Free Toussaint Louverture by Madison Smartt Bell

longer be understood as a reen-actment of the American Revolution on European soil.
    The notion of using the black revolutionaries of Saint Domingue to overthrow slavery in other West Indian colonies and even on the North American continent would become significant later, but if it had already occurred to the members of the French National Assembly it was nowhere near being part of their program. At this point, the majority in the assembly was too pragmatic to consider disrupting the slave system of its colonies, for the economic price would have been too great. Given the revolutionary turmoil at home, the West Indiancolonies in general and Saint Domingue in particular were practically the last functioning elements in the economy of the whole French empire (provided that healthy economic function could be restored in Saint Domingue). It is not cheap for a nation to wage war on all its borders at once. Far from abolishing slavery, the object of the Second Commission was to bring an end to the slave rebellion and put the insurgent blacks back to work. That was easier said than done.
    Sonthonax, especially, seems to have been an ambitious man, but although technically the commissioners could “seize control of all the authorities,” their grasp on real power was very weak. In theory the commission was the highest civil authority in the colony, and the deportation of men like Desparbes and Blanchelande left them without a competitive leader on the military side, but with the Colonial assemblies abolished by the law of April 4 and following the precipitous departure of Ailhaud, the commission amounted to just two men, widely separated by geography and out of communication for long periods.
    The military forces in the colony were a threadbare patchwork of militias and regular army units which included, for example, a sizable contingent of Irish mercenaries stationed at the tip of the northwest peninsula, at Mole Saint-Nicolas. The military had been strained by armed rebellions all over the colony, not only the huge one in the north, and their loyalty to representatives of the French Revolutionary government was questionable.
The petits blancs
who'd taken control of many of the bigger towns like Port-au-Prince had been quick to declare for the revolution and to join the Jacobin clubs—maneuvers which got them out from under the heel of the
grands blancs.
But the
petits blancs
hated the
gens de couleur
even worse than they hated the
grands blancs,
so the commissioners' program of appointing colored men to public posts and inserting them into the officer corps (in the case of Sonthonax a very aggressive program) soon eroded the popularity they had enjoyed when they first arrived. Both commissioners knew they were walking on eggshells with every step they took.
    In their regions divided from each other by the Cordon de l'Ouest, Polverel and Sonthonax were so busy trying to manage the volatile tensions among the
grands blancs,
the
petits blancs,
and the
gens de couleur
in the urban centers that they had little time or opportunity todo much about the masses of insurgent slaves in the countryside. Operations led by Laveaux on the Northern Plain had at first been successful. The huge but ill-disciplined bands of Jean-François and Biassou folded quickly before organized European assault—the blacks had learned that they would lose confrontations with massed troops in open country. For a short time the French military had hopes that these two insurgent chiefs might be captured.
    Tougher resistance came in the mountainous terrain between the lowlands and Dondon, and Laveaux had a couple of very hard battles to fight at Morne Pelee and La Tannerie. Toussaint commanded the insurgent blacks in these two engagements, making himself known to the French for the first time as a significant military leader. He had spent much time and energy on the fortification of La Tannerie, and was not dislodged from it easily. When Laveaux finally won the