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Changed the New World Toussaint Louverture: A Biography The Haitian Revolution of
1791–1804, mostly led by Toussaint Louverture, may well have been the most
important single event in the history of New World slavery. Despite the
revolution’s relatively small scale, its historical influence for some sixty
or seventy years can even be compared to that of the 1917 Russian Revolution.
Yet the subject still receives scant attention in most
history textbooks. In 1789, at the start of the
French Revolution, the small French colony of Saint Domingue, on the western
side of Hispaniola, produced greater riches—in the form of sugar, coffee,
cotton, and indigo—than any other colony in the hemisphere. Indeed, by 1789
Saint Domingue exported about half the world’s coffee and nearly as much
sugar as Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil combined. The colony, almost as small as
Vermont and even more mountainous, accounted for some 40 percent of the value
of all French foreign trade and “the livelihood of as many as a million of
the 25 million inhabitants of France depended directly on the colonial
trade,” centered in Saint Domingue.1
This extraordinary productivity
depended on the brutally coerced labor of some half a million slaves, many
quite recently imported from Africa. Surprisingly, while the colony’s 30,000
free people of color, virtually all mulattoes (termed gens de couleur),
suffered from galling legal and social discriminations, many owned coffee
plantations in the West and South Provinces as well as a total of some one
hundred thousand black slaves. Saint Domingue’s 40,000 whites included many
professional managers of the larger sugar plantations, especially in the
North Province, which were owned by rich absentees in France or by great
merchant houses in France’s port cities. Most owners of smaller plantations,
wealthy merchants, and government officials on the island belonged to the
class of grands blancs, as distinct from the petits blancs, the
white sailors, traders, artisans, market-women, fortune-seekers, and
prostitutes in Saint Domingue’s rapidly expanding port towns, who were much
more receptive then the grands blancs to the revolutionary Jacobin
ideology imported from France. Although Saint Domingue had
historically been far more stable and free from slave revolts than
neighboring British Jamaica, the astounding developments of the French
Revolution had an immense impact on its highly imbalanced society. Most of
the grands blancs were convinced that loyalty to the French royalist
regime was essential for preserving the colonial slave system. They sought to
mobilize the gens de couleur (often their own descendants) against the
radical white townspeople whose celebration of the French Declaration of the
Rights of Man had little effect in moderating their long-term contempt for
and hatred of the free coloreds. While the gens de couleur (as well as
a few free blacks like Toussaint Louverture) initially supported the slave
regime, in which they had a major stake, they rejoiced over the news of the
French Revolution and adapted its doctrines to their struggle for
racial equality. Madison Smartt Bell, a
distinguished novelist and author of a fictional trilogy on the Haitian
Revolution, has now written a brilliant and truly gripping biography of Toussaint
Louverture. He agrees with a number of historians who argue that if the grands
blancs had initially extended full citizenship to the gens de couleur,
the slave revolt could have been repressed. But the French National Assembly,
under pressure from resident planters as well as free mulatto and
abolitionist groups, passed a series of contradictory measures that both
aggravated the white colonists’ racism and gave the Dominguan gens de
couleur first a sense of hope and then betrayal. On May 15, 1791, the
Assembly granted civil rights and the vote to gens de couleur born of
free parents, but four months later they passed another law abrogating the
previous measure and leaving the matter of mulatto rights up to the white
colonists. Finally, on April 4, 1792, the Assembly granted full equal rights
to all free mulattoes and blacks in the colonies, but even if the decree had
been enforced, it came at least a year too late to have much effect on events
in Saint Domingue. Beginning on August 22, 1791,
nearly two thousand slaves on the sugar-rich Northern Plain launched a
well-planned campaign to attack and burn plantations while also
indiscriminately killing the whites who could not escape: The fire, which they spread to the
sugarcane, to all the buildings, to their houses and ajoupas [huts],
covered the sky with churning clouds of smoke during the day, and at night
lit up the horizon with aurora borealis that projected far away the
reflection of so many volcanoes, and gave all objects a livid tint of blood.2
Soon whites were arming groups of
mulattoes and even slaves to combat the rebels, but the mulattoes,
especially, often changed sides. By the fall of 1791, when the middle-aged
Toussaint first emerged as a hardly visible leader, the growing number of
insurgents had freed tens of thousands of slaves and had destroyed a large
number of the plantations in the North Province. But thousands of rebels had
also been killed. Bitter fighting and repeated episodes of mass slaughter
continued until December 1803, when the final withdrawal of Napoleon’s large
army of veteran troops opened the way for Haiti’s declaration of independence
as Latin America’s first independent state and as the world’s first nation
created by liberated slaves. As Bell makes clear, the preceding
twelve years presented anything but a linear path to this astonishing
outcome, or even to the earlier abolition of Dominguan slavery. After war
broke out between France and much of the rest of Europe in 1792–1793, both
Spain and England launched major invasions of Saint Domingue, hoping to
repress the insurrection and prevent it from spreading to their own slave
colonies. Toussaint, a highly educated liberated slave and a master of both
strategy and tactics, ultimately defeated and expelled both foreign armies.
