Haiti and Kenya independence · CHAPTER 4 ·
Napoleon’s Saint-Domingue expedition
Chapter 4 of Two Roads to Independence: Haiti 1789–1838 and Kenya 1895–1978: “Napoleon’s Expedition”
In 1801 Napoleon sent General Leclerc to restore French control of Saint-Domingue; some 31,000 soldiers landed over two years. Toussaint’s generals submitted in spring 1802 and he was seized and shipped to France, but yellow fever and renewed unity against a feared return of slavery destroyed the expedition by November 1803.
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The map above is the world of Saint-Domingue, November 1803 — Vertières — France holds only Le Cap and the Môle.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1800 · Europe in 1800.
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SHORT EXPLANATION
For a few months in 1802 it appeared that Napoleon had recovered Saint-Domingue. His brother-in-law General Leclerc sailed from Brest in December 1801 with the first of some 31,000 soldiers who would land over two years; the arrows entering from the east show the fleet’s route. After hard fighting, including a three-week siege at the small hilltop fort of Crête-à-Pierrot, Toussaint’s generals submitted in spring 1802 and kept their ranks. On 7 June Toussaint was seized at a meeting and sent to France. He died in a mountain prison in April 1803.
French victory did not last. Yellow fever, a mosquito-borne disease especially deadly to newly arrived Europeans, destroyed Leclerc’s army and killed him in November 1802. That summer news had arrived that France was restoring slavery in Guadeloupe, to the east, where Louis Delgrès and his followers chose death over surrender at Matouba. Former slaves and free people of color—free men and women of African or mixed descent—united under Jean-Jacques Dessalines. At Arcahaie in May 1803 he tore the white from France’s blue, white and red tricolor.
On the map insurgent ground turns gray, leaving France with Le Cap and the Môle Saint-Nicolas, a naval harbor at the north-west tip. Dessalines’ forces defeated the last French army at Vertières on 18 November 1803. French promises had lost their credibility: the fight to protect freedom had become a fight to leave France altogether.
The full story
Napoleon publicly promised the people of Saint-Domingue that their freedom would be respected. His orders to General Leclerc, who sailed from Brest on 14 December 1801, had another purpose as well: disarm the colony’s Black generals and send them to France. The expedition would restore French control over a colony that had come to govern itself.
The fleet assembled at Samaná Bay in late January 1802 and landed at several points in February. Henry Christophe burned Le Cap before the French could take it. Toussaint’s armies withdrew into the mountains, contesting the advance. At Crête-à-Pierrot, a small fort above the Artibonite River in the center, Lamartinière’s garrison resisted much larger forces from 4 to 24 March. Its defenders then broke through the French lines, after inflicting some 2,000 killed and wounded.
By May Christophe, Dessalines and Toussaint had submitted. Leclerc had won the field, but the fighting had weakened his army just before the fever season. The terms of submission also depended on French assurances that would soon be put to the test.
On 7 June Toussaint went to meet General Brunet near Gonaïves and was seized, as the Toussaint’s arrest marker shows. A French officer reported that, boarding the warship Le Héros, Toussaint warned his captors that they had cut down only the trunk of the tree of Black liberty: its deep and numerous roots would make it grow again.
Events in Guadeloupe gave the colony reason to fear what French control would mean. On 28 May at Matouba, Louis Delgrès and his followers blew up their position as French troops closed in. A French law of 20 May had confirmed slavery in colonies being recovered from Britain. When news arrived that summer, cultivators, the former slaves required to work estates, rose, and Black officers serving France began to desert. Toussaint’s arrest and the news from Guadeloupe persuaded people that France meant to restore slavery. The army Leclerc had been sent to disarm was gathering again against him.
Yellow fever struck the expedition hard. The mosquito-borne virus killed most newly arrived Europeans but spared people who had survived it as children; much of Leclerc’s army died, and Leclerc himself died on 2 November 1802. His successor Rochambeau killed Black and mixed-race prisoners and civilians on a scale never counted, using drownings and attack dogs brought from Cuba. His methods made enemies of former collaborators.
Toussaint died on 7 April 1803 in a prison in the Jura mountains of France. Dessalines continued the war. At Arcahaie in May he and Alexandre Pétion united Black and mixed-race officers. Dessalines removed the white from the French tricolor to make a blue and red flag, which Catherine Flon sewed according to tradition. That month Britain and France resumed war, and the British navy cut off French supplies.
On 18 November Dessalines’ army stormed the forts of Vertières outside Le Cap. Rochambeau capitulated, and the last French garrison left Môle Saint-Nicolas, the north-west harbor, in early December. The people whom Europe’s strongest army had come to subdue had defeated it.
FULL EXPLANATION
Did Napoleon mean to restore slavery?
Napoleon’s public promise was that freedom in Saint-Domingue would be respected. His instructions to Leclerc nevertheless called for the Black army to be disarmed and its generals sent to France. Once that was done, cultivators would be defenseless. Whether Napoleon intended from the beginning to restore slavery there remains contested. The measures taken elsewhere explain the colony’s fear. The law of 20 May 1802 maintained slavery only in colonies returned by Britain under the peace of Amiens, such as Martinique, and authorized the slave trade. An unpublished consular decree of 16 July ordered Guadeloupe governed like Martinique, meaning that slavery would return. In The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon (2011), Philippe Girard argues that Napoleon’s policy hardened as circumstances allowed; other historians see a design waiting for Saint-Domingue to be disarmed. Whatever Napoleon’s original intentions, Guadeloupe gave the colony’s people reason to fight.
