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By Root 916 0

ideas were not so very dissimilar. Both wanted to restore the plantation economy by sending nouveaux libres back to work in the cane and coffee fields. Both were inclined to bind the freedmen contractually to plantations for periods as long as three years, and often to the same plantations where they had previously been slaves. When Toussaint undertook such measures himself he thought of them as necessary for the restoration of prosperity, but when they were undertaken by Hedouville, Toussaint could easily be persuaded that the agent was a tool of Vaublanc and the faction in France that was maneuvering for the restoration of slavery in fact, if not in name. One of his letters to the agent makes much of the idea that he, Toussaint, had been set free by the principles of the postrevolutionary French Constitution—and no mention of the fact that he had been free for more than a dozen years before. Toussaint pre-ferred to identify himself with the nouveaux libres as much as he could—but the stringent labor rules were hugely unpopular with that group, no matter who was pushing them.

Hedouville had brought no significant military force with him, but he did have a team of civil servants with which he intended to replace most of the men Toussaint had appointed to various civilian posts in the government. Like Idlinger, who was in charge of the government's accounting in Le Cap, many of Toussaint's appointees were white Frenchmen, and many were considered to be corrupt, but Hedouville's efforts to replace them with his own people quickly became another sore point. In an effort to interrupt Toussaint's negotiations with the British, Hedouville ordered that enemy envoys should be admitted only at Le Cap, but Toussaint paid no attention to that. When Hedouville rebuked him for his leniency toward the emigres, Toussaint wrote tartly to the Directory, “Ah, since one reproaches the blacks for throwing out their former tyrants, isn't it part of their duty to prove that they know how to forgive—to welcome the same men that persecuted them?”38

One of the French naval captains told Toussaint “how flattered he would be, after having brought General Hedouville, to return with General Toussaint Louverture, whose services would find in France all the sweetness and honor which they so richly deserve.” The shades of sarcasm and menace in this remark did not escape Toussaint, who responded darkly, “Your ship is not big enough for a man like me.”39 Officers of Hedouville's largely symbolic honor guard persisted in teasing him with the prospect of a perhaps involuntary journey to France, until Toussaint finally pointed to a nearby shrub and said that he would make the trip ‘when that is big enough to make a ship to carry me.”40 Toussaint wore a red head-cloth under his general's bicorne; this mouchwa tet had a Vodouisant significance—it represented a bond between Toussaint and the warrior spirit, Ogoun Ferraille. Hedouville's supercilious young staff officers boasted that four of them would be enough to arrest “the ragheaded old man.” Ogoun did not take the insult lightly; not very long after, a couple of these witty young blades were slain in an ambush south of Port-au-Prince.

If Hedouville was playing Rigaud against Toussaint, Toussaint was not much troubled by his game. “Let Monsieur Rigaud go take his instructions from the Agent of the Directory,” he said, in a moment of unusual frankness, to one of the French colonists he had amnestied in the region of Port-au-Prince. “I could very well have him arrested, but God forbid—I need Monsieur Rigaud … the caste of Mulattoes is superior to mine …; if I were to remove Monsieur Rigaud, they would perhaps find a leader worth more than he … I know Monsieur Rigaud …; he loses control of his horse when he gallops …; when he strikes, he shows his arm … Me, I know how to gallop too, but I know how to stop on a dime, and when I strike, you feel me but you don't see me.41

Hedouville's efforts to contain and limit Toussaint's power, via Rigaud or any other counterweight, were rapidly coming to nothing. After