Leclerc’s invasion force was crippled by shortages and disease before fighting began

Evidence

As he launched his campaign against Louverture, Leclerc was already aware of several factors that were sapping the strength of his force. Before he had left France, he had already noted a serious lack of decent supplies for the expedition; “the wine is bad, the biscuit no good,” he had complained. In Saint-Domingue, on the day he declared war against Louverture, Leclerc wrote in desperation to the colonial minister in Paris to “come quickly to his aid” and to send him “thirty thousand pairs of shoes,” for his troops were “barefoot.” He had been told in Brest that there were 15,000 pairs of shoes on board, only to find on the other side of the Atlantic that in fact there were only 4,000 “bad pairs.” In Saint-Domingue he had difficulty buying appropriate supplies. He complained bitterly about the American merchants, who dominated the commerce of the colony and who he believed were overcharging him—they were “all the most Jewish of Jews,” he announced—and about the local merchants who were their agents. There was, finally, an even more serious problem: disease. “I already have 1,200 men in the hospital,” he announced, and warned the minister to prepare for a “considerable consumption of men in this land.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 949

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The logistics collapse of the French expedition—barefoot troops, bad supplies, 15,000 vs 4,000 shoes—is a concrete case of how colonial overreach founders on supply chains, complementing the sacrifice article’s theme that distant empire demands disproportionate blood.
• SHARE: For a military-logistics friend—the shoe detail (promised 15,000 pairs, found 4,000 bad ones) is precisely the kind of specific supply-chain failure they’d love.