who had also won election to the National Assembly in September 1796 would form the core of a new colonial assembly which would make Saint Domingue independent of France. In November 1796, Sonthonax began to write letters to the home government requesting his recall, yet he stayed on for nearly a year longer, and sometimes seemed determined to stay indefinitely.
Between the election of September 1796 and August 1797, the “factions gestating” began to split the colony between Sonthonax and Toussaint Louverture. At the same time, fissures opened among the five members of the Third Commission. Giraud, almost from the moment of his arrival, had been fearful of “the savage ferocity of the Blacks” and “the refined perfidy of the colored people and the ancien libre Negroes.”16 Giraud believed that Raimond was plotting to slaughter all the whites in the colony, and Sonthonax and Leblanc exploited his fear to isolate Raimond and make him powerless on the commission. (Roume, the fifth commissioner, had been sent to represent the French in Spanish Santo Domingo.) With Pascal, who was now his son-in-law as well as the commission's secretary general, Raimond turned to profiteering from the leasing of plantations confiscated from their emigre owners—an activity which reinforced their relationship with the sector of Toussaint's black officer corps which was enriching itself under this system. Then Giraud disintegrated into nervous illness and returned to France, and Sonthonax and Leblanc had to bring Raimond back into the commission's decision making.
For his own part, Leblanc began to compete with Sonthonax, courting popularity with the prominent blacks in the region of Le Cap. Toussaint was shocked to be included in these overtures, or he pretended to be, and wrote to the commission as though Leblanc had offered him a bargain with the devil. Thus far, Toussaint had remained on good terms with Sonthonax, with whom he had frequent private conferences during this period. Then Raimond quietly approached Toussaint to warn him that Sonthonax was scheming for independence with the other recently elected delegates to the National Assembly. Wary Toussaint told Raimond that the accusation might stem “from the bitterness you cherish against your colleague, for I know that you don't have a good understanding between you.”17 Nevertheless, he agreed to sound Sonthonax out on the matter without revealing that Raimond was his source. Sonthonax denied any such ambition and promised to send the delegates to France without further delay— though in fact he sent only a few of them.
Since Sonthonax's return, a quarrel had been simmering between him and Toussaint over the matter of emigres in general. The particular case of Bayon de Libertat brought it to a head. On July 4, 1797, Sonthonax sent Toussaint a remarkably hotheaded letter protesting Bayon's return to Saint Domingue, with a copy of “the law which condemns to death the emigres who return to the territory of the Republic after having been banished, and condemns those who have aided or favored their return to four years in irons. It is in the proclamations of the Commission as well as in the deposition of Bayon that you will read your duty with regard to this man, the brother-in-law of Tousard and the intimate friend of Baron de Cambefort, commander of Saint Marc. I am too much your friend to recommend you a weakness … The Commission, always compassionate, does not