Revolutions - 4.15- The Leclerc Expedition

Episode Date: March 21, 2016

With the massive expedition he assembled, Bonaparte reckoned it would take three months to retake Saint-Domingue.

Hello, and welcome to revolutions. Episode 4.15, the Leclair Expedition. For all the attention, First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, had taken to arrange the massive expedition he hoped would soon recapture Sandomang. When the peace preliminaries were signed with the British in October 1801, he had yet to settle on a commander-in-chief for the campaign. But by the end of the month, he finally tapped a young general named Charleau-Victoire-Imanuel Leclair. All of 29 years old, Leclair was an intimate member of Bonaparte's inner circle. The two had begun serving together as young officers at the siege of Toulon, and during the Italian campaigns, Bonaparte elevated Leclair to the rank of General of Division. Leclair was the man Bonaparte dispatched back to Paris to tell the directory that he had just signed the Leobin Peace preliminaries in the spring of 1797,

You know, after he had signed them. The two men were so close that when Bonaparte accidentally stumbled upon his sister Pauline in amorous consultation, he was delighted rather than outraged that Leclair was the man with whom Pauline was consulting. In fact, just as Bonaparte was settling on Leclair as the man to lead the Sandalmang expedition, he also decided that Leclair was the right man to make Pauline an honest woman. So Leclair got both his military orders and a demand that he was. He married Pauline at practically the same time.

In part, this was because Pauline had a habit for scandal and Bonaparte wanted to marry her off, but it also represents a further step in Bonaparte's long-term plans to forge an imperial family to help him rule the world. So Leclair got his orders, got married, and then departed Paris to join his new fleet. And what a fleet it was. The Sandomang Expedition, known historically as the Leclair Expedition, for obvious reasons, now comprised 50 ships spread out across seven Atlantic ports. Among those 50 were fully half the French Navy's heavy warships. This fleet was manned by 20,000 sailors, prepared to ferry 20,000 soldiers across the Atlantic.

All of them crack units and veterans of the Revolutionary Wars. And unlike previous military missions to the colonies, an array of talented and ambitious officers eagerly signed up for the mission. As we've seen, these kind of talented and ambitious officers have been pretty adept at not getting themselves sent to the colonies. But now that peace was at hand in Europe, Sandomang was the only place left to go hunting for riches and glory. Every officer, no doubt, planned to use this opportunity to acquire a plantation or two for himself that would keep him in fine style for the rest of his life. The dream of hitting the colonial jackpot was alive and well. Also joining this expedition were a number of men that we've already met. Leclair's second in command, for example, was General Rochambeau, now embarking on his third tour of duty in the colony.

Also aboard were most of the colored exiles, André Rago, chief among them, but also General Volat, rehabilitated from his aborted coup back in 1796, Alexandra Petion, who will remember become the first president of the Republic of Haiti, and then Petion's 26-year-old protégé, Jean-Pierre Boyer, who will become the second president of the Republic of Haiti. We also find on board Jean-Beptice Belly, the one-time free black militia colonel who had helped save the second commissioners during the Battle of Le Cap, been appointed to the Tricolor Commission, and then been elected to serve as a delegate in both the National Convention and the Council of 500. Finally, among the Creoles taking part were Tussons, two sons, who had both been getting their educations in France, and then serving as de facto hostages for the past five years. They were ordered by Bonaparte to take part in the expedition, specifically to convince their father to stand down. But though he had organized a massive armada to go retake Sandal Meng, Bonaparte was mostly interested in using their

overwhelming force to forestall a war rather than wage one. And he gave Leclair a highly confidential three-step program to retake Sandelmang, hopefully without firing a shot. So step one, when you arrive, offer assurances to both General Tucson personally and the population generally that your intentions are peaceful and just. Promise Tucson literally anything to get him to hand over the keys to the principal ports and military fortresses. Promise him anything. It doesn't matter because you're not going to keep any of those promises. Once you have control of all the strategic bases, move on to step two. Demand that Tucson seed both his civilian and military authority. Again, promise him anything to get this done. But more

importantly, make it 100% clear that all the other black officers would keep their rank, privilege, and position. The point here is to isolate Tucson by making sure his senior officers knew that their positions would not be threatened by the overthrow of Tucson. Again, make any promises necessary. Once you've secured the goodwill of these officers, Use them to pacify any native uprisings that may have sprung up since your arrival. So once you've won over the officers, neutralized Tucson and pacified the colony, then move on to step three. Arrest every single Creole officer above the rank of captain and deport them from the island in one fell swoop. Anyone who resists with armed force should be summarily shot.

