Toussaint Louverture Read online

  Despite Bayon’s shortcomings, Louverture maintained friendly relations with him well into the Haitian Revolution, probably because of his willingness to grant skilled employees like him (as opposed to field hands) a remarkable degree of impunity. In the Bréda plantation of Manquets, a slave driver named Hippolyte and a sugar refiner named Jean-Jacques once walked off of their jobs, inciting dozens of others to do the same, in order to protest extended hours and an unpopular manager. Bayon punished them lightly, most likely because slave drivers were influential and sugar refiners were costly. He simply put Hippolyte off-duty and sent Jean-Jacques back to work, eventually rewarding him with two gold coins for good behavior.15

  House slaves—a group that included Louverture’s brother Paul and his surrogate mother, Pélagie—also fared well under Bayon’s management. There were no fewer than 20 slaves attached to the master house of Haut-du-Cap out of a total workforce of 152. An additional 27 slaves belonging to Bayon and neighboring planters lived there at the Brédas’ expense as well—a remarkable number considering that the total of 47 domestics only had to care, at most, for a family of four (Bayon’s wife often visited spas in France, where their daughters also studied in 1780–1784). One domestic was solely employed to make jams and wigs. By contrast, the much larger plantation of Gallifet, which employed 407 slaves, only assigned 7 to domestic duties. The accountant of Haut-du-Cap fretted about the Bréda domestics’ “taste for laziness, independence, and libertinism.” They had little else to do.16

  Coachmen like Louverture normally lived in the carriage house, but the building was falling apart by the 1780s on the Bréda plantation, so perhaps he built his own lodging on a little parcel of land he owned near the plantation. This is where he began a new life after the breakdown of his first marriage. The exact date remains a mystery: by his own account, Louverture began a relationship with his second wife around 1778, had a son by her in 1784, and considered himself “married” to her by 1785, even though his first wife was actually still alive. Unable to obtain a divorce, he probably kept his marital status unclear so as not to draw attention to the adulterous or bigamous nature of his second union. Afraid of being tagged with illegitimacy and losing their inheritance, his children by his second wife similarly tiptoed around the issue, vaguely explaining that their parents were living in “the creole way” before making their common-law marriage official.17

  Louverture’s second wife, Suzanne Simon-Baptiste, was a laundress on the Haut-du-Cap plantation. She was apparently the daughter of Pierre Baptiste, the elderly gatekeeper of the Bréda plantation and Louverture’s godfather. She was also the sister of the slave driver Bruno and the mason Gilles, which placed her at the center of the established families that formed the backbone of the plantation. Born around 1746, she proved to be a dependable wife. Louverture grew very attached to her, though he still carried on the occasional affair. Like her husband, she was a devout Catholic. Pragmatic and businesslike, she stayed away from politics during the Haitian Revolution, preferring to accumulate and manage landholdings instead.

  Suzanne already had a mixed-race son before marrying Louverture, as well as possibly a mixed-race daughter. Her son, Placide, also known as Séraphin, was born in 1781 to a mulâtre (mulatto) named Séraphin Clerc, which made him a griffe (three-quarters black), according to the meticulous racial nomenclature of the colony. Though Placide was not Louverture’s biological son, he always treated him as if he were, and even displayed a marked preference for him. It is difficult to know whether this bias reflected Placide’s personal qualities or some deeply buried desire to whiten the family line.18

  Suzanne and Toussaint Louverture had two sons together, Isaac (born in 1784) and Saint-Jean (born in 1791). Both appeared as slaves on Bréda plantation rosters alongside their mother. Most likely, Louverture could not afford to buy their freedom after the failure of his coffee business, and so they remained enslaved until the Haitian Revolution. Their continued bondage underscores the extent to which he navigated two worlds: he was a freedman who had rented slaves, but he was now raising an enslaved family on the plantation of his former master. After the heady period of the late 1770s, when he had been able to free several relatives, the 1780s marked a long pause in his social ascent.

