Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [98]
Though Toussaint had not been censured for his conduct toward Hedouville, his deals with the English and the Americans might also have provoked the French government, especially the prohibition of French military vessels in Saint Domingue. Though he had made no open bid for independence, it was becoming more and more apparent that Toussaint did not especially want to see French military vessels in port anywhere on the island—which meant that he needed to bring the Spanish region of Hispaniola under his control. But while the civil war continued he could spare no troops for that operation. Therefore, Rigaud's rebellion had to be utterly crushed. Thus far, Toussaint's ruth-less repression of the mulatto revolt resembled the Terror in France, whose original purpose, as declared by Robespierre, was to create seamless internal solidarity for the confrontation of foreign enemies.
By November 1799, the civil war between the mulattoes and the blacks had settled on the siege of Jacmel, which Toussaint delegated to Dessalines, who had routed Rigaud from the positions he had taken further to the north. During the same month the Directory collapsed in France, and Napoleon Bonaparte assumed executive rule of the nation. Though this arrangement described Napoleon as “first consul” in a consulate of three, it was patently clear that France's new system of government was a military dictatorship, controlled by a single dictator. Such a hard swing to the right was apt to be favorable to proponents of slavery, as Toussaint could not help but suspect. In December, the Consulate issued a constitution stating that the colonies would henceforth be governed by “special laws”—alarming news for Toussaint and all the nouveaux libres of Saint Domingue, as such exceptions to the laws that governed the French homeland had previously been used to permit and justify slavery.
Agent Roume, though rapidly falling out of sympathy with Toussaint, wrote to First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte to complain of the effects which such decisions at home were having in the colony, in the souls of men whom Roume characterized as “simple but good.”66 The notion of “special laws” for the colonies led the blacks of Saint Domingue to suspect they were going to be governed by “a new code noirbased on the old one.”67 Worse, a flurry of letters had begun to circulate, all claiming that an army with a mission to restore slavery would appear on the Spanish side of the island and attack French Saint Domingue across the frontier. The effect of such rumors on Toussaint is not hard to imagine.
On April 27, 1800, Toussaint extracted an order from Roume to take possession of Spanish Santo Domingo. Well aware that the home government did not want this region to fall into the control of its black general in chief, Roume had been refusing since January to sign the order. His once congenial relationship with Toussaint had gone sour. Aware of Maitlands semisecret visits, Roume disapproved of Toussaint's dealings with the British; and the civil war distressed him so much that he concocted a covert plan to halt it by bringing in a Spanish fleet from Cuba to draft both Toussaint's and Rigaud's armies for an all-out assault on Jamaica. Toussaint knew nothing of that fantastic scheme; it was the issue of Spanish Santo Domingo that brought him to a crisis with Roume.
He had Roume locked up for a time in Fort Picolet, on the cliffs above the harbor of Le Cap, but when the agent still held out, Toussaint applied pressure from different angles. A committee of prominent whites led by Mayor Borgella of Port-au-Prince issued a proclamation that Toussaint was “the only man who can seize the reins of government with a certain hand”68 and giving him authority (which it had no legitimate power to give) to overrule Roume's decisions. At the same time, a false rumor that Toussaint had been appointed “proconsul” by