Bonaparte estimated this three-step plan would take about three months start to finish and preclude the necessity for using the French arm to do anything, but sit around and look menacing. So, spoiler alert, this is not going to be wrapped up in three months. In fact, it is all going to go so badly that Bonaparte will have to abandon his dream for a French-dominated Gulf of Mexico. Instead, when Napoleon was finally exiled for good to St. Helena, he would tell a companion that the Leclair expedition was one of his great mistakes, right up there with the invasion of Russia and the Spanish ulcer.

He reportedly said, with an army of 25 to 30,000 blacks, what might I not have undertaken against Jamaica, the Antilles, Canada, and the United States itself were the Spanish colonies. There was an opportunity here to make General Tucson, his senior officers, and the well-trained army they commanded partners in his plans for global domination. But instead, Bonaparte chose to try to screw them over and push them all aside. And the really big missed opportunity here is that Tucson and his Creole army would have been permanently immune to the diseases that ravaged European soldiers arriving in the Caribbean. So once Tucson got going, it might have been impossible for any European power to stop him. But of course you get into speculating too hard and you wind up wondering whether Bonaparte taking this route would have also led to him kicking himself, except this time for letting Tucson Louvature get too powerful. Now, this would all make for a great alternative history, but we should probably get back to the actual history. So after the expedition had been forced to wait and wait until the British promised not to interfere, when the go-ahead order came in October, everyone was eager to depart.

Whereupon the wind proceeded to blow in the wrong direction for the next seven weeks, trapping the fleet against the Atlantic coast into December and threatening the whole project. Remember, all three steps needed to be completed before the malaria and the yellow fever started to set in. But just as the whole project was seriously about to be scrapped, the winds reversed, and in mid-December 1801, the Leclair expedition set sail. But sailing 50 ships across the Atlantic is not an easy job, and the French admiral in charge of the fleet was pretty incredulous that the orders Bonaparte had issued, that the various contingents of ships would all leave the seven Atlantic ports on the same day, sail without problems to a pre-arranged meeting spot off the coast of Spain,

arrive there at the same moment, and then immediately set sail to arrive in Sandomang all together and all at once. The Admiral knew that the will of the Atlantic was quite a bit stronger than the will of Bonaparte, and he was not wrong. The minute the ships began to depart, various storms and mishaps, false starts, and perfectly understandable delays wound up scattering the ships all over the map. When the Admiral and a core of the fleet got to the rendezvous point, they all waited around for as long as they could, for as many ships as they could wait for,

but ultimately, the Admiral had to leave a bunch behind and hope that they would just eventually catch up. The fleet wound up delayed long enough that back in Sandalman, governor for life Tucson Louvichure, had plenty of time to prepare. After learning in December, both that peace between France and Britain was at hand, and that a massive fleet was gathering on the Atlantic coast, he spent the next two months making ready to defend his island. On paper, Tucson had close to 20,000 men in the regular army and another 10,000 enrolled in local militias. But those numbers were inflated, and Tucson knew it. Throughout history, senior officers and military regimes have always made a habit of inflating their troop numbers. numbers, pocketing the wages and supplies they received in excess of their actual numbers.

This was a practice winked at at every level, but when it came time to actually fight, the real bill always comes due. But Tucson was no dummy, and the militarization of the plantation economy that we talked about last week was in part meant to make it very easy to raise the people to fight if it came to that, to launch a colonial levay en masse. When soldiers were discharged back to the fields they took their guns with them, and Toussaint had himself spent the last year or so hiding weapon caches all over the island. And in the months before the fleet's arrival, Toussaint rode around Sandomang making sure everything was where it should be, and that his officers holding every fort, garrison, and port knew their jobs, which was resist the French for as long