He then overcame, with help from the United States, a large force including
many gens de couleur, led by the mulatto general André Rigaud, who
opposed Toussaint’s efforts to achieve more autonomy from France. President
John Adams and his secretary of state, Timothy Pickering, supported Toussaint
because they were intent on preventing France from regaining power in the New World.
In 1801, a time of relative peace
in Saint Domingue, Toussaint distributed a constitution that abolished
slavery forever, prohibited distinctions according to color, and affirmed
equal protection of the law (measures that were appended to the US Constitution
in compromised form only after the Civil War). Finally, in early 1802, after
extremely bloody warfare, Toussaint and his lieutenants were able to defend
their positions against tens of thousands of Napoleon’s troops, who had been
sent to restore the slave regime and French control. This prepared the way
for the final French defeat in 1803, some nineteen months after General
Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc (Napoleon’s brother-in-law) had captured
Toussaint by a ruse and shipped him off to die—also in 1803—in a cold dungeon
high in France’s Jura mountains. One momentous early consequence of
the humiliating French defeat was Napoleon’s decision to abandon dreams of
another New World empire, based in the Caribbean and supplied by Louisiana
instead of the United States. Having lost from 50,000 to 65,000 men in Saint
Domingue, many to disease, which the insurgents were able to exploit,
Napoleon reluctantly decided to sell the vast, largely unknown Louisiana
Territory to the United States, which instantly doubled the size of the
country and gave America full control of the Mississippi and
Missouri Rivers. Other important consequences of
the Haitian Revolution included the influence of refugees and the
encouragement of slave revolts. In the early 1790s tens of thousands of white
Dominguan refugees, many accompanied by household slaves, streamed westward
to Cuba and Jamaica and northward to Louisiana and the Atlantic port cities
and towns of the United States. These fugitives circulated vivid accounts of
rape and mass slaughter that undercut the complacent conviction of many
slaveholders that most black “servants” were happy and content with their
place in a paternalistic world. The very words “Santo Domingo,” which
English-speakers used to refer to Saint Domingue, came to evoke alarm and
terror in the minds of slaveholders throughout the hemisphere. Like the
Hiroshima bomb, the revolution’s meaning could be rationalized or repressed
but never really forgotten since it demonstrated the possible fate of every
slaveholding society in the New World. Nonwhite sailors and migrants also
transmitted the basic facts about the Haitian Revolution to various groups of
slaves and to free blacks in the American North.3
For the latter oppressed people, who by the 1820s began celebrating the
anniversary of Haitian independence, this first mass emancipation of black
slaves gave assurance, in the words of James Forten, Philadelphia’s
prosperous black sailmaker and entrepreneur, that other African-Americans
“could not always be detained in their present bondage.” By 1893 the great
Frederick Douglass could proclaim at the Chicago World’s Fair that when “the
black sons of Haiti …struck for freedom…they struck for the freedom of every
black man in the world.”4
Meanwhile, whites found convincing evidence of Haitian influence on slave
conspiracies and revolts in such far-flung places as Virginia, Cuba, South
Carolina, Venezuela, Barbados, and Colombia. While the effects of the Haitian
Revolution on slavery itself were ambiguous—and the destruction of Saint
Domingue’s productivity gave an immense stimulus to other producers of sugar
and coffee and thus to the Atlantic slave trade5—the
slaves’ victory had a profound bearing on the way American slaveholders, in
particular, viewed any antislavery agitation. Bryan Edwards, a white British
West Indian and then MP who had personally witnessed an early stage of the
revolt, popularized the conviction that it had been the Amis des Noirs, or
French abolitionists, who were wholly responsible for igniting the
insurrection. When three enormous slave revolts in the British West Indies
seemed to have been set off by the unceasingly vocal British antislavery
movement, Southern US leaders began exaggerating the threat and power of
abolitionists in the North (who were accused, for example, of inciting Nat
Turner’s bloody uprising of 1831 in Virginia). In other words, the specter of
Haiti led Southerners to overreact to an originally feeble antislavery
