[The following is in regards to French efforts to put down Toussaint L’Ouverture’s slave rebellion in Haiti.]
Toussaint paid the ultimate price for trusting Leclerc, captured at a supposedly secure meeting, then shipped off to a dungeon on the Swiss border, where he died from starvation and exposure within the year. Before departing Santo Domingo, Toussaint warned Leclerc that his capture would make no appreciable difference in the outcome, because the French had no idea what they were up against.
Events soon proved Toussaint’s point. Once the black population of Santo Domingo realized that Napoleon’s plan called for their reenslavement, Leclerc’s mission became impossible. It was a matter of numbers. The black population, two-thirds of African birth and all former slaves, totaled 500,000. (There were another 30,000 mulattoes and 30,000 whites.) This meant that Leclerc’s army, even at its high point of nearly 40,000 troops, was outnumbered more than ten to one.
Leclerc could not believe it when hundreds of black prisoners strangled themselves to death rather than return to slavery. Women and children laughed at their executioners as they burned to death. Meanwhile, Leclerc’s army was virtually annihilated by a combination of black reprisals, yellow fever, and malaria. In his last dispatch to Napoleon before his own death, Leclerc minced no words: “This colony is lost and you will never regain it… My letter will surprise you, but what general could calculate on the mortality of four-fifths of his army.” It was a catastrophe for the French army, which kept pouring troops into the breach and eventually suffered over 60,000 casualties.
Source:
Ellis, Joseph J. “The Purchase.” American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. Vintage Books, 2008. 220. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Charles Leclerc to Napoleon, 6 and 9 August 1802, quoted in James, The Black Jacobins, 343-45.
Further Reading:
François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, also known as Toussaint L'Ouverture or Toussaint Bréda
Charles Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc
I wonder where the stars go, where all the revolutionaries pining for something more disappear to once a populace gains its independence. Haiti as it is is an awful place to live.