as you can. But when you can't resist any more, burn down your town or city, retreat to the mountains, and will wait until disease kills them all off. But though he had carefully prepared and knew that the French were coming, when the French fleet was sited off the northeast coast of Hispaniola on January the 29th, 1802, Toussaint still despaired at his chances of survival. I think the biggest single batch of soldiers that the French have sent to Sandomang so far was 6,000 men. The Leclair expedition was orders of magnitude beyond that and far beyond what Tucson was

likely expecting. According to the tradition, Toussaint himself was in place to watch for the fleet personally, and when he saw the size of it, he said, quote, we are going to die. The whole of France has come to Sandal Meng. And remember, he is only seeing part of the fleet. Tusson's whereabouts over the next week are officially unknown, because that's the way he wanted it. But there's a good chance that he rode west as fast as he could and secretly entered Le Cap just ahead of the French fleet. There, he would have met in close consultation with the man in charge of Le Capp, General Henri Christoph. Christoph, as I mentioned, will one day be the emperor of the Kingdom of Haiti, and having just spearheaded the repression of the Moise Rebellion, he was now the highest-ranking

general in the North Province. And Christoph is an interesting guy, and often portrayed as a cultural contrast to Desaline. Desaline had grown up in the fields. He was a whole. He was a hard and brutal man who had won his freedom with the sword. Christoph, by way of contrast, had been raised an urban slave, serving in a variety of occupations, but is best known as a waiter in and then manager of, a prominent Le Cap Hotel. Christoph was also a free man when the revolution began, having received his manumission papers just a few years before, now operating the hotel not as a slave, but as a free black. So Christoph is Urbane, cosmopolitan, used to interacting with men and women of all color and class. He liked lavish party,

sumptuous accommodations, and European culture. The contrast between Desilene the bloodthirsty field slave and Christoph, the enlightened urban slave, is without question very overdrawn. But that is the way they are portrayed. The ships bearing Leclair and his senior staff arrived outside LeCap on February the 4th. When they got there, they found Christoph had removed all the marker buoys from the harbor, So navigating their way in was going to be treacherous. So the best thing to do would be negotiate with Christoph rather than fighting their way in. But Christoph said, I can't do anything until Tucson gives me the okay, and unfortunately he's not home right now. Which, like I say, was probably a lie to buy some time.

Leclair then reiterated his demand to be allowed into the harbor, and Christoph said, if you try to make me do anything without Tucson's permission, I'll burn the city to the ground and don't think I won't. But though he couldn't make a direct approach on La Capp, Leclair would not just sit back and wait. So he ordered General Rochambeau to take a contingent of troops to go retake Fort Liberté, that key fort east of Le Cap, where Jean-François had massacred those whites, and where Hedruville had finally come to ruin when he ousted Moise from his command. Rochambeau's approach was resisted, but after a good hard push, the French took the fort.

Meanwhile, Leclair himself sailed with the bulk of his men to a landing spot west of LeCap. But he was outsmarted by Tucson or Christoph or whoever was actually giving orders inside the city. One of Tucson's white supporters talked his way on board Leclair's ship and told him that the best place to put in was just a little further west than Leclair originally planned. Leclair decided to heed this man's local knowledge and would not discover for some time that it was actually a trick. The convoy just kept sailing and sailing and getting further and further away from LeCap. When Leclair got to this alleged best spot, he realized it was going to take him the better part of a day to march back to the city. With the French landing on both sides of LeCap, Christoph decided their intentions were truly hostile and made good on his threat to burn the city, proving his seriousness by setting fire to his own house first. His men then spread out, lighting fires all over.

Distraught residents tried to put these fires out, but the blaze quickly spread out of control. And when it got to the Arsenal, that was the ballgame. The Arsenal erupted in a furious blast that shook the whole city. So we're now eight and a half years removed from the Great Battle of Le Cap of June 1793, and once again the Paris of the Antilles is being consumed by fire. When the ravaging flames finally died out, 90% of the city was a burned-out wreck. Again. Leclair, meanwhile, got to watch an ominous glow appear on the horizon on the night of February the 5th,

