Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [97]
In the midst of all the fighting, Toussaint waged a propaganda war. During the early stages of the conflict with Rigaud, Agent Roume had done his best to defuse it, writing an open letter to Rigaud which urged him not to be trapped in Hedouville's scheme to set him and Toussaint against each other. Roume saw the racial dimension of the conflict and was alarmed by it. An elegant passage turned on the point that Roume himself was married to a femme de couleur: “Toussaint Louverture knows only two kinds of men, good ones and bad ones; it is I who assures you of that; I, the husband of a mulatress; I, the father of a quar-teron; I, the son-in-law of a negress—believe me, my mulatto brothers-in-law, believe me, who has long known the sentiment of the General in Chief, believe that I have come to the degree of admiration which he inspires in me by recognizing him the impartial friend of the Blacks, the Reds, and the Whites.”60 This familial view of Saint Domingue's racial situation was one that Toussaint could certainly share. In peacetime he could rise to the level of impartiality which Roume described here, and even during the civil war he liked to point out the numerous loyal mulattoes who remained in his army, many of them in high-ranking, trusted positions.
But now, Toussaint claimed that Rigaud had built his party by assuring all the gens de couleur that “the Mulattoes are the only natives of Saint Domingue, that in consequence the country belongs to them by right, that it is theirs, as France is for the Whites, and Africa for the Negroes.”61 In his efforts to incite the blacks against the whites, Toussaint argued, Rigaud proved himself “faithful to the principles of Machiavelli.”62 The author of The Prince was much on Toussaint's mind these days; he had also accused Hedouville of fleeing his post “to escape the disastrous effects of his Machiavellianism.”63 Now he returned to the Villatte rebellion to demonstrate the Machiavellian cast of Rigaud's faction, alleging that in 1796 the mulattoes were already plotting to seize all three departments of the colony—Villatte in the north, Beauvais in the west, and Rigaud in the south—in a plot masterminded by Pinchinat. Should there be any doubt that the mulattoes hated all the blacks and wanted to destroy them, there was always the example of the Swiss.
The product of this kind of thinking was a war of racial extermination. Toussaint's rising second in command, General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, emerged as the chief executioner. In regions where Toussaint had run into ambushes and assassination attempts, the reprisals were crushing. Dessalines was always more consistently hostile to mulattoes than Toussaint. “The Blacks,” he said, “are friends of repose; whenever they get stirred up it's because someone else put them in motion, and you will always find colored men behind the curtain.”64 Dessalines respected courage wherever he found it, and colored men who stood up to him were often invited to serve in his command—as many of them did. To those unable to bear arms, Dessalines would say, “What are the rest of you good for?—to give bad advice. Enough!”65 His men understood the remark to be a death sentence.
Toussaint was determined to settle all internal conflicts quickly and absolutely, because there were plenty of external threats still on his horizon as the eighteenth century drew to a close. The Directory had given him no definite reaction to his expulsion of Hedouville; in an increasingly shaky state itself, it had decided simply to watch and wait. In France, both Hedouville and Sonthonax were outraged against him, while the Vaublanc