Toussaint Louverture Read online

  Also by Philippe Girard

  Clinton in Haiti: The 1994 US Invasion of Haiti

  Haiti: The Tumultuous History, from Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation

  The Slaves Who Defeated Napoléon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801–1804

  Editor, The Memoir of Toussaint Louverture

  Copyright © 2016 by Philippe Girard

  Published in the United States by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 W. 57th St, 15th floor, New York, NY 10107.

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  Frontispiece: Toussaint Louverture as a French general. The engraving was possibly modeled after a contemporary portrait. Reprinted from François Séraphin Delpech, Iconographie des contemporains depuis 1789 jusqu’à 1829, vol. 2 (Paris: Delpech, 1832).

  Designed by Amy Quinn

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Girard, Philippe R., author.

  Title: Toussaint Louverture: a revolutionary life / Philippe Girard.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Basic Books, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016018088 (print) | LCCN 2016018559 (e-book) | ISBN 9780465094141 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Toussaint Louverture, 1743–1803. | Haiti—History—Revolution, 1791–1804—Biography. | Revolutionaries—Haiti—Biography. | Generals—Haiti—Biography.

  Classification: LCC F1923.T69 G57 2016 (print) | LCC F1923.T69 (e-book) | DDC

  972.94/03092 [B] —dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016018088

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  À Cécile, Hélène, Flore, Rémy, et tous

  les esclaves de la plantation Bréda

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1Aristocrat, c. 1740

  2Child, c. 1743–1754

  3Slave, 1754

  4Revolutionary Apprentice, 1757–1773

  5Family Man, 1761–1785

  6Freedman, c. 1772–1779

  7Slave Driver, 1779–1781

  8Muleteer, 1781–1789

  9Witness, 1788–1791

  10Rebel, 1791

  11Monarchist, 1792

  12Spanish Officer, 1793–1794

  13French Patriot, 1794–1796

  14Politician, 1796–1798

  15Diplomat, 1798–1800

  16Planter, 1800–1801

  17Governor General, Early 1801

  18God? Late 1801

  19Renegade, Early 1802

  20Prisoner, 1802–1803

  21Icon, 1803–Present

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliographic Essay

  Index

  Maps by the author.

  INTRODUCTION

  IN SEPTEMBER 1802, in a dank cell of a fort in eastern France, an elderly officer began to dictate an account of his career to a secretary. He had much to say. His life had taken him from bondage on a sugar plantation to the governorship of France’s richest colony, Saint-Domingue. For almost five decades he had labored as a slave and a muleteer before launching a revolution in 1791 that became the only successful slave revolt in world history. He had fought off invasions by Spain and Britain in 1793–1798. He had conquered the neighboring colony of Santo Domingo in 1801. In the process, he had become one of the richest men in the Americas.

  “Every body has heard of Toussaint, the famous Negro general,” noted one of his first biographers, the British abolitionist James Stephen, in 1803. So great was public interest in his life that Stephen’s book went through four printings in a year. By that date, other biographies had been published in France, the United States, Germany, Italy, Denmark, and Sweden. To his admirers, Toussaint Louverture was the George Washington of his race, the black Napoléon, the new Spartacus, or even the Messiah. Black men and women sang songs about his revolution from Venezuela to Brazil; William Wordsworth wrote verses in his honor in Britain; and in Germany, Friedrich Hegel developed his master-slave dialectic based on the lessons of the Haitian slave revolt. The British Annual Register named him 1802’s most significant world figure.1

  But Napoléon, the first consul of France, so feared Louverture’s growing power that in 1801 he had sent an expedition to overthrow, arrest, and deport him. Before 1802 was over, the powerful governor of Saint-Domingue was a prisoner in the Fort de Joux in eastern France. Louverture had summoned a secretary to his cell in the hope that Napoléon would free him if only he read a full account of his career.

  Louverture labored over the text for days. He proofread and amended the secretary’s first draft, annotated and edited a second, then added a conclusion to a third. Finally, he wrote a fourth and final version entirely in his own hand. This was a monumental effort for a man who had grown up illiterate. The result was a rendering of the Haitian Revolution from the vantage point of its central figure, but it left many questions unanswered. Louverture made heartfelt references to his family members, but he largely glossed over his personal life; he defended his views on race and forced labor, but he occasionally misrepresented his record on both in order to ingratiate himself to the French consul. The memoir is as beguiling as it is frustrating. “I was a Slave, I dare to announce it,” he wrote. This passing comment was Louverture’s only reference to his prerevolutionary life, the only acknowledgment that he had once been enslaved. Though today he is remembered as the leader of a slave rebellion, that is not how he wanted to be defined. He had also been a freedman, a father, and a planter; most of all, as he repeated throughout the memoir, he was an officer and an official of the French republic who had transcended class and race to take his place among the great statesmen of the revolutionary era.2

  The challenges that the biographer of Louverture faces are many. Secretive, guarded, and occasionally deceitful, he preferred to keep his innermost fears and dreams to himself. He had many foes and no true friends. His relatives knew him better than anyone else, but aside from the partial recollections of two of his sons and one of his nieces, they have left us few accounts of his private life. For these reasons, there have been few scholarly biographies of Louverture. In English, the most recent biography based on extensive primary research was C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, first published in 1938.