knowing full well now that the first thing he had done upon arriving in Sandelman was allowed LeCap to burn to the ground. Not exactly an auspicious beginning. And in reports back to Bonaparte, Leclair would totally downplay the extent of the destruction. But on February 6th, the French converged on the city to find it in ruins, and Christoph and Tucson and all their soldiers nowhere to be found. The destruction of Le Cap, though, was good news for one group, the returning colored exiles. They knew that their own position in the expedition was tenuous, but if the French triumphed quickly that they would see the colored officers as a threat to French domination and just deport them all. but with armed resistance brewing, they all knew that their local military knowledge would be

indispensable. And this was true for all of them, except Andre Rigo. After arriving in Sandomang, Leclair decided that Rago was simply too great a threat with too many loyal contacts to just let loose on the island. So shortly after landing, Leclair ordered Rigo deported back to France. But this would not be the end for André Rago, and he would not be kept from his home forever, as we'll see in our very last episode on the Haitian Revolution. Now, luckily for General Leclair, the total destruction of LeCap turned out to be really the only bad news in the first weeks after his arrival. He had sent ships and soldiers to all the principal ports of Hispaniola, with orders to talk their way in, and if that failed, then to

fight their way in. And his subordinates were far more successful than he himself had been, especially because plenty of Tucson senior officers were willing to listen to what the French had to say. So the two main ports on the Spanish side, Santa Domingo itself and then another city called Santiago, both fell without a shot being fired. Down in port-a-prince, things looked like they were about to get dicey, but the colored commander of the city's principal fort betrayed this all-important fortification to the French. This officer had been a partisan of Rigoz, who was subsequently absorbed into Tucson's army after the War of Knives, and he was all too happy to turn around and stab Tucson in the back. Now, Desaline was an overall command of the West Province, but he was not in Porta Prince to prevent its fall.

But he was able to march a loyal force into Leo Gaon, and after determining that it too would likely fall, he burned it to the ground. Also going up in flames at this point was the plantation owned by Josephine Bonaparte, which, was located just outside of Leogon. Meanwhile, out on the southern peninsula, the commander of Lecai was similarly indifferent to Toussaint personally, and after being assured that he would be able to keep his rank in privileges and sensing that the French were about to beat Tucson's butt, he welcomed a French naval squadron into the harbor. Then Jeremy, never a fan of Tucson Louvichure, soon followed.

The only place the French really ran into trouble was around Port-a-Py, where a general named Morapaw resisted both French overtures and an armed assault. But recognizing that he would not be able to resist forever, General Morapaw burned Port-a-Pai and retreated inland. Now, there is a tendency to believe that Tucson Louvichure was always one step ahead of his enemies, and that this was all a part of his master plan. But he cannot have been thrilled about this opening round of the fight. All of these defections had to have been a blow, and it wasn't just a few colored or white office, with secret axes to grind. Desaline, for example, marched from Leogne to Jacques Mel to ensure the loyalty of the garrison there,

and having believed that he secured it, marched out again, whereupon the black general in charge of the city promptly defected and handed Jacques Mel over to the French. With things going quite well for Leclair, aside from the little hiccup of Le Cap completely burning to the ground again, he decided to take one good stab at completing Step 1 of Bonaparte's plan. Talk Tucson out of fighting. Now, Tucson was himself hiding up near his favorite plantation in Ennery, which was outside go naive, and yes, there is a map to go along with all of this at Revolutionspodcast.com.

To act as a go-between, LeClair brought out Tucson's sons, who were, as I said, there for that very purpose. The message they bore was that Tucson could expect all kinds of awesome treatment and could be assured that slavery was never going to be reestablished. just so long as he stood down. Tucson then demanded an immediate ceasefire to proceed any future negotiations, but Leclair replied that he could only guarantee that the men under his own immediate control would not fight, but that he couldn't get word round to any of his other forces.

I mean, they're spread out everywhere. Tucson took this to be a disingenuous half-truth, that Leclair had no intention of ending things peacefully. So negotiations broke down. Dusan then sent word round to the officer still. loyal to him that they had carte blanche to deal with the French, a sinister little pun. So Leclair is kind of looking like not the savviest operator here. Bonaparte had told him to promise Tucson anything to get him to stand down, and instead Leclair is playing cutesy with the promise

of a ceasefire. I mean, why not just say, yeah, full ceasefire? Great, done. Now, probably this was just a bit of overconfidence, given the good news coming in from everywhere else, but still, I mean, he's botching step one. But that said, step two was actually moving along swimmingly, as senior officers across the island were taking the French up on their promises to let them keep their commands. And with additional reinforcements coming in every few days as the missing ships arrived, Leclair decided that the best way to really cement step two was to bring the hammer down on Tucson. And only Tucson. Well, technically Tucson and Christoph, since they're both now together. Leclair declared those two generals fugitives, but only those two generals.