movement in the North and thus contributed to the deepening sectionalism that
led to America’s Civil War.6
As for Toussaint Louverture
himself, historians and biographers long accepted the public image he eagerly
tried to convey—that he had been a lowly slave until the revolution redefined
him as one of the tens and then hundreds of thousands of black nouveaux
libres. But in recent decades we have learned that in 1791 Toussaint
Bréda (he changed his name only in 1793) was an ancien libre who had
been free for seventeen years, that he was married and had fathered eleven
children (eight out of wedlock), and that he was the owner of slaves as well
as far-flung holdings of land. Born sometime between 1739 and
1746, Toussaint was the son of an Arada prince who had been baptized with the
name of Hyppolite after being shipped as a slave from the Gold Coast of
Africa to Saint Domingue. He was not only literate but amazingly well read.
He could cite Machiavelli and had deeply internalized the passage in a famous
work by the pro-revolutionary Abbé Raynal calling for a black Spartacus to
lead a huge slave revolt to overcome the greed and avarice of Europeans in
the New World. No less important, Toussaint was a devout Catholic and
high-degree member of a Freemason lodge, where he met socially with grands
blancs, including his beloved former master, Bayon de Libertat, who
managed the Bréda plantation, close to Cap Français, the elegant French city
on the northern coast. Despite his own activities as entrepreneur, Toussaint
continued to live near the Bréda plantation, where as a slave he had cared
for livestock, developed skill in veterinary medicine, and as a coachman had
transported and delivered messages for Bayon de Libertat, with whom he later
developed a close and genuine friendship. During the early years of the
revolution, various white observers, including some of the blacks’ long-held
prisoners, who had an opportunity to study the insurgents’ behavior at close
range, claimed that the original slave insurrection had been incited by elite
white royalists who were desperate to check and overcome the revolutionary
tidal waves coming from France. The petits blancs, who supported the
revolution, had taken control of the Colonial Assembly. In response,
according to Bell, the plan of grands blancs, “wild though it seems,
was that a manufactured and secretly controlled uprising of the slaves on the
Northern Plain could frighten the petits blanc faction back
into submission.” As Bell shows in some detail,
there was much circumstantial evidence to support this view. The slaves
themselves would have been receptive to royalism, and to the uprising on its
behalf, since they had been trained to respect the authority of African kings
and in the first years of revolt actually professed to be fighting for the king
of France (or Spain), whose liberating or ameliorating edicts had supposedly
been repressed and blocked by the planters. Moreover, Léger Félicité
Sonthonax, the radical French Jacobin commissioner who in 1793 took control
of the main French army in Saint Domingue, was by no means alone in accusing
Toussaint himself of having orchestrated the August 1791 insurrection, acting
as the principal agent for such counterrevolutionary grands blancs as
Bayon de Libertat and his brother-in-law, Colonel Cambefort, the commander of
the French forces in the north. Unlike most historians in the past
few decades, Bell cautiously accepts this view. At the outset of the
revolution, he writes, Toussaint’s economic and social interests were close
to those of the grands blancs. He succeeded not only in protecting his
former master and his wife but was able to remain quietly and
calmly unmolested at Bréda during the first several weeks of the
insurrection, when all the surrounding plantations had been burned to ash;
the several pell-mell rebel assaults on Cap Français that occurred during
these weeks had to pass directly in front of Bréda’s gates. No less surprising, only
twenty-two of Bréda’s 318 slaves, long managed in part by Toussaint as a
sword-bearing commandeur, or enforcer of the slaveholder’s authority,
left the plantation in the early days of the uprising. The theory of a
royalist conspiracy would also help explain why, despite the desire of many
slave insurgents for bloody vengeance, the leaders’ original goals even in
the fall of 1791 were limited to a negotiated prohibition of whipping and a
shorter work week for slaves, coupled with the emancipation of as few as
fifty leaders. Toussaint seems to have brought the latter number down from a
few hundred while also preventing the slaughter of white prisoners.