  We are not even sure what Louverture looked like. Written sources indicate that the man who defied Napoléon was just five-foot-two and frail of stature. Contemporary white authors deemed him ugly by their standards of beauty—but we cannot judge for ourselves, because he refused to have a portrait made. As a result, the portraits of him that did appear were often drawn by people who had not met him in person; they simply projected onto a canvas their vision of what a black general should look like. His enemies made him apelike to discredit him; nineteenth-century abolitionists lightened the color of his skin to make him seem less threatening to European audiences; contemporary Haitian artists depict him in the heroic pose of a triumphant general. The image on the jacket and the frontispiece of this book date from Louverture’s time and are consistent with written depictions by his contemporaries, making
them some of the best, if imperfect, illustrations available.

  And yet it is possible to understand Louverture, and it is possible for the very reason that we want to read about him in the first place. Writing about slaves is usually difficult, because history is written by the winners, so planters dominate the archival record. But in Haiti, uniquely, it was the slaves who won. Louverture alone left behind thousands of letters, reports, and other documents. Many of his fellow revolutionaries did the same.

  These sources have been read in many different ways. Because Louverture is the bridge between the slave-holding French colony of Saint-Domingue, where he was born and raised, and the independent black republic of Haiti, which grew out of the slave revolt he helped initiate, scholars have focused on his views on slave labor, on his relationship to colonialism, and on his African heritage. For many years, their verdict was clear-cut: Louverture was the idealistic herald of slave emancipation, the forefather of an independent Haiti, and a black nationalist. Then new archival finds in the past forty years revealed that Louverture once owned and exploited slaves, leading some modern historians to describe him instead as a selfish would-be planter who never completely forsook France and white society.

  Neither view is accurate. And the more we learn of Louverture, the harder it is to pin him down. He was of African descent but embraced the cultural model of his French masters; he launched a slave revolt but sharply restricted the rights of freedmen after he seized power; he charted an autonomist path for Saint-Domingue but insisted until his dying breath that he was a loyal servant of France.

  So how are we supposed to make sense of him? How it is possible to write about him at all? By accepting that he was all of these things at once. He came from a colony shaped by French, African, and American influences, and he lived through a revolutionary era so tumultuous that he often had no choice but to accommodate his enemies’ agendas. By obligation and by personal taste, he operated in multiple worlds simultaneously. His parents, who were among the million Africans brought to Saint-Domingue between 1697 and 1793, raised him in their native language, Fon, and probably introduced him to their native religion, Vodou. Born in the French Caribbean, Louverture also grew up in the Afro-French language Kreyòl, on plantations producing sugar, coffee, and cotton for the European market, and observing a racial imbalance that saw a tiny minority of whites control a vast population of blacks and people of mixed race. Then there was France, the distant metropole that had imposed colonial rule in Saint-Domingue and imported the Catholic religion, the French language, and eventually the revolutionary ideals that would inspire the Haitian Revolution itself.

  Louverture navigated all three of these worlds, switching from one to another as needed. He was a slave rebel and a conservative planter, a caring father and a cold-blooded general, a passionate idealist and a scheming politician. Above all, he was a pragmatist. In his early life he proved willing to accept slavery because it was the prevailing form of labor in the Caribbean; during the Revolution he came to regard universal emancipation as the only system acceptable to his supporters; and when he confronted the problem of how best to actually govern the colony, he backtracked and reintroduced compulsory labor rules, which, in his view, were the only way to avoid the economic ruin of the colony.

  If we examine Louverture solely through the prism of our current preoccupations with race, slavery, and imperialism, we risk missing the issues that mattered to him, starting with his personal ambition. His political views were often scattershot, but his craving for social status was a constant. Educating himself, seeing to his children’s future, making money, gaining and retaining power, and achieving recognition as a great man: he never wavered from the pursuit of these ends. He was a social climber and a self-made man, which in no way diminishes his accomplishments. In fact, it humanizes a figure who can seem unapproachable otherwise. From the slave quarters to the governor’s mansion, his life journey was a remarkable story of a black man of humble origins fighting his way to the top of a white-dominated world.

  Louverture was almost fifty when the Haitian Revolution broke out, so for most of his life he lived in a society where it was legal not only to own and whip a slave, but also, with a judge’s order, to torture, mutilate, and burn him or her alive. He owned nothing, not his own body, or his children. Opportunities for manumission were rare, and a free person of color could only hope for secondary status under the law. Saint-Domingue was controlled by a European power. The few armed people of color in the colony were employed as slave-catchers. Slavery, racism, inequality, and imperialism seemed unchallengeable facts of life.