Everyone else could expect immediate blanket forgiveness for anything they had done, and that included Desaline, who was currently marching around the West Province, lighting things on fire, and killing anyone who stands in his way. Leclair then also proceeded to bungle the one thing that he really needed to lock down, and that was his supply lines, which were supposed to be running up to the United States. Now, I don't know if he just hadn't been properly briefed or what, but when Leclair got to Sandomang, he really did not act as if the Americans were critical to his mission. Instead, he treated all the American merchants in Le Cap as if they were in league with Tucson, and that his first order of business should be shutting down contraband going to the enemy, rather than ensuring that his own supply needs were being met. Now, it's true that the Americans had been supporting Tucson, and some of them would continue to do so. But still, Leclair treated them all very badly for no good reason. As soon as his fleet arrived in LeCamp, he blockaded the harbor until every American ship could be thoroughly searched.

Then he simply decreed that in the future, American ships were forbidden to put in at any port, aside from LeCap and Port of Prince. With the American traders now incensed by Leclair's heavy-handed treatment, they were then really happy to discover that he planned to buy their merchandise not with hard cash, which he didn't really have. have, but instead French debt notes, which were trading at like 50% face value back up in Philadelphia. So LeClair is treating the American merchants like the enemy and then underpaying them for their products. I mean, like I say, he's not really the savviest operator. But probably not realizing what a mistake he was making, or possibly not caring because this was all going to be over in a few weeks anyway, Leclair launched a full-blown multi-front campaign on February the 17th, 1802. The plan was to converge on the forces still loyal to Tucson,

led by Christoph and Moripa and Desilin, and drive them into a single spot where they would be forced to risk a single decisive battle. A battle, Leclair, was confident that he could win. The natives might be experts at sneaky guerrilla warfare, but they would be no match for the battle-hardened regiments of the French army in a set-piece battle. So one column marched south from Fort Libertay, hugging the border with Santa Domingo. Another march south out of Le Camp, another march southwest towards Gonaiv, a fourth marched east from Porta Pai, and then the last column March North out of Porta Prince. All of them pushing towards the heart of Tucson Louvature country, surrounding the old cordon of the west and his favorite plantation in Ennery. And as I said, there's a map of all this at Revolutionspodcast.com.

Tusson himself withdrew into a tight mountain ravine that provided a fairly defensible position. But even still, in his first real engagement of the war, Tusson let General Rochambeau charge up and dislodge him. The governor for life was himself nearly killed, then nearly captured, and only barely got away. Meanwhile, outside Port-Py, Morapef fought as stubbornly as he could, but was soon trapped between two French columns, surrounded with no hope of victory, he sent word out that he was ready to accept Leclair's blanket pardon and defect along with all his men. So now it was down to Tucson, hiding out with the bedraggled remnants of an army, Christoph in the mountain south of Le Cap, and then Desaline, who's marching around the West province, offering no quarter to anyone. Desaline tried to retake port of prince, and when that

failed, he raced up to San Mark, fought his way in past the small garrison, and burned the city to the ground. He then marched into the interior of the West Province, burning and pillaging all before him, with especially notorious massacres of white civilians at Marabelle and Petit Riviere, which led the French to start counter-massacring captured black prisoners, and now this is not going to wind up a pretty war at all. The early campaign of 1802 peaked in March, when General Desaline finally holed up in a mountain fortress called Crette-Apeiro, setting the stage for one of of the most famous battles in Haitian history. The fort had recently been held by the British, who had expanded and strengthened it. Desaline had about 2,000 men with him, but soon after

arriving, both Tucson and Christoph demanded he reinforced their depleted ranks, and pretty soon Desaline was left with just 1,200 men inside the fort. Believing Desaline was trapped, General Leclair decided to storm the fort, rather than sit around and wait for a siege to take him down. On March the 4th, the French officer leading the first French units at the scene let his low opinion of the blacks get the better of him. He launched an unsupported attack, promptly lost 300 men, and fell back in disarray. A week later, reinforcements arrived led by Leclair personally, that included a company of Creole defectees, led by Alexandra Petion.

