Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [99]
Roume had recently annoyed the British by expelling one of their agents, Douglas, from Le Cap, and Toussaint's British allies were quietly pressuring him to get rid of Roume altogether, but Toussaint did not really want to go so far. He preferred to keep the colony's interests balanced between the interests of the superpowers of his day, and if no representative of the French government remained in Saint Domingue he would be in open rebellion against France, thus wholly dependent on whatever protection he could expect from the United States and from the British navy. At about the same time, his old friend Laveaux, who had been turned away by local authorities from a mission to Guadeloupe, was expected to land in Spanish Santo Domingo. Here was one agent of France whom Toussaint might have welcomed without ambivalence. But Laveaux's ship was captured by the British before he could land, and taken to Jamaica as a prize. Roume would be the agent, or no one would. When Roume finally signed the order to take over the Spanish territory, Toussaint invited him to resume his office.
Toussaints troops were still so tied up in the civil war that he could send only General Age, a white French officer but up to now a Toussaint loyalist, to carry out the mission. Age traveled alone, or the next thing to it. When he reached Santo Domingo City, Governor Don Garcia refused to acknowledge his authority, though Age threatened the arrival of Toussaints army. Don Garcia gave him six soldiers for an escort back to the French border. When Age returned discomfited, Roume rescinded the order, announcing (honestly enough) that it had been extracted by force. Toussaint was furious, but for the time being he was too consumed by the civil war to do anything about it.
For months, Toussaints tremendous black army had been halted outside the defenses of Jacmel. Beauvais, never wholly enthusiastic about war with the overwhelming black army, had finally decided to leave his post and the colony—only to be shipwrecked and drowned. In January 1800, the redoubtable mulatto officer Alexandre Petion—who had previously served in Toussaints command but now decided to switch sides—slipped through the lines around Jacmel and took over the defense. During the next few months, the tightening siege gradually reduced the inhabitants to a state of starvation.
With such a huge numerical advantage, Toussaint's army could easily have surrounded Jacmel on land, but to seal off the town by sea was trickier. Though the British were supposed to allow Toussaint to operate in Saint Domingue's coastal waters, the four ships he sent to blockade Jacmel were captured and hauled off to Jamaica. This event, which coincided with Roume's expulsion of the English agent Douglas, put a strain on Toussaints arrangement with Maitland. Still worse, the French Jew Isaac Sasportas had just traveled from Saint Domingue to Jamaica to raise a slave rebellion there, and got himself arrested. If Toussaint had ever had anything to do with that conspiracy, he disavowed it now—by some accounts it was he who betrayed Sasportas in the first place. Agent Roume, however, would have been happy to disrupt Toussaint's coziness with the English, and may well have had a hand in Sasportas's doomed expedition. For whoever might have been concerned, the Jamaican authorities made a point of hanging Sasportas on a gallows high enough to be visible from the shores of Saint Domingue. Toussaint