Nevertheless, even if the royalist whites had been instrumental in
encouraging the original slave revolt, Bell convincingly points out that the
slaves took matters into their own hands—especially with respect to killing
and destruction—in less than twenty-four hours. This may help to explain the
conflicting reports on what the insurgents really desired and demanded and
why the ruling whites contemptuously rejected the modest proposals of the
main black leaders. It is notable that in the early
fall of 1791 when Toussaint joined the top leaders of the rebellion, Boukman
Dutty, Georges Biassou, and Jean-François Papillon, he seemed to be treated
as an equal even though he initially served as a secretary and doctor. Even
if he had not been involved in the planning of the revolt, his age and
experience would probably have made him appear as a respected “father” to the
group. Though Toussaint avoided publicity and remained in the shadows until
August 1793, he became committed to the revolutionary goals of liberty and
equality while hoping to draw on his own experience in devising a way to
combine free wage labor with the productivity of the plantation system. His
longer-term vision included a semi-autonomous Saint Domingue that would
somehow attract and make use of the knowledge and skills of whites like Bayon
de Libertat while maintaining racial equality. According to what Bell describes
as “a wonderfully eloquent” and “extraordinarily sophisticated” letter, the
leaders of the insurgency had totally changed their demands by July 1792 and
had completely mastered the radical ideology of the French Revolution. This
letter, purportedly signed by Biassou, Papillon, and a fourteen-year-old
nephew of Toussaint, was addressed to the colonial and French governments and
delivered to Colonel Cambefort, who headed the military campaign against the
insurgents. Since the long letter, most of it quoted by Bell, shows “detailed
knowledge of the rhetoric of both the American and French revolutions,” a
familiarity with the French “Constitution and Declaration of the Rights of
Man,” and “a thorough knowledge of the various levels of the French
government,” Bell concludes that it must have been written by a committee,
aided by captured white clerks or priests, or by Toussaint. But I am far more
persuaded by David P. Geggus, one of the leading experts on the Haitian
Revolution, who observes: The language of the text has a
suspiciously inauthentic look. Its combination of sophisticated vocabulary
and rhetoric with simplistic errors of spelling and grammar makes it unlike
any other surviving text from this milieu. It was probably a fraud, concocted
by the royalist de Cambefort.7
As Geggus shows, Colonel Cambefort
was then “the target of increasingly frequent charges of counterrevolutionary
influence on the slave revolt.” The letter was a way of striking back at the
radicals by proving that they, and not the royalists, were responsible
for the devastating revolution. It should be added that while Toussaint
became committed to the principle of natural human rights, as Bell
emphasizes, Biassou and Papillon, the alleged writers of the letter, ended up
selling large numbers of blacks, including some of Toussaint’s followers, to
Spanish slave traders. The insurgents’ prolonged ties
with the Spaniards who occupied at different times the eastern part of the
island—later the Dominican Republic—underscore the fact that an understanding
of Toussaint’s goals and brilliant leadership requires some consideration of
the diverse groups he dealt with: the Spaniards, who sought to undermine the
French but who had no desire to abolish slavery; the incoming French
officials, whose mission changed as the French and Haitian revolutions
progressed; the grands blancs, some of whom favored independence from
France, especially after the execution of King Louis XVI, and who welcomed
the British invasion in 1793; the English themselves, who intended to
suppress the slave revolt and prevent it from spreading to Jamaica; the newly
freed slaves or nouveaux libres, who could look with distrust on an ancien
libre like Toussaint, who, like many gens de couleur, had long
participated in the oppressive slave system; and finally, the free and often
privileged mulattoes. Almost from the outset, the
Spanish from the eastern part of the island sought to weaken French authority
by supplying arms to the insurgents. With the coming of war, Spanish troops
crossed the border and made leaders like Toussaint auxiliaries in the Spanish
