Battle of Vertières, 1803: the last battle of the Haitian Revolution

In December 1801 Napoleon Bonaparte sent his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, with an experienced army to restore French rule in Saint-Domingue, the colony that the former slave Toussaint Louverture now governed with only nominal loyalty to France. According to Britannica's account of the revolution, Toussaint held out for several months before agreeing to an armistice in May 1802. The French broke it and shipped him to France, where he died in prison on 7 April 1803.²

Jean-Jacques Dessalines, born in West Africa around 1758 and enslaved in the colony, had been Toussaint's lieutenant. Britannica's biography notes that he at first submitted to the French. When Napoleon made plain his intention to restore slavery, which the French Convention had abolished in 1794, Dessalines and other black and mixed-race leaders rose again.³

A war the French were losing

Henry Christophe fought beside Dessalines, and they were soon joined by Alexandre Pétion and other mixed-race officers, angered that the old restrictions on their class had been restored. Reports that France had brought back slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique made the struggle desperate. Yellow fever ravaged the French army, and Leclerc himself died of it in November 1802. In the last months the French army was commanded by General Donatien de Rochambeau.⁴

The historian C. L. R. James, in The Black Jacobins, tells how Dessalines met the rebel leaders at Arcahaye and made them a flag: the white was torn out of the French tricolor, and in place of the letters R.F. they wrote "Liberty or Death". When war broke out again between Britain and France on 18 May 1803, the French position became hopeless, Britannica writes, and James adds that Rochambeau was now cut off by the British fleet.⁵

The attack on Le Cap

By November the French held little more than Cap-Français, called Le Cap, ringed by fortified posts. James writes that the black and mixed-race troops concentrated on 16 November for a last attack on the city and its forts. Clairveaux was in command, with an officer whose courage had earned him the name Capois Death. From early morning the national army attacked; Britannica dates the battle, named after the post of Vertières, to 18 November.⁶

The charge of Capois became the legend of the day. In James's telling, a bullet knocked over his horse; he scrambled up, raging, made a gesture of contempt with his sword and pressed on, shouting "Forward, forward!" The French, who had fought on so many fields, had never seen fighting like it, and even Dessalines, watching from a neighboring hill, was overcome by the spirit of Capois and his men.⁷

The Haitian Art Society adds the part of the story that Haitians still tell: that the French were so struck by Capois' courage that they briefly ceased fire, and that Rochambeau saluted him before the battle went on. It gives this as a report, not a certainty, and the episode earned Capois the lasting nickname Capois la Mort.⁸

The end of French Saint-Domingue

A sudden torrential rain stopped the fighting, James writes, but it was the end. That night Rochambeau held a council of war and decided to leave the island. Britannica records that he surrendered Cap-Français, the last significant French stronghold, under terms that gave the French ten days to evacuate.⁹

Rochambeau showed no haste. Dessalines answered by threatening to turn his guns on the French ships in the harbor, and James says he warned that they would be bombarded with red-hot shot. In the end it fell to the Royal Navy, which had blockaded the colony since the war resumed, to carry out the evacuation: Captain John Bligh negotiated with both Rochambeau and Dessalines, and the French garrison sailed from Cap-Français as British prisoners. James writes that of the 60,000 soldiers and sailors who had come from France, nearly all had perished.¹⁰

On 1 January 1804 Dessalines proclaimed the independence of the country under the name Haiti, taken from the island's Arawak name, and later made himself emperor as Jacques I. Vertières is celebrated in Haiti every year, on 18 November. France recognized Haitian independence only in 1825, and only in return for an indemnity of 100 million francs.¹¹

The Florida International University library exhibition that reprints James's passage warns that his book, inspired in part by Marxism and by decolonization in Africa, is a notably romantic story. For the shape of the day, though, his account and Britannica's agree: a final assault on the forts of Le Cap, the French decision to leave that night, and a surrender that ended French rule in Saint-Domingue.¹²