  Louverture raised his second family in a difficult environmental context. Deforestation and soil erosion, two woes of modern Haiti, were already becoming an issue. Colonists cut forests haphazardly to harvest exotic woods like mahogany and to make room for fields (an attorney of Haut-du-Cap even cut down all the guava trees). Tropical downpours, known locally as avalasses (a Kreyòl term derived from “avalanche”), then washed the soil away, leaving the hill of Morne du Cap bare and stone-dry. As a result, the Bréda plantation was often hit by droughts and flash floods that destroyed bridges, carved ravines, and ruined crops.19

  Plagues of biblical proportions hit Haut-du-Cap in rapid succession. After a major flood in 1784, followed by a lengthy drought in 1785–1786, smallpox returned in 1785, taking the life of Bayon’s cook and prompting him to vaccinate all the young children on the plantation—a frightening prospect at a time when vaccination was nearly as dangerous as the disease itself. Isaac Louverture was just a few months old. Bayon had suffered heartbreak of his own when one of his daughters died in 1784, just weeks before she was due to return from France.

  The death in Paris in July 1786 of Pantaléon de Bréda Jr., the absentee owner of the Bréda plantations, was more significant in Louverture’s life than the death of his boss’s daughter. Because Pantaléon Jr. had died childless, he had divided his fortune among his four nieces and nephews. Word quickly got out, terrifying all those—including Louverture—whose families had been owned by Pantaléon Jr. “Slaves no longer wanted to work the land, because they had gotten it into their head that they would be split and even sold,” reported Bayon. “I had to use all my influence to calm them.” Freak incidents—such as a rainless lightning storm that killed a slave—did nothing to soothe fretful nerves. Altogether, eight slaves died in Haut-du-Cap in the summer and fall of 1786.20

  Fortunately for Louverture and his relations, Pantaléon Jr.’s absentee heirs had trouble coordinating a sale, in part because of the bad reputation of the slaves of Haut-du-Cap. After years of confusion and delays, the heirs abandoned the partition plan they had drawn up. Instead, they decided to continue operating the Bréda plantations in Haut-du-Cap and Plaine-du-Nord together and to split the proceeds—or rather losses, since the estates turned out to be far less lucrative than they had expected.

  According to colonial statisticians, the plantations of Saint-Domingue were veritable gold mines. By 1790, Saint-Domingue was exporting 70 million pounds of white sugar a year by weight, plus 93 million pounds of brown sugar, 68 million pounds of coffee, and 6 million pounds of cotton. The total value of these goods topped 200 million colonial livres (133 million French livres), or more than the production of all of Britain’s Caribbean colonies combined. In return, France sold 80 million French livres’ worth of goods in its Caribbean colonies, a market that kept 3 million French workers busy. The 600 French ships plying the Saint-Domingue trade also served as a training ground for 12,000 sailors who could be enrolled in the French Navy in the event—the certainty—of yet another war with Britain.21

  Generations of historians have cited these numbers ever since, but by doing so they have been unwittingly recycling the propaganda of the planter lobby. Colonial bookkeeping was not meant to enlighten scholars but to evade taxes and defend slavery. Because far-sighted economists like Adam Smith and Pierre du Pont de Nemours argued that slavery was no cheaper than wage labor when accounting for the slaves’ high cost and low productivity, slavery’s apologists felt compelled to prove that slavery was, if not morally defensible, at least highly profitable.

  Accordingly, contemporary estimates of slavery’s profitability varied dramatically depending on the source’s political leanings. One of the best works on the matter was a two-volume study publi
shed in 1775 by Michel Hilliard d’Auberteuil, who was sympathetic to the plantation system but also eager to reform it. According to his careful accounting, each year a typical slave produced 600 to 1,800 colonial livres more than it cost to feed him or her. When accounting for the initial purchase price and other costs, this made for an 8 to 10 percent return on investment, or slightly more than the cost of credit. But Auberteuil was deeply concerned that the main cost variable, labor, was trending upward, and that profit margins were getting ever thinner as a result. At the time of his writing, it was virtually impossible for a newcomer to get rich on borrowed money, although hundreds of young men flocked from France every year hoping to do just that. Ten years later, the declining fertility of the soil and the rising price of imported slaves brought down profit rates further and put the sustainability of the entire plantation economy in doubt. Investments from France kept pouring in anyway, but the Saint-Domingue sugar boom was increasingly taking on the trappings of a financial bubble.22

