Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [96]
Toussaint began taking a similar line. The address he made to an assembly of field hands on the Cul de Sac plain is his longest speech in Creole ever recorded:
Am I not a black as much as the rest of you? Was I not a slave like the rest of you?—well what do they want to say? Don't listen to them, my friends. We are all brothers. Who fought for you from the beginning of the whole business until now … wasn't it me? You didn't know me well back then, because I was at Le Cap. Wasn't it the blacks of Le Cap who fought first for freedom? The mulattoes have fought on their own account in this area, and if they tell you they were fighting for you they are deceiving you. Wasn't it them that gave up the blacks around here to be sent to the Mosquito Coast?* Ah, look at Rigaud today—who's looking for trouble, and what does he expect to get out of it? He says I want to sell the blacks to the English. He's crazy, oh!—wasn't it me who chased all the English out of here! Don't listen to people who come around to stir you up against me. Seize them and bring them to me. It's Rigaud and his people, or rather it's the mulattoes who want to make the rest of you go back to slavery. It's they who owned slaves and are angry to see them free. Isn't it I who was a slave myself exactly like the rest of you? The whites had slaves, but they know what is called a revolution, they love the law … they are friends of the blacks, so watch out!—if you do harm to them, you'll make me very angry58
The view here expressed of the whites' benevolence and commitment to general liberty was perhaps a little exaggerated. Christophe Mornet, Toussaint's commander in the Cul de Sac region, was enforcing the labor policy with such enthusiasm that one gratified white observer commented that “little remained to be done for the gangs to be working just like in the old days.”59 But in this same speech Toussaint apologized for that severity, shifting the blame to Christophe Mornet, and offered all his listeners passports to leave their plantations and go where they liked. As the conflict with Rigaud flowered into all-out civil war, Toussaint found it expedient to rally his black base by suspending his stringent labor policy. He promoted several days of festival that brought swarms of blacks into Port-au-Prince from the outlying area, and on the gallery of the government house he joined in Ibo warrior dances, to help whip up enthusiasm for battles which were sure to come.
On July 3, Roume, under pressure from Toussaint, declared Rigaud a rebel and traitor to France, though the agent still hoped to mediate a peaceful settlement. Five days later, Toussaint sent his main force, which now amounted to between twenty and thirty thousand men, to confront Rigaud at Petit and Grand Goave. Though Rigaud's main strength was in the south, particularly in his home region of Les Cayes, his faction had footholds all over the colony, particularly in the coastal towns. Beauvais, commanding at Jacmel on the south coast, hoped at first to remain neutral, but when gens de couleur in the surrounding countryside were attacked by Mamzel and the Doko maroons (probably on Toussaint's orders), he was forced to join the struggle on the side of Rigaud and his race. Meanwhile, Toussaint was riding rapidly all over the Western and Northern departments to suppress rebellions in the Artibonite Plain and at Mole Saint-Nicolas. On July 25, he broke a siege of Port de Paix, where Rigaud's partisans had attacked Toussaint's General Maurepas.
Not so very long before, Cap Francais had been a mulatto stronghold. In the summer of 1799, Toussaint executed Pierre Michel (the officer who'd been first to rescue Laveaux from mulattoes then led by Villatte) for an attempt to turn over this important town to Rigaud's supporters; fifty other conspirators were put to death at Le Cap on August 4. Rigaud's partisans wanted to assassinate Toussaint, if they could not defeat him