Toussaint Louverture Read online

  White restlessness harked back to the very beginnings of Saint-Domingue, at a time when it was an independent settlement of pirates who switched their allegiance from one country to another based on their strategic interests. The colonists eventually picked France as their colonial overlord, but they continued to view the colonial bond as a voluntary contract between two equal parties. Many rejected the moniker of “colony” altogether, arguing that they were really an “allied state” of France. Because the colonists’ allegiance was contingent on France’s military protection, every war raised the possibility that they might throw in their lot with a more powerful patron—as would eventually happen during the Haitian Revolution.4

  This social contract was not a happy one. First on the list of colonial grievances was the exclusif, the set of trade laws that theoretically excluded most foreign merchants from colonial ports and forced colonists to buy overpriced French products. Trade restrictions had helped spark a violent white revolt in 1722–1723, and hatred of the exclusif endured.5

  Taxation was another point of contention, just as it was in the American and French revolutions. Saint-Domingue only began to pay royal taxes in 1713, and then under the condition that a colonial assembly set the rates, an unusual arrangement in absolutist France. The assembly regularly tried to expand its powers into the legislative arena, particularly during power vacuums created by the deaths of King Louis XIV in 1715 and Governor Armand de Belsunce in 1763. The assembly’s power grab failed, but complaints about excessive taxation and lack of representation remained part and parcel of the colonial mindset until the Haitian Revolution.

  The Superior Councils of Cap and Port-au-Prince were other outlets for autonomist claims. Their main task was to serve as courts of appeal, but they also had to register royal laws before they could take effect, and they used this role as an excuse to claim some legislative powers (their counterparts in France, the parlements, did the same). The councils’ activism peaked during the militia controversy of 1768–1769, the second of Saint-Domingue’s three great white revolts, which only ended when the governor deported all the magistrates of the Port-au-Prince Superior Council and replaced them with cronies. But other colonial courts continued to defy royal authorities until the Revolution. The acquittal of Nicolas Lejeune was just one example.6

  Over time, the Enlightenment critique of absolute monarchy provided the colonists with the theoretical framework to challenge colonial rule more directly. Concepts like the separation of powers (from Montesquieu), constitutional monarchy (Voltaire), and the popular will (Rousseau) ran against the top-down, authoritarian nature of the French colonial empire. Because the gouverneur and the intendant were appointed by the secretary of the navy in Versailles rather than elected, colonists complained of being subjected to a kind of “ministerial dictatorship.” All-powerful when dealing with their slaves, “big whites” like the Bréda attorney François Bayon de Libertat felt powerless when confronting royal appointees. “The current administrators, who are despots, only want us to submit blindly and unquestioningly to their authority,” Bayon complained.7

  In practice, colonists stripped royal authority of its substance through passive resistance. They falsified census forms to avoid paying the capitation tax due on each slave. They bribed royal officials to skirt the law. As for the trade regulations of the exclusif, legal loopholes abounded, contraband was rampant, and governors threw open the ports of Saint-Domingue whenever there was a war or a natural disaster—which was often.

  All this changed in the 1780s, when France made a concerted effort to run its empire more efficiently, in keeping with the Enlightenment’s focus on reason and order. Though well intended, these reforms rekindled white unrest by upsetting the various methods that colonists had developed to cope with absolutism (similar efforts to bring North America under British laws helped bring about the US War of Independence, while Spain’s Bourbon Reforms constituted a leading cause of the Latin American wars of independence).

  As part of these reforms, France allowed foreign merchants in 1784 to sell timber and foodstuffs in some colonial ports and then reduced rates on US imports. But France took this opportunity to increase enforcement against smuggling, which revived old grudges against all trade restrictions. Colonists looked enviously at the complete freedom of trade that American revolutionaries had achieved after waging their own war against Britain’s Sugar Act and Townshend Acts.

  In 1785, François Barbé-Marbois took over as intendant of Saint-Domingue and made the peculiar decision to perform the duties expected of him. A capable and honest administrator, he vigorously collected overdue taxes and debts so as to balance the colonial budget. He even had the gall, Bayon complained, to confiscate the slaves that owners had not declared in their machinations to evade the capitation tax. The intendant’s ambitious infrastructure projects also meant that the slaves of Haut-du-Cap were requisitioned to work on the road that passed through the Haut-du-Cap plantation; it was enlarged and extended all the way to Port-au-Prince.8

  Equally grating to the “big whites” was a growing movement in France to improve the lives of slaves. Early Enlightenment philosophers had spent little time discussing the implications of their egalitarian principles in the colonial context, but in the 1770s and 1780s a new generation of more radical activists, such as Denis Diderot and the Marquis of Condorcet, began to attack slavery as an affront to civilized society. Abolitionist societies were founded in Philadelphia in 1784, in Britain in 1787, and in France in 1788, the last known as the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. These societies coordinated their efforts in a kind of abolitionist international whose goals were the immediate abolition of the slave trade and, ultimately, slavery itself.9

  Royal administrators were sympathetic to the abolitionists’ call for reform. They feared that unchecked labor abuses would cause a general slave uprising. Accordingly, in December 1784, King Louis XVI of France signed an ordinance allowing slaves to appeal to public officials if they were subjected to excessive forms of cruelty, such as severe whippings and mutilation. Though the ordinance merely reiterated clauses already found in the 1685 Black Code, it angered Saint-Domingue’s planters, who felt that reminding their slaves that they had rights was as dangerous as it was outrageous. “The last edict did much harm,” erupted Bayon. “Soon, we will no longer be the masters of our negroes anymore. They will denounce us to county commanders and to the rural police.” (Bayon probably also resented clauses in the ordinance that outlawed the various tricks he and other attorneys had used to defraud absentee owners.)10

  Repurposing the rhetoric of the Enlightenment to defend their economic interests, planters described themselves as “slaves” who sought to preserve their “liberty” (by which they meant their property rights) from an abusive government. Alternatively, proslavery authors presented themselves as realists who knew better than bleeding-heart abolitionists. Surely, slavery was not a perfect system, but it was a necessary one: there was no other way to produce crops in the tropics. Without slaves, there would be no sugar to export, and thus no merchant navy, and thus no sailors for the French Navy. Without slaves, France would fall behind Britain. Abolitionists were not just a public nuisance: they were enemies of the state.11

  In an unprecedented act of defiance, the appeals court in Cap summoned the governor and the intendant from the colonial capital in Port-au-Prince to defend the royal ordinance of 1784 in person, and then refused to enforce it anyway. The court eventually backed down after receiving a watered-down version of the ordinance a year later, but to punish the court for its insubordination, Versailles shut down Cap’s appeals court altogether in 1787. This move forced colonists to travel all the way to Port-au-Prince, several days’ sailing away, for their legal business. “Discouragement is general, this colony will slip away,” lamented Bayon. His father-in-law, the court’s senior member, resigned his position soon afterward.12

  Slaves and freedmen like Louverture did not take part in these political debates,
but they knew of them. Bayon feared “an awful disorder among our negroes, who are already quite independent. . . . Negroes know what is in [the December 1784 ordinance]. It is printed and many can read.” It was possibly during that period that Louverture, who had learned the basics of reading from his godfather, first became aware of a famous passage attributed to Guillaume Raynal that warned of an impending slave revolt. “The negroes only need a chief courageous enough to lead them to vengeance and carnage. . . . Where is he, this great man . . . this new Spartacus?” the passage asked in reference to the Greek slave who had almost vanquished Rome. According to one possibly apocryphal account, Louverture read and reread the passage many times while dreaming that he might one day become the black Spartacus of the prophecy.13

  Slaves took note of Louis XVI’s efforts on their behalf and began to view the reformist Bourbon king as their best advocate. Meanwhile, white colonists were toying with secessionist ideas so as to nullify French slave regulations. Concerned that their masters would give free rein to their worst instincts once they were freed of royal officials’ moderating influence, slaves viewed the colonial bond as their first line of defense. In time, they would revolt with the avowed goal of defending the French monarchy. In Saint-Domingue, advocates of independence were reactionaries, while rebel slaves were staunch royalists.14

  White Saint-Domingue was a society always teetering on the edge of chaos. The white lower class included descendants of the unruly pirates who had founded the colony, indentured servants, and a sizable contingent of petty criminals that France had exiled to the colony in 1721–1722. As slavery came to underpin the agricultural sector, these landless whites found it increasingly hard to make a living. Late colonial Saint-Domingue was beset by social strife between slaves, landowning “big whites,” and unemployed “little whites.” And yet more migrants came every year, drawn like moths to a flame by exaggerated accounts of the colony’s riches. Twelve hundred men arrived in a single convoy in 1785 with few prospects of finding either a job or a bride. “Disease will sweep clean the lot of them,” Bayon noted crassly. Either that, or their restlessness would sweep the colony away.15

  A city of 20,000 patrolled by a mere 12 policemen, Cap was not known for its attachment to law and order. Duels caused 80 deaths a year in the garrison of Cap alone. It did not take much to set people off. In 1785, fistfights and duels erupted in Cap’s theater. The cause? Theatergoers disagreed over whether there should be a play or a ball that night.16

  Already accustomed to fighting for no reason, whites found a worthy cause when the monarchy tried to reform slavery in the 1780s. Each new royal ordinance led to protests, riots, and even talk of independence. Elite whites encouraged the restless lower class to get to the streets to defend their rights. “Little whites,” who had adopted the rhetoric of self-government, were happy to play along. The example set by the victorious American rebels suggested that it was possible to gain political autonomy while maintaining racial inequality—though local separatists seemed to forget that slaves represented 90 percent of the population of Saint-Domingue, a far higher proportion than had ever been the case in any of the thirteen US colonies. Extremists were openly considering rebellion by 1787, when they threatened to set the colonial capital of Port-au-Prince on fire to protest the closing of Cap’s court of appeals. “It is horrifying that people are willing to burn a whole town to seek vengeance against administrators they do not like,” reported a suddenly chastened Bayon. “The remedy is worse than the disease.”17

  The situation in the mother country was, if anything, even more flammable. French public expenses, exacerbated by the costly intervention in the US War of Independence, vastly exceeded income. Eighty percent of tax receipts went to pay interest on existing debts. One obvious solution to the fiscal crisis would have been to eliminate the tax-free privileges of clergymen and nobles, but Louis XVI was too irresolute to make such an unpopular decision. Instead, in 1788, he summoned deputies from all corners of the kingdom in the hope that the resulting assembly, known as the Estates-General, would balance his budget for him. His decision unwittingly led to the French and Haitian revolutions by bringing into the open two fundamental questions: Who belonged to the French nation, and who were its legitimate representatives?

  Louis XVI viewed colonies as moneymaking ventures more than French provinces, so he did not have them in mind when he summoned the Estates-General. But the richest white colonists of Saint-Domingue unilaterally selected eighteen deputies to represent their cause in Versailles. In a ploy that evoked the three-fifths clause of the US Constitution, they justified the large size of the delegation by counting Saint-Domingue’s total population, including slaves and free people of color, even though they had no intention of granting either group political rights. To appease the colonists, France eventually agreed to seat six white planters as deputies. The Count of Noé, the absentee owner of one-fourth of the Bréda estates in Saint-Domingue, served as a deputy alternate. Other Bréda heirs joined the Club Massiac, an influential group defending the interests of white planters in Paris.18

  Summoning a representative assembly was a dangerous step for Louis XVI. In June 1789, bourgeois members of the Estates-General, seeing themselves as the embodiment of the French nation, formed a National Assembly and began work on a constitution. In the months that followed, they passed ever bolder measures that far exceeded Louis XVI’s limited goals of fiscal reform. On August 4, they abolished the privileges of the nobility and the clergy; on August 26, with assistance from the US ambassador, Thomas Jefferson, they passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which began with the radical claim that all men were born “free and equal in rights.” The French Revolution had begun.

  When some liberal deputies argued that the first article of the Declaration implicitly abolished slavery—as indeed it did—the Saint-Domingue delegation in Paris panicked. “THEY ARE DRUNK WITH LIBERTY,” the deputies reported to their constituents. A formal abolition of slavery seemed imminent. Rather than defending slavery itself, colonial deputies cleverly invoked the ideal of self-government, begging the National Assembly to let colonies pass their own laws on internal matters. The ruse worked. Distracted by local events, the National Assembly eventually delegated all colonial matters to a legislative committee dominated by colonial lobbyists, which buried or watered down racial legislation for the next two years (women, men without property, and Jews were initially excluded from the full benefits of the French Revolution as well).19

  By October 1789, a Bréda absentee owner was marveling at the “inconceivable revolution” that had just taken place in Paris. “Stay where you are,” he wrote to a cousin who was in Saint-Domingue to settle the inheritance of Pantaléon de Bréda Jr. But events in the colony were following a parallel course. In Cap and Port-au-Prince, street clashes pitted advocates of self-government against partisans of Louis XVI. White separatists saw no danger in yelping about liberty while surrounded by slaves, but the attorney who oversaw one of the Bréda estates was more astute: “There exists a kind of anarchy that hurts commerce a lot,” he wrote. “I hope to God it will end soon, because all of this sets quite a bad example for our workforce.”20

  In the heated context of a transatlantic revolution, few paid heed to these cautionary notes. In 1789, Saint-Domingue’s white colonists secretly elected assemblies in each of the three provinces of the colony to enshrine racial discrimination in colonial law before the French National Assembly could legislate on the matter. Things quickly got out of hand. In October 1789, the provincial assembly of Cap forced the unpopular intendant, François Barbé-Marbois, to flee the colony. It then arrogated to itself legislative and executive powers normally reserved for the king. An even more radical assembly, which claimed to speak for the entire colony and was dominated by radical “little whites” eager to defend their racial privileges, took up residence in the city of Saint-Marc in the spring of 1790. In a matter of weeks, it banned all royal interference in racial matt
ers, outlawed future manumissions, and disenfranchised white men who had married women of color. All these decrees at least dealt with domestic issues; but the assembly of Saint-Marc also eliminated the trade restrictions of the exclusif and claimed for itself the sole right to legislate in the colony, both of which encroached on France’s basic prerogatives as a colonial power. The assembly’s efforts culminated in May 1790, when it passed a constitution that effectively made Saint-Domingue independent from France. It was Haiti’s first constitution, though few Haitians today would recognize it as such because it was drafted by racist settlers.21

  By this point, some wealthy whites were growing concerned that the assembly of Saint-Marc and the “little white” rabble had gone too far. “A decree just demobilized all royal troops” and incorporated them into a colonial army, a Bréda attorney marveled. The crew of a ship of the line that had recently arrived from France had mutinied and embraced the autonomist cause because the French sailors felt a sense of kinship toward the “little white” population. Such chaos could not be allowed to continue. Sensing a change in mood, Governor Antoine de Peynier—whom the assembly of Saint-Marc had fired for good measure—sent loyal troops in August 1790 to disband the runaway legislature. He then banished its deputies to France so that they could be put on trial for sedition.22

  The victory of the forces of order and tradition was short-lived. Tired of the colony’s tumultuous politics, Peynier left in November 1790. The only man willing to take his job in such circumstances was a relatively obscure officer named Louis de Blanchelande. It would have taken a strong-willed and skilled leader to prevent the colony from exploding, but Blanchelande, like the genial Louis XVI, was neither. When two French regiments mutinied in Port-au-Prince in March 1791 and attacked his headquarters, Governor Blanchelande—who officially bore the title of “general” of the colony and was primarily charged with its defense—ingloriously snuck out through a rear window and let the local commander handle the situation. The troops lynched the commander, after which Port-au-Prince, the colonial capital, effectively became an independent