  Measuring profit rates on French plantations is a mammoth task that has yet to be undertaken, but the example of the Haut-du-Cap plantation suggests that sugar plantations were no longer moneymakers by the 1780s, at least for absentee owners. The correspondence of the Bréda attorneys reveals a litany of woes. Bayon was a master of the genre: “Drought has entirely ruined Haut-du-Cap” (1776). “No one here has ever witnessed such a hurricane and so much flooding” (1780). “This is the worst weather in thirty-four years” (1784). “We had the worst weather in forty years” (1788). Revenue in other estates he managed for the Brédas, such as the pottery works and the Manquets plantation, was subpar as well.23

  In lengthy but anecdotal letters that offered no clear view of the overall financial picture, Bayon attributed these setbacks to problems like bad weather, but third-party accounts indicate that the deficit was actually structural. When subtracting production costs, Haut-du-Cap and Plaine-du-Nord ended 1787 with a combined loss of 34,495 colonial livres. The following year, with a loss of 15,653 livres, was only marginally better. So was 1789, with a loss of 3,289 livres. The gold mine was a money pit.24

  As years passed, the Bréda heirs increasingly complained of Bayon’s lackluster performance, not only in Haut-du-Cap, which, plagued by labor unrest and recurrent drought, was unlikely to ever produce enough to cover its costs, but also in the potentially more lucrative Plaine-du-Nord and Manquets plantations. Bayon’s habit of blaming bad weather grew thin over time, especially at a time when tales of Saint-Domingue’s wealth circulated freely in France. Were the Bréda heirs not supposed to be, as the expression went, “rich like a Creole?”

  Against Bayon’s wishes, in 1789 two of the Brédas traveled to Saint-Domingue to get a firsthand look at their inheritance. What they saw appalled them. Bayon’s recordkeeping was poor, his management style lackadaisical. He would spend funds on a new dovecote or on ferrying his surviving daughter to her dance lessons instead of more productive purposes. He was often gone for business or pleasure, so sugarcane was cut late or never, and field slaves died in large numbers for lack of proper care, leading to constant and costly purchases of new slaves from Africa. And yet the proportion of sick and elderly slaves on the Bréda plantations remained stubbornly high for a simple reason: after enduring cost overruns on the sugar plantation that he had purchased in his own name in Limbé, Bayon routinely employed the Brédas’ healthy slaves on his estate. He also sold molasses to local merchants below the going rate (presumably in exchange for kickbacks) and could provide no receipts for a full year’s worth of sugar sales. Such shenanigans were common on absentee-owned plantations, but Bayon’s brazenness stood out even by local standards. The heirs sacked him.25

  Sugar production began to recover under new management, but increased productivity was not necessarily a good thing for the slaves, whose own toil was responsible for it. To maximize profits, the Bréda heirs refused to invest in new laborers and kept extending working hours. Ambitious infrastructure improvements, notably irrigation works on the Plaine-du-Nord plantation, also added to the workload. The understaffed plantations could not conceivably continue operating in this manner indefinitely—nor did they: the Bréda slaves were among the first to revolt in 1791.

  Hard-pressed for cash, the Bréda heirs eventually consigned all their sugar exports to a Bordeaux merchant, who was charged with reimbursing their debts and giving them a fixed allowance. But the merchant complained that sugar shipments from their plantations barely covered interest on their debts and cut down their allowance accordingly. Everyone from the planters to the merchants was losing out financially, and the slaves were suffering.26

