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the British withdrawal he wanted to reduce the size of the black army, but could do nothing toward this end. He mistrusted Toussaint's cadre of black officers, many of whom were illiterate and thus in Hedouville's view too easily led, or misled, by their white secretaries— who were apt to belong to the suspicious grand ^Zawc/emigre class. And despite all Hedouville's remonstrations and proclamations to the contrary, Toussaint persisted in favoring this latter group, which was not only protected by his agreements with Maitland but also had an important role in his own project for rebuilding the economy of the colony. Most of the civilian bureaucracy was reporting to Toussaint's officer cadre, and the military had infiltrated most branches of administration. Hedouville's struggle to reassert civilian control created still more friction.

When Hedouville urged him to cut the number of his troops, Toussaint told him, “Ah well, if you are able, you can do it yourself.” The reaction of Toussaint's adoptive nephew Moyse, who then commanded at Fort Liberte, was still more pointed: “That agent wants to diminish the troops, and I want to increase my regiment. If there are no soldiers, there won't be any more general.”42 Moyse was also more and more openly hostile to labor policies which would attach former slaves to their former plantations, regardless of their source.

In the fall of 1798, rumors began to spread that a massacre of the whites was in the offing. The French Revolutionary calendar's New Year came in late September, and the nouveaux libres circulated more widely and generally than usual during this period, holding dances and assemblies which fed the fear among the whites that an insurrection was being planned. Toussaint sought to scotch the rumor, telling his officers: “Show how absurd is the intention they have imputed to the blacks, and don't allow any assembly to take place.”43

In this tense atmosphere, quarreling broke out between soldiers of the Fifth Regiment, commanded by Moyse at Fort Liberte, and planters in the area. Hedouville was alarmed enough by that situation to order Moyse replaced by Manigat, a black magistrate in the town backed by some of the few white troops at the agent's disposal. Moyse was away on a tour of inspection of the countryside when Manigat took over, and when he returned, Manigat declared him a rebel. After an exchange of gunfire between Manigat's supporters and his own, Moyse left town with many men of the Fifth Regiment and began raising the field workers of the Northern Plain in an insurrection against Hedouville. By some accounts, Toussaint met Moyse at Hericourt Plantation and helped coordinate the rising.

Hedouville sent for help from Toussaint at Gonai'ves, but Toussaint would not receive the messengers, though one was his close friend Colonel Vincent and the other his sometime confessor, the Catholic priest Antheaume. Instead, Toussaint had them briefly imprisoned in the Gonai'ves fort. When Hedouville learned what had happened to them, he resigned himself to leave Saint Domingue. In an address to the citizens of Le Cap, Hedouville blamed the trouble on an emigre plot to make the colony independent of France. By then the population of the Artibonite Valley had joined the insurrection, and Dessalines was marching north from Saint Marc at the head of the Fourth Regiment, with an order in Toussaint's own handwriting and phonetic spelling (which meant that it must have been composed in great haste): “I spoke to you yesterday about Fort Liberte—well, it is now in the power of the white troops by the order of Hedouville … Hurry up and get twelve hundred men ready to march against Le Cap and arrest him before he embarks.”44

By the time Toussaint and Dessalines reached Le Cap, riding the wave of the huge popular insurrection, Hedouville was already on shipboard, with his honor guard and a handful of local sympathizers, including the mulatto commissioner Julien Raimond and Belley, the retired black delegate to the French National Convention. He sent ashore a few of Moyse's officers