As soon as everyone was in place, Leclair launched a second assault that saw massive casualties on both sides. Leclair himself was wounded, and though the French nearly took the fort, they were repelled at the last minute. After this vicious little battle, neither side showed any interest in letting the other side tend to their dead, and apparently decades after the fact, there were still skeletons strewn about the remains of the fort. But with French honor now on the line, Leclair couldn't afford to walk away. The wounded commander-in-chief rode down to Sanmark to gather up heavy guns, and he at them dragged up to the siege lines. While he did, Desaline himself appears to have lost his nerve.

He told his subordinate officers, I have to go check on something, but you hold the fort until I send orders that it's okay to evacuate. And then he slipped out the back door. By March the 22nd, Leclair was back at the fort with the heavy guns, and he opened up with a constant bombardment. Casualties inside were heavy, but the men refused to give up. Watching this, from whatever vantage point he had slipped off to, Desaline finally decided that holding Kretapiro was hopeless and smuggled in order through the lines to tell the remaining forces to evacuate.

That night, they melted away, sneaking silently right through the French lines. In the morning, the only men left inside the fort were those too sick or too wounded to run. When the French realized that there was nobody defending the ramparts anymore, they marched on in, looked around, and massacred. occurred everybody left inside. This is not a pretty war. The siege of Crettapeiro is practically the dictionary definition of a Pyrrhic victory. Between those killed in the fighting and those dying of their wounds, General Leclair reckoned he just lost 1,500 men, more men than had been in the fort that he had just taken. And while the French had emerged victorious, Desilene and about half of his men had gotten away and were still on the loose.

But the really important thing was that Desilene's heroic and defiant stand against overwhelming odds became the stuff of instant legend. The story spread across the colony, undermining with every glorious retelling the aura of inevitability that surrounded the French reconquest of San Domain. There now actually appeared to be a chance that the French could be beaten. But that was a seed that was going to take some time to grow. And the immediate military situation facing Tucson Louvichura and his defiant officers was too dire to ignore. They had been surrounded so quickly and so thoroughly that it was hopeless to even try to orchestrate a last ditch Leveon mass.

In the north province, Christoph had about 4,000 cultivators already under arms and was raiding around the North Plains right up to the city limits of LeCap, but this appears to have just been an excuse to get close enough to say, hey, I'll defect, if you'll let me, after securing a promised from a senior French officer that first, liberty and equality would remain the foundations of any new colonial order, and second, that Christoph's status as a fugitive would be cancelled. Christoph defected at the end of April, with 1,500 regular troops and those 4,000 armed cultivators. With the end in sight, Toussaint finally decided that combat was no longer an effective strategy. On April the 29th, he sent agents to Leclair to arrange a ceasefire.

so that the two men could meet in person. On May the 7th, at a plantation outside La Capp, the senior staffs of both sides sat down to talk. Tucson said that this had all just been a great misunderstanding and then secured a promise that he and all his men would be kept in their positions, Leclair, having finally learned that he should promise Tucson whatever to get him to lay down his arms. The dinner held that night to celebrate the peace was attended by, among others.

Desaline, Christoph, Alexandra Petyon, and Jean-Pierre Boyet, who is remembered just 26 years old. Between them, and in various combinations, these four men would wind up ruling Haiti until the last of them, Jean-Pierre Boyer, was deposed by a coup in 1843. But though this was a perfect opportunity to make a bold start to step three of the plan, arrest and deport every Creole officer above the rank of captain, Leclair didn't do it. He was not sure where he actually stood, and the coda, to step two, was, used the generals to put down any native uprising. So the dinner party broke up, and everyone was allowed to go their own separate ways. A decision that Leclair would come to regret. But though he would not strike at the senior black and colored generals, Leclair did have his eye on Tucson, and very much wanted to remove him from the island, as soon as he was sure that the other generals would not have reject. Toussaint, meanwhile, was no doubt hoping that he had bought himself the time he needed for disease to take its toll on the French so that he could resume the war. But though disease would start to ravage the French, and the war would continue, Toussaint-Louvature would not be there to lead it. His estrangement from the black population made him vulnerable,