Fever, numbers and the cost of the war
Fever devastated the French, but the insurgents had to remain in the field for it to affect the outcome. Dessalines understood the value of the season and withdrew to the mountains. In the rainy season of 1802 Leclerc’s regiments were destroyed within months. Yellow fever spread through the Aedes aegypti mosquito and killed newly arrived European adults at terrible rates, while sparing most people who had survived it as children. J. R. McNeill calls this difference differential immunity in Mosquito Empires (2010). Estimates of French losses vary with the people counted. Of roughly 31,000 soldiers landed in 1802–03, perhaps 7,000 to 8,000 survived. McNeill’s wider estimate of 50,000 to 55,000 French dead includes sailors, later reinforcements and civilians: fever reached sailors in the harbors and families who had come to reclaim estates. Losses among the colony’s fighters and civilians were never counted and certainly ran to tens of thousands. Strategy, unity and disease reinforced each other; none would have been enough alone.
Women in the war of independence
The names by which the war remembers women reveal only part of their contribution. Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière is celebrated in Haitian history for fighting at Crête-à-Pierrot, yet French officer Pamphile de Lacroix’s detailed memoir of the siege does not mention her. Sanité Bélair, a lieutenant in her husband Charles Bélair’s forces, was captured and executed by the French in 1802; her image now appears on Haiti’s ten-gourde note. Later writing tells of Catherine Flon, traditionally the first flag’s seamstress at Arcahaie, and Cécile Fatiman of Bois Caïman. Thousands of unnamed women grew food for the armies, carried messages and ammunition, and kept families alive in the mountains. Carolyn Fick and literary historian Marlene Daut have shown how nineteenth-century Haitian writers preserved their memory. The remembered heroines stand for a collective effort the written record largely ignored. Oral tradition and early Haitian histories help recover it alongside the military archive.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
A constitution that alarmed Paris. By 1801 Toussaint had given the colony a constitution, governed the whole island and traded with Britain and the United States. Napoleon feared losing France’s richest colony and wanted its plantation economy restored to finance his ambitions. Planters in Paris pressed him to act. Saint-Domingue’s self-government had become a challenge to French rule.
Peace in Europe freed France to act. Preliminary peace with Britain in October 1801 opened an Atlantic crossing without British interception. Napoleon used the pause to send one of France’s largest overseas fleets. The position reversed when war resumed in May 1803: Britain blockaded the French garrisons and deprived them of men and supplies.
A plan to disarm the colony. Submission placed officers in French hands, but Leclerc’s orders called for their Black army to be disarmed and its leaders deported. They saw soldiers disarmed and, in June 1802, Toussaint seized after making peace. The guarantees offered at submission had failed. Distrust helped turn the defeated army into a revolutionary force again.
Divisions inside Saint-Domingue. France found allies because Saint-Domingue was divided. André Rigaud and Alexandre Pétion, defeated in the 1799–1800 War of Knives against Toussaint, sailed with Leclerc. Many cultivators resented Toussaint’s labor code, and some officers expected France to win. French policy later threatened the freedom of these groups alike. Their reunion at Arcahaie in May 1803 closed the division that had helped the expedition gain its opening.
THE TURNING POINT
Vertières, 18 November 1803. Le Cap’s defenses stood at Vertières. On 18 November 1803 Dessalines’ army attacked the forts; Haitian tradition celebrates François Capois, Capois-la-Mort, charging under fire. Within two days Rochambeau agreed to evacuate, sailing with some 6,000 men into the hands of the British squadron offshore. The Môle’s last French garrison left in early December. Former slaves had defeated Europe’s strongest military power, ending French rule; six weeks later their leaders declared independence.
What it changed
Independence is declared. The generals gathered at Gonaïves on 1 January 1804 and declared independence. Their country took the name Haiti from the Taíno, the island’s first Indigenous inhabitants, and Dessalines became governor-general for life. The name marked the end of the colony. Defining citizenship and protecting the new state against a French return remained to be settled in the next chapter.
Napoleon abandons the Americas. Napoleon’s failing expedition helped persuade him to abandon his American empire. In April 1803 he sold Louisiana to the United States for 15 million dollars, more than doubling the young republic’s size. The revolution thus reshaped North America, although the United States refused to recognize Haiti for almost sixty years. The country whose victory helped enlarge it was shunned.
A war remembered as extermination. The drownings, dogs and other killings under Rochambeau left a memory of extermination. Haitian leaders feared France would return to finish the work. That fear, rooted in the war of 1802–03, influenced their treatment of the French who remained, including the killings of 1804 discussed as a memorial in the next chapter. The war’s memory shaped Haitian politics for generations.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Why did Napoleon’s expedition to Saint-Domingue fail?
French policy helped produce the resistance that defeated the expedition. By May 1802 France held most of the colony and might have survived the fever season had it remained quiet. But Toussaint’s arrest and the restoration of slavery in Guadeloupe convinced former slaves and free people of color that France meant to re-enslave them. They united under Dessalines, whose leadership sustained the fight. Yellow fever killed Leclerc and most of his soldiers; McNeill’s differential immunity helps explain why Europeans died while local fighters survived. Renewed war with Britain in 1803 cut French supply lines. The political rupture, disease and blockade worked together against an army whose promises had lost credibility.
An interesting fact
Roughly 5,000 Polish legionaries served among Napoleon’s troops in Saint-Domingue. They had joined France hoping it would restore Poland’s independence. Some deserted or refused to fight people they saw as fellow victims of oppression, and a few hundred remained in Haiti. Dessalines’ 1805 constitution recognized “Germans and Poles naturalised by the government” as Haitians, making an exception for them. Cazale still claims descent from the legionaries. Polish painter January Suchodolski depicted them in Saint-Domingue in a canvas now at the National Museum in Warsaw.
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