Haiti - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 157

His flair for administering the enormous regions that now lay in his power was astonishing. He made
laws, appointed governors, organized the plantations, levied taxes, and implemented his edicts with a
thoroughness and a vigilance that were almost uncanny. Sloth was punished with the rod, and disobedien-
ce or defection with the firing squad or the gallows. His rigours reached such a pitch that he was obsessed
towards the end by the caution and loneliness of a despot.
The colony was still nominally a part of the French Republic. But fearing its secession, the First Con-
sul dispatched a force of 25,000 men and 70 warships, commanded by his brother-in-law Leclerc, the
husband of Pauline Bonaparte.
The French army, after a series of hard-fought actions, reduced the opposition of the Negroes to the
level of guerrilla warfare and then to a precarious peace. To seal the restoration of goodwill, the French
invited Toussaint to a ceremonial banquet in Cap Français (now Cap Haitien), and he was allowed to enter
the town at the head of a battalion of his troops. A month later Leclerc, on secret orders from Napoleon
issued before the opening of the campaign, engineered the treacherous abduction of Toussaint under the
guise of a friendly meeting with one of his generals on board a French warship. Transported to France,
he was imprisoned in a mountain fortress of the Jura. Locked in this glacial dungeon, he passed his time
writing impassioned and bewildered letters to Napoleon. These documents in self-taught and misspelt
French make pathetic and tragic reading; Napoleon, out of indifference or some curious twist of Corsican
vindictiveness, remained silent. His jailor finally received orders to withdraw pen, ink and paper from
his cell, where, a year after his abduction, on the morning of the seventeenth of Germinal, the year XI,
Toussaint was discovered dead in a chair by the fire, with his head leaning against the chimney-piece.
In contemporary portraits the long, intelligent face of this strange black Spartacus is poised above gold
lace and epaulettes on the pedestal of a frilled and starched cravat and shaded by a cocked hat with a
plume of ostrich feathers. He remains the foremost of the Negro chain-breakers and the first modern hero
and herald of slave-emancipation throughout the world. Wordsworth was among the many contempor-
ary poets and writers to applaud his struggle and mourn his end. There is, indeed, more intrinsic tragedy
about his captivity and his death than that of his former warder, a couple of decades later, in St. Helena.
It is interesting to observe the consistent ignobility of Napoleon's dealings with the Negroes.
When Napoleon reinstated slavery in the Lesser Antilles, the war blazed up again under the command
of Toussaint's generals, Dessalines, Christophe, Clervaux, Pétion and Maurepas. Yellow fever, as much
as death in battle, thinned the ranks of the French. They succumbed in swarms, including the general
himself. Before he died, reduced to despair by the hopelessness of the situation, he instituted a reign of
terror that was ably continued by his successor Rochambeau.
This is a curious figure. He was extremely handsome, with his powdered hair still tied in a queue,
despite the change of fashion—brave, insolently proud, and obsessed by a pathological loathing of the
Blacks. He inherited Leclerc's tactics of mass shootings and hangings, and the Jacobin custom of noy-
ades . He revived the English and Spanish Maroon-catching habit of hunting the Negroes with blood-
hounds, and asphyxiated his prisoners with sulphur in the holds of warships. He even occasionally
achieved those dizzy heights of unutilitarian harm, of absolute and disinterested wickedness that histor-
ians of the Renaissance ascribe to figures like Sigismondo Malatesta, the tyrant of Rimini. One of these
is worth recording. When he was commandant of Port-au-Prince, he gave a ball for the coloured women
of the capital. It was an unexpected success, as the dancing was general and notable for its gaiety. But at
midnight the guests were led into a large chamber next to the ballroom, full of people dressed as priests
who were chanting the Dies Irae before a row of coffins covered by a black cloth. When the chant came