army. When Toussaint first issued a proclamation, in August 1793, adopting
the name Louverture (“the opening”) and calling for “Liberty and Equality to
reign in Saint Domingue,” he referred to himself as a general in the armies
of the king of Spain. It was on this same day, probably not by coincidence,
that Léger Félicité Sonthonax, the French commissioner who led the very
forces that Toussaint opposed, felt compelled for military reasons to issue a
general edict of slave emancipation. It was not until May 1794 that
Toussaint dramatically switched sides and led his black and mulatto forces
over to the French side. This momentous decision, which may have been
influenced by knowledge that the French National Convention had abolished
slavery in all French territory three months earlier, was one of the key
turning points of the Haitian Revolution. Before long Toussaint had attacked
and defeated his former allies, Biassou and Papillon. While Toussaint remained
officially and even emotionally loyal to revolutionary France for the rest of
his life, he continually clashed with French officials from Sonthonax to
General Joseph d’Hédouville, who arrived in 1798, and who, like Sonthonax,
Toussaint finally succeeded in expelling back to France. During Sonthonax’s
second stay in Saint Domingue, the two actually cooperated for a time, and
after Toussaint’s defeat of the British, Sonthonax promoted him to commander
in chief of the entire French army in Saint Domingue. The most serious
conflicts with both Sonthonax and Hédouville arose from Toussaint’s close
ties with the grands blancs and his partly successful efforts to
encourage the safe return of white plantation managers and owners, including
Bayon de Libertat, who had fled to the United States after the sacking and
burning of Cap Français in 1793. Toussaint’s goal of utilizing the
knowledge and managerial skills of such whites, contrary to French law, also
raised suspicions and hostility among white radicals and some freed slaves.
Though there was much support for Toussaint’s objective of reforming the
plantation system with supervised free wage labor, it was the grand blanc
planters who expressed delight in November 1798 when Toussaint,
Bell writes, issued a proclamation requiring
all the able-bodied blacks in the colony who were not attached to the army to
return to work for wages on the plantations (generally the same plantations
where they had formerly been slaves). As for the newly freed slaves,
well over half of whom had come from Africa, Toussaint could speak Fon, the
African language of his ancestors, and he won fame as an orator in the
domestic Créole. Bell argues that though Toussaint was a devoted Catholic, he
had also internalized many of the beliefs of Vodou, which provided a cultural
link with African slaves, many of them Ibos from what is now a part of
Nigeria. When beginning a civil war with General Rigaud and the gens de
couleur in 1799, Toussaint courted his “black base” by promoting several days of festival that
brought swarms of blacks into Port-au-Prince from the outlying area, and in
the gallery of the government house he joined in Ibo warrior dances, to help
whip up enthusiasm for the battles which were sure to come. One can hardly imagine a more
amazing contrast to this Ibo dancing than the image of Toussaint dining with
General Thomas Maitland, the commander of the defeated British army. When
arranging the complex evacuation of British troops in 1798, Maitland helped
Toussaint to undermine the authority of his rival, General d’Hédouville, the
civil authority. He did so, Bell writes, by signing with Toussaint
a secret nonaggression pact and trade deal
which lifted the British blockade from Toussaint’s Saint Domingue, and gave
him a free hand within its borders so long as he honored a promise not to
export the black revolution to the British Caribbean colonies. (Toussaint
kept his end of the bargain a year later by betraying a conspiracy to raise a
slave revolt in Jamaica.) Following this amicable deal,
which would have outraged the French government, “the white general treated
the black one to a festive dinner, and afterward gave Toussaint the elaborate
silver service used at the meal, with the compliments of the king
of England.” Toussaint’s many contradictions
and diverse skills in appealing to all sides can at times become ethically
disturbing. One admires accounts of his tactical genius and lightning-quick
movements through Saint Domingue’s mountainous terrain. It is a bit more
troubling to read that he became “notorious for secretly instigating popular
