Le Cap. Ball at the government palace; Clervaux’s answer to Madame Leclerc.

In the night of 20 Vendémiaire (12 October 1802) the halls of the palace at the Cap were illuminated; the strains of harmonious music resounded through apartments resplendent with luxury. The officers of Leclerc’s staff, elegantly dressed, strove with sallies of wit to dispel the sadness that reigned in the circles formed by the Indigenous ladies; they admired those natural graces that unfold only beneath the brilliant sky of the tropics. The officers of the colonial troops stood apart in groups, and their faces expressed nothing but somber preoccupation. The news that had come from France the day before, which delighted the whites, dismayed them profoundly: the First Consul had said to the Abbé Grégoire at an official presentation of the Institute: “After what is happening in Saint-Domingue, I should like all the friends of the Blacks throughout Europe to have their heads veiled in mourning crape.” Madame Leclerc, perhaps the most accomplished European woman who ever shone in our climate, gay, covered with jewels, dreaming only of pleasures amid the public calamities, moved through the apartments with elegance and spent her amiability in vain to enliven the evening. She approached General Clervaux and said to him: “How is it, general, that you are so somber? Ought you not to be satisfied? Tonight we are celebrating the happiness that reigns in France and will soon reign in the colony.” “Madame,” Clervaux answered her curtly, “I was free before, and all I owe to the new circumstances is that my debased color has been raised up; but if I believed there would ever be any question of slavery here, I would turn bandit that very instant.” This answer, uttered with energy by a man of Clervaux’s influence, threw the French into the keenest anxiety and troubled the festivity. Leclerc, who had already resolved on his ruin, thought of hastening the moment of his arrest. But Clervaux did not give him time to carry out his plan. At daybreak he left for the Haut-du-Cap, apparently full of confidence in the good faith of the French, to fetch his wife, he said, and bring her back to town. At the ball he had learned far more than Dessalines had revealed to Pétion. Leclerc, to take from him the chief force on which he relied, at once brought into the Cap the whole 6th colonial, 1,200 strong, together with the chef de bataillon Jacques Clervaux, who commanded the post of the Haut-du-Cap. He was the general’s brother. The 10th colonial, commanded by Jean-Philippe Daut, a Black man, and the 13th were seized with fear on seeing the 6th depart. The Black and colored soldiers were much concerned with what was intended for that corps, since, on the contrary, the order had been given to bring the European troops back into the towns and to leave the colonial troops in the interior. Clervaux had withdrawn to his house at the Haut-du-Cap; Generals Clausel and Claparède were also there, each occupying a fine country house. Pétion went through the bivouacs of the 13th, calming the soldiers’ fears, promising them that he would never abandon them, and inciting them to insubordination. Suddenly the 13th took up arms in tumult and demanded its arrears of pay, as well as the rations it had not received during the fortnight it had remained surrounded at the Dondon by the insurgents. General Clausel had fifteen rations distributed to each soldier and sent Captain Var, quartermaster of the 13th, to the Cap with orders to draw the regiment’s pay there. Var was a white man, formerly a soldier of Faubert’s regiment in the South, who had always served in the Black and mixed-race troops. He came back to the Haut-du-Cap with the pay and announced that he had seen the 6th drawn up on the shore with its arms stacked. He at once paid the troops. But the soldiers, not finding their due by their own reckoning, grow restless, plot and threaten; the tumult is at its height. Clausel and Claparède call for Pétion to ask him the cause of this movement. While Pétion is on his way to them, Geffrard, formerly a colonel in Rigaud’s army, who was at the Cap without employment, arrives disguised as a sailor at the quarters of the 13th and declares to his old comrades in arms that the 6th colonial has been embarked entire to be drowned, that many men of color and Black men have been arrested, and that he has escaped to avoid death. Dommage, a Black man, formerly colonel of the 4th, had just been drowned with almost his whole family. General Paul Louverture, Toussaint’s brother, as soon as he learned of this execution, had left the Cap in haste under cover of a disguise and gone to join Sans-Souci, whose authority he had recognized. Pétion returned to the quarters of the 13th and exhorted the soldiers to observe the strictest discipline. He then went to Clausel and told him that the soldiers, having been paid, had ceased their murmurs. Clausel and Claparède, struck nevertheless by the attitude the colonial troops were taking, returned to the Cap before nightfall with their guides. Clervaux and Pétion at once sent two couriers, one to Christophe and the other to Capoix, to tell them of their plan of insurrection. Capoix, already in revolt against the metropolis, could only support them with energy. A French writer, Ph. Albert de Lattre, formerly liquidator of war expenditures in Saint-Domingue, says on page 68 of a memoir on Saint-Domingue: “It was also learned that the intimacy of these mulatto chiefs with the Negro generals, and with Capoix-la-Mort, another Negro chief and one of the most ferocious men Africa has produced, * aimed at expelling all the whites from the colony. These mulattoes circulated letters they had received from abroad; they showed an indecent joy at being told that war with England was certain. It was through them that the first word of it was received.” The same writer says of Pétion and Clervaux: “They were loaded with honors and riches; their pay and table allowances were always settled first. General Leclerc had a particular fondness for Pétion; four days earlier he had brought them together at a splendid banquet. Clervaux and Pétion received these marks of affection with disdain.” Pétion, Dessalines and Clervaux were indeed received with the greatest distinction by the captain-general. But this was not because he felt affection for them. Slavery had been restored in fact; the resistance of the cultivators was stubborn, and Leclerc was striving with honors and largesse to turn the officers of the colonial troops into the executioners of their brothers. It is not given to every man to sacrifice honor and the principles of liberty to material well-being. Clervaux, Pétion and Dessalines could certainly have become, like Laplume, Dieudonné Jambon and Nérette, the instruments of the crimes of the French; but they preferred to bear every kind of privation in the mountains, braving death each day, with no reward but the love of their brothers, rather than halt for a moment the march of liberty. As for Christophe, we shall see him irresolute for an instant; but carried along by the general surge, he will embrace the party of his brothers. He will risk more than his life in taking up arms against the whites, for the implacable hatred the insurgents bore him constantly threatened his existence and that of his family. On the other hand, he was the only Indigenous general officer whose fidelity was not suspected by the captain-general.