  According to the mercantilist economic theory that underpinned the French empire, the well-being of colonial planters and merchants was a moot point, since the sole purpose of the colonies was to enrich the mother country—but Saint-Domingue’s overall value to France was questionable as well. The department of the navy and colonies consumed 45 million French livres a year in peacetime, and wartime expenses were far higher: the Seven Years’ War cost the French government the staggering sum of 1.8 billion French livres; the US War of Independence cost another 1.3 billion livres. Saint-Domingue, France’s largest colony, only contributed 5 million colonial livres a year in royal taxes. The French government could only hope to recoup its losses through trade monopolies, but colonists dutifully evaded them. A royal official aptly described Saint-Domingue as a colony “sustained by France, fed and defended by France, and expecting France to pay for its deficits.” The cost-benefit ratio only got worse with the Haitian Revolution.27

  A dominant narrative today asserts that Europe’s surge into the industrial age was financed in part by the profits it made off slavery. However, given the amount of blood and treasure wasted by France in Saint-Domingue, it may well be that in the Haitian case, colonialism was a losing proposal for all involved. Buying slaves in Africa so that they could die in the Caribbean was not only inhumane, but also may have been bad business.

  By the time Bayon was forced to relinquish his job as attorney of the Bréda estates in the first days of July 1789, the Haut-du-Cap plantation was a combustible mix. Its slaves were at once abused, malnourished, and restive. Maroonage, disobedience, and slow work were rampant. Owners and managers were squabbling. The Bourbon monarchy had bankrupted itself fighting for an American colonial empire whose economic value was questionable. At this very moment, a mob was running through the streets of Paris on its way to the Bastille prison. The ripple effects of the French Revolution would soon be felt across the Atlantic.

  NINE

  WITNESS

  1788–1791

  IN MARCH 1788, Toussaint Louverture heard a shocking story of labor abuse. It involved a white planter named Nicolas Lejeune who owned a coffee estate near Plaisance, thirty miles southwest of Cap. Convinced that his slaves were trying to poison him, Lejeune had tortured several of them to force them to confess. The rumor mill spoke of unspeakable acts. For Louverture, the episode may have brought back painful memories of the cattle epidemic of 1773, when the attorney Delribal had also tortured alleged poisoners. At the time, the Haut-du-Cap slaves had appealed to nearby Bréda relatives for redress. Lejeune’s slaves took a different route: as provided by royal law, they notified local officials and begged them to intervene.1

  A magistrate visited the Lejeune plantation and stumbled across a horrific scene. Two women were shackled inside a makeshift cell, their limbs a charred mess of black flesh. Lejeune had partly burned them off. The women later died. Lejeune’s actions clearly violated the Black Code and recent royal ordinances that outlawed the torture and murder of slaves. Penalties for slave abuse rarely exceeded a fine in practice (Lejeune and his relatives had already gotten away with similar crimes in the past), but the governor of Saint-Domingue concluded that such impunity, if allowed to continue, would encourage slaves to revolt and imperil the whole colony. He demanded that the Lejeune case be brought to court to make an example.2

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bsp; An uproar ensued. White masters could never be proven wrong, colonists claimed, even when they were; otherwise the entire racial foundation on which the colony was built would collapse. Moreover, the right to dispose of one’s personal property, including of the human variety, was a sacred and inviolable right of man; protecting sadists like Lejeune was really a crusade for individual liberty. The court in Cap sided with the planters and acquitted Lejeune. Royal officials brought the case to the appeals court in Port-au-Prince, where Lejeune again narrowly prevailed.

  The beginning of the Haitian Revolution is usually associated with the great slave revolt of August 1791, but disputes like the Lejeune case were already pitting white colonists against royal authorities by the late 1780s. These political controversies may be regarded as the first steps of a revolutionary process that eventually culminated with the slave revolt. Strangely, one could argue that Saint-Domingue’s first revolutionaries were not black slaves but the colony’s free white colonists and free people of color. Louverture was not apparently involved in these early stirrings: instead, he observed them from afar as an interested witness learning how not to wage a revolution.

  No French king ever traveled to the Caribbean, so in Saint-Domingue, as in other French colonies, royal power was exercised by a gouverneur (the political and military leader) and an intendant (the chief financial and legal officer). In theory, these two men made all the important decisions on behalf of the absolute monarch of France. In practice, Versailles and its appointees exercised barely any control in the colony.3