uprisings which only his authority could subdue.” Reports that he repeatedly
prevented the wholesale slaughter of prisoners stand in striking contrast to
the torture and mass killings of his second-in-command and ultimate
successor, the former slave General Jean-Jacques Dessalines. But in Bell’s
most shocking admission, while one considers the
forbearance and moderation [Toussaint] mainly exercised, one must also recall
that many of the atrocities Dessalines committed under Toussaint’s rule were
probably done with Toussaint’s tacit approval, if not on his
secret order. In an intriguing and subtle
argument, Bell contends that “the extremes of ruthlessness or beneficence”
that Toussaint displayed under different circumstances “are most easily
resolved in the terms of Vodou, where the individual ego can disappear
altogether, ceding control of the person and his actions to an angry or a gentle
spirit.” Bell develops this theme in some detail, but it is somewhat
difficult to reconcile with Toussaint’s attacks on Vodou and his ultimate
prohibition of Vodou assemblies and ceremonies. Regardless of one’s conclusions,
Toussaint’s unique personality enabled him to pilot the Haitian Revolution
through tumultuous events and to achieve by early 1801 what Bell terms “the
apogee of his military and political success; he looked to be invincible.” In
a masterpiece of biography, Bell manages to present a balanced picture,
including the negative aspects of a man he calls “the highest-achieving
African-American hero of all time.” After defeating major Spanish, British,
and French attempts to gain control and reinstitute slavery in the richest
colony of the New World, Toussaint was able to stand off Napoleon himself in
their final confrontation. A great question left open by Bell is whether the
subsequent tragic history of Haiti might have been different if Toussaint had
not been taken prisoner and had been able to continue as a leader of
the revolution. In one of the supreme ironies of
New World history, after Napoleon himself had been captured and exiled to
Saint Helena, he wrote that he had made a major mistake in opposing the
revolution in Saint Domingue: I have to reproach myself for the
attempt at the colony during the Consulate; it was a great mistake to have
wanted to subdue it by force; I should have contented myself to govern it
through the intermediary of Toussaint. When we consider Haiti’s bleak
history of misrule and perpetual poverty, it is interesting to speculate on
what might have happened if Napoleon had accepted slave emancipation and had
chosen to govern Saint Domingue through the semi-autonomous agency of Toussaint
Louverture. In reality it was the brutal ex-slave Jean-Jacques Dessalines,
who, after he led the final defeat of the French, proclaimed the independence
of Haiti in 1804 and then his own authority as emperor. In 1805 he ordered
the extermination of most of the remaining whites. A pact between Napoleon
and Toussaint would have prevented this bloody history of black revenge as
well as the ghastly aspects of the last confrontation between the genocidal
French and rebellious blacks. If Toussaint had stayed in power,
his extraordinary abilities to deal with highly divergent groups, such as the
freed slaves and the grands blancs, might well have led to some
success in solving a perennial problem in Haitian history. That problem is
conflict between a reformed plantation system, with continuing agricultural
exports, and the move of many Haitians to subsistence farming, leading to the
conditions of deep and continuing poverty that exist today. Toussaint would
have faced strong opposition from former slaves as he continued to use wages,
force, and the skills of white managers to restore plantation agriculture
with its high output. Britain, one should recall, for all its claims to
having a free citizenry, still used legal force to prevent factory workers
from leaving their jobs. Still, Toussaint was an expert at
persuasion and manipulation. If his followers had been able to shape events,
Haiti (really still Saint Domingue) would no doubt have escaped the punitive US
naval embargo on its trade, to say nothing of the devastating burden of
paying reparations in the 1820s in exchange for French recognition. Since
Saint Domingue had long been a model of prosperity and growth as a slave
colony, it is at least conceivable that it could have become a model of
productivity and increasing racial equality for the
post-emancipation Caribbean.
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