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

On a plateau south of Cap-Français, a horse went down under a cannonball, and its rider got up and kept walking toward the guns. The French watching from their lines cheered him. By nightfall a tropical downpour had drowned the fighting, and by midnight the French commander was asking for an armistice. The last battle of the Haitian Revolution opened the way to the first country in the world founded by former slaves.²

Background: Napoleon's war to take back Saint-Domingue

By 1801 the former slave Toussaint Louverture governed the French colony of Saint-Domingue with only nominal loyalty to France. Napoleon Bonaparte, then First Consul, wanted it back. In late 1801 he sent his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, with an experienced army to restore the old order. Toussaint resisted for several months and laid down his arms in May. On 7 June Leclerc had him seized at a parley and shipped to France. Held without trial in the Fort de Joux, near Besançon in eastern France, he died in his cell on 7 April 1803.³ › Napoleon Bonaparte

Toussaint's lieutenants, Jean-Jacques Dessalines among them, at first submitted to the French. What turned them back into rebels was slavery. On 20 May 1802 a decree of Bonaparte kept slavery in the colonies France was recovering, and that summer it was restored in Guadeloupe. When the news reached Saint-Domingue, the war flared up again in the autumn, and Dessalines went back into rebellion at the head of it.⁴

Disease did the rest. Yellow fever ran through the French army, and Leclerc himself died of it on 2 November 1802. Command passed to General Donatien de Rochambeau. Then, on 18 May 1803, Britain and France went back to war. The Royal Navy blockaded the colony, and from then on the French in Saint-Domingue could expect neither men nor supplies from home. To show that there was nothing left to negotiate, Dessalines tore the white out of the French tricolor and made the blue and red the flag of the rebellion.⁵

Armies and commanders

By the autumn of 1803 the French held little more than Cap-Français, called Le Cap. It was the last significant French stronghold, protected by a ring of forts on the plateau of the Haut-du-Cap to the south and west of the town: Bréda, Vertières, Champin and Pierre-Michel, which stood on a high knoll and dominated all the others.⁶

Against him came the Armée indigène, the army of independence. In late October Dessalines left the region of Port-au-Prince and gathered his best troops at the crossroads of the Limbé, where weeks of rain held them until 15 November. They then moved up to Morne-Rouge, within reach of Le Cap. The Haitian historian Thomas Madiou, writing in the 1840s, puts the army at 27,000 men; Beaubrun Ardouin, writing in the 1850s, at more than 20,000.⁷

Dessalines had his best generals with him. Clervaux, the senior general after Dessalines himself, commanded the main attack. Henry Christophe and Romain were sent round over the mountains to La Vigie, the heights above the town on the far side, to pin Rochambeau's reserves. Vernet, Gabart, Jean-Philippe Daut and Cangé led the other columns, and the vanguard went to François Capois, whose courage had earned him the name Capois la Mort, Capois Death.⁸

The battle in phases

The guns open at dawn

In the night of 17 to 18 November Haitian gunners built a battery of three pieces some 200 toises, about 400 meters, from Fort Bréda. At dawn on the 18th it opened fire, and the French forts answered from every side. Rochambeau rode out of the town with his guard of honor, foot and horse, and took post near Vertières, where a heavy 16-pounder was set up on the open savanna of Champin. The Haitian infantry, drawn up along the road to Le Cap, came under the plunging fire of Pierre-Michel and had to be moved.⁹

Capois before Vertières

Dessalines saw that the key to the field was a hill on the Charrier plantation that overlooked Vertières, which the French had left unoccupied. Whoever held it could cut the forts off from one another and from the town. He sent Capois and the vanguard to take it. To get there Capois had to lead his grenadiers straight under the guns of Vertières, and they were thrown back again and again.¹⁰

Then came the moment the battle is remembered for. A cannonball killed Capois's horse and threw him to the ground. He scrambled up, sword in hand, and went on, shouting "Forward, forward!" The French on the walls of Vertières had watched it all. By Madiou's account, cheers went up from Rochambeau's guard, the French guns fell silent, and a hussar rode out to the bridge to tell the Haitians that the captain general sent his admiration to the officer who had covered himself in glory. Then the firing began again. The Haitian Art Society gives the episode as a report, not a certainty, and Dessalines's own campaign journal, quoted by Ardouin, says only that Capois had drawn praise from his enemies.¹¹

The storm of Charrier

While Capois held the French at the bridge, Dessalines threw more columns at the hill of Charrier, and Ardouin and Madiou both name Jean-Philippe Daut, sent forward from the reserve, among those who carried it. The columns went forward under the fire of the forts and took heavy losses. Once on the summit, the Haitians dragged up guns that silenced the French 16-pounder and fired down into Vertières. Dessalines watched it all from a large stone near his headquarters.¹²

Turning point: rain and a request at midnight

The fighting went on through the afternoon, and the Haitians still could not take Vertières itself. Late in the day a tropical storm broke over the plateau and the rain soaked the powder; the battle simply stopped. Rochambeau went back into the town with his guard, and in the night the garrisons of Vertières and Pierre-Michel abandoned their posts and followed him. At six in the evening Dessalines came up to Charrier, where he greeted Clervaux, who had lost an epaulette to grapeshot, as "the commander of my generals".¹³

At midnight a French officer came to the Haitian outposts asking for an armistice. Dessalines sent him back: he would talk only to an officer with Rochambeau's full powers to surrender Le Cap. The French no longer had the strength to defend the town, and their ships could not break out through the British squadron. That night, as C. L. R. James tells it, Rochambeau and his council of war decided to leave the island.¹⁴

Aftermath: the end of French Saint-Domingue

On 19 November a French staff officer, Duveyrier, signed the capitulation with Dessalines. The French were to hand over Le Cap and its forts within ten days. Rochambeau was in no hurry to leave, and at the end of the month the Haitians trained their guns on the French ships and threatened them with red-hot shot. Unable to slip past the blockade, Rochambeau came to terms with the British instead, and the French garrison sailed out of Le Cap as prisoners of the Royal Navy.¹⁵ › The Battle of Trafalgar, 1805

Six weeks later, on 1 January 1804, the country was declared independent under the name of Haiti, the first state founded by former slaves. In the autumn of 1804 he made himself emperor as Jacques I. The new state began in blood: in 1804 thousands of the white inhabitants who had stayed were killed on Dessalines's orders. Ardouin, Haiti's great nineteenth-century historian, judged that the promise of protection Dessalines had made to the whites of Le Cap at the surrender was a trap, and printed a letter of his own that he held proved it.¹⁶

Legacy and memory

France did not recognize Haiti until 1825, and then only in exchange for an indemnity to the former colonists. The Fondation pour la mémoire de l'esclavage gives the sum fixed in 1825 as 150 million gold francs, cut to 90 million in 1838, while Britannica gives 100 million; the payments, and the loans taken out to meet them, weighed on Haiti's finances for the rest of the century.¹⁷

In Haiti, Vertières is the founding victory. The battle is commemorated every year on 18 November, above all in Cap-Haïtien, the old Le Cap; for the 220th anniversary in 2023 a Te Deum was sung in the city's cathedral before local officials and delegations of schoolchildren. Capois la Mort remains its hero.¹⁸

Historians have long told the battle in a heroic key. The Florida International University exhibition that reprints C. L. R. James's account calls The Black Jacobins a notably romantic story, written under the influence of Marxism and African decolonization. The core of the day, though, stands in every account: the storm of the forts, Capois at the bridge, the rain, the request for terms at midnight, and a surrender that ended French rule in Saint-Domingue.¹⁹