  Yet Louverture presided over a revolution—the most radical of the late eighteenth century—that turned on their head the entrenched beliefs, practices, and habits of his society. No European power had abolished slavery in an American colony; Louverture’s revolution forced France to emancipate all its slaves in all its colonies. His white contemporaries took it for granted that a single white man could subdue a hundred Africans with the snap of the whip; he built an army of freedmen strong enough to threaten British Jamaica, Spanish Cuba, and the southern United States. Slaves had been listed alongside cattle on plantation records; he and other black males became bona fide citizens of France, generals in the French Army, and deputies in the French parliament. France had ruled Saint-Domingue through its appointed governors; he secured that title for himself and drafted a constitution to support his claim. At the apex of his career in 1801, Louverture was an international statesman who corresponded and signed treaties with the governments of Britain, Spain, the United States, and France. The slave-owning Thomas Jefferson feared his power while negotiating for a share of the trade of Saint-Domingue, the United States’ second-largest trading partner.

  The tragedy of Louverture’s life was that, despite orchestrating one of the most important revolutions in the history of mankind, he never got the recognition he felt he deserved. “I am black but I have the soul of a white man,” he once told a French colonial official. Yet “because I am black and ignorant,” he noted bitterly in his memoir, “I must not count as one of the soldiers of the Republic.” Napoléon did not even bother to read the memoir. By refusing to accept “this negro” as an equal, the French emperor reduced him. He made Louverture into what he is remembered as today—a former slave who would always be defined by his African ancestry—when in fact his servile past was just one of the many facets of Louverture’s revolutionary life.3

  ONE

  ARISTOCRAT

  c. 1740

  IN THE EARLY DECADES of the nineteenth century, Toussaint Louverture’s son Isaac set out to gather all the information he could find about his African ancestors. He uncovered a tragic story that began in privilege and ended in bondage. Toussaint Louverture’s grandfather Gaou Guinou was a “powerful African king” of the so-called “Slave Coast” of West Africa, but Gaou Guinou’s son Hippolyte (Louverture’s father) was captured and sold alongside his wife—“according to the barbarous custom of the Africans”—and became a slave in Saint-Domingue.1

  These family traditions must be handled with caution because they were recorded nearly a century after the fact. They are also tainted by Isaac’s competing urges to aggrandize his ancestors (“powerful African king”) and reject his African heritage (“barbarous custom”). But the story, which Isaac must have originally heard from his father, is our main guide as we follow Louverture’s parents from their youth in West Africa to the distant and mysterious island to which they were uprooted.

  In the early 1700s, the portion of the Slave Coast that corresponds to present-day Benin was home to several ministates that shared common foundation myths and the Fon language. The city-state of Whydah was “the greatest trading place on the coast,” according to a visitor. The kingdom of Allada stood farther inland, and the great warrior kingdom of Dahomey farther inland still.2

  Family traditions held that Louverture’s grandfather Gaou Guinou was the king of Allada and that his father, Hi
ppolyte, a prince of royal blood, was married to the “daughter of Affiba, king of the Ajas,” another people from the Slave Coast. But Allada royal dynasties mention no king named Gaou Guinou, so Louverture’s descendants most likely made up their royal parentage to lessen the stigma of their slave ancestry. Gaou Guinou’s first name in fact suggests that he was merely a gan (a prominent official of the Allada kingdom), and therefore that his son Hippolyte—as well as, ultimately, Toussaint Louverture—was not a prince, but an aristocrat.3

  Aristocrat from the Allada kingdom. Reprinted from J. Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, Encyclopédie des Voyages (Paris: Derot, 1796), 131.

  In any case, enslavement was destined to upend the privileged life of Louverture’s father. Slavery was a fact of life in Allada, where it had existed locally since time immemorial (given his social prominence, Hippolyte likely owned slaves himself). West African slaves had also been exported to the Muslim world for a thousand years, and a third market, the Americas, had grown exponentially since 1492. Spanish conquistadors in the Caribbean had originally subjected native Amerindians to a type of serfdom they called repartimiento, and French colonizers had imported white indentured servants. But the punishing death rate of the Caribbean had made both systems uneconomic, and African slave labor reigned supreme by the 1700s. Though costly to purchase, African slaves tended to survive longer than other laborers because they had some natural immunity to the diseases of European and African origins that had made the New World so deadly to Amerindian and European workers.4

  By the time the Atlantic slave trade ended in the 1800s, 12 million human beings had been transported from Africa to the Americas. Only a small minority went to what had by then become the United States (about 6 percent). Most went to Brazil (40 percent) and the Caribbean (50 percent), including Saint-Domingue (Haiti), which alone imported more slaves than the United States. Slave traders originally preyed on the northwestern coast of Africa, but by Hippolyte’s time they had shifted their focus south to the Slave Coast. From 1,200 a year in the 1640s, exports from the region of Allada shot up to 10,000 a year in the 1690s and to more than 15,000 a year in the 1700s and 1710s.