and all around him senior officers were cutting deals with the French that did not include provisions for the governor for life. Even Desaline is suspected of feeding Leclair rumors that Tucson was up in his plantation, plotting a revolt. In June 1802, about a month after the peace, Leclair decided Tucson was sufficiently isolated to make his move. Now, he apparently tried to talk Desaline into making the arrest, but Desaline refused, so Leclair settled on one of his own senior white officers. On the pretext of asking Tucson's advice on how best to purchase and run a plantation, and a hint that this might be the first step towards Tucson continuing to play a role in the new colonial order.

This general lured Tucson to a plantation house to talk it all through. Tucson arrived with 20 guards, but left them out front while he went inside, and when he went inside, he was arrested. He was then taken quickly to a boat waiting in the harbor at Gonaiv, and three days later he was bobbing in the harbor of Le Capp. There he was joined by his wife, niece, and two sons. On June the 15th, 1802, the ship carrying the Loveture family sailed away for France. Born a Creole slave in Sandelmang, it was the first time Tucson had crossed the ocean.

Recognizing that this was very likely the end for him, he famously told his captors, quote, In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Sandalmang only the trunk of the tree of liberty. It will spring up again from the roots, for they are numerous and they are deep. The ship reached France in July, and by August Toussaint-Louvature was thrown into the infamous Fort DeJou, a mountain fortress on the border with Switzerland. There he would sit in the cold and the damp and wonder if anyone back home was fighting for his return. Back in Sandelmang, no one was fighting for his return. And this came as a surprise as much to General Leclair as anyone. He had braced himself for popular revolts, military coups, or assassination attempt.

and none of it came. The arrest and deportation of Tucson Louvichure caused hardly a ripple. And though Tucson is not technically dead yet, he soon would be. He's not going to last even a year in prison. Toussaint Louvichure was a political genius. And had he lived in practically any other time or place, he would be as famous as any other great leader in history. I have no doubt that he would have been as adept, for example at maneuvering his way through European war and politics, as he was maneuvering his way through colonial war and politics. But he suffers both for being a big fish in a very small pond, and because that pond was a successful slave revolt, and no other country had an interest in glorifying or promoting the leader of a successful slave revolt. But though he was a cunning strategist,

and blessed with an almost preternatural foresight, at least until the end when he fell for obvious trap. Tusson did lack a certain kind of imaginative vision that did help bring him down. He could never see past plantation economics, and so even as he attempted to transcend the racist past of the colony, he simply re-entrenched its economic model as deep as he could, leaving him very unpopular with the people that he had led to freedom. And there were other options out there. Sontanax had tried to encourage collective ownership of plantations by the workers. workers, Moees had advocated allowing a small freehold planter community to emerge that would create some measure of self-sufficiency and, dare I say, economic justice. But Tucson couldn't

see it. Like everyone else, all he saw was coffee and sugar. He was also, we should note, a classic political survivor who ensured his own position first and accounted for everything else second. He did not join the revolt of 1791 until he was sure it had legs, and even then the first thing he did was try to negotiate everybody back into chains in exchange for freedom and pardons for the leadership. He turned on his old comrades in 1794 the minute he thought fighting against them served his interests better than fighting for them. And after he killed or exiled all his domestic opponents, he imposed an authoritarian labor code that treated the black cultivators with only slightly better regard than the old slave system had. Tusson Lovature was a genius,

who had a dream for himself and his country that he nearly saw fulfilled, and he deserves to be put alongside the other great men of history. But like all those other great men, he was ultimately incredibly self-interested and occasionally a moral catastrophe. On April 7, 1803, to San Luvichure was found dead in his cell. The cause of death is unknown. He was just about 60 years old. He had steered Sandelmang from slavery to the brink of independence, but it would be left to other men to complete that journey.

Next week, we will join those other men as they attempt to complete the journey. The peace with France will be short-lived. The fighting will resume, finally culminating in 1804, with a full-blown declaration of independence.