Toussaint Louverture by Madison Smartt Bell

Author:Madison Smartt Bell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307548191
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-08T10:00:00+00:00

In France, the spring 1797 elections had brought a royalist majority to power. In the new National Assembly the dispossessed land and slave owners of Saint Domingue found a vigorous advocate in Vincent Marie Vienot de Vaublanc. His speeches were bitterly critical of Sonthonax, “who has sacrificed everything to the Africans, in the hope of dominating them through each other,” but instead finds himself “reduced to trembling before them and to seeing his orders despised by men who owe only to him the authority with which they abuse him.”26 In Vaublanc's view, Sonthonax had become the prime example of the humiliation of whites brought about by his own misguided policies, notably the abolition of slavery. Vaublanc's rhetoric called more or less openly for the restoration of the ancien regime in Saint Domingue.

Toussaint Louverture was well aware of these developments and of the menace they represented to liberty for all. One theory suggests that he forced Sonthonax out of the colony as a sacrifice to Vaublanc's faction, which had indeed called for Sonthonax's removal. But Vaublanc's rhetoric was also aimed directly at Toussaint and his officers. “And what a military government! To whose hands is it confided? To vulgar and ignorant negroes, incapable of distinguishing the most unrestrained license from the austere liberty which yields to the law.”27 In September 1797, Laveaux made a speech defending Toussaint against such vitriol, describing him as “a man gifted with every military talent” and “a Republican full of sentiments of humanity”28 and protesting that his loyalty to France was absolute.

In November, Toussaint himself wrote to the French Directory, reminding the government that he trusted in France enough to send his children there. At the same time he made it painfully clear that preserving liberty for the former slaves of Saint Domingue would be more important to him even than the welfare of his children should circumstance force him to make that choice. The conclusion of this letter, much as it tries to insist on his belief in French support for general liberty, is riddled with doubt and crowned with defiance: “could men who have once enjoyed the benefits of liberty look on calmly while it is ravished from them! They bore their chains when they knew no condition of life better than that of slavery. But today when they have left it, if they had a thousand lives, they would sacrifice them all rather than to be subjected again to slavery. But no, the hand that has broken our chains will not subject us to them again. France will not renounce her principles … But if, to restore slavery in Saint Domingue, you were to do so, then I declare to you, that would be to attempt the impossible; we knew how to face danger to win our liberty, and we will know how to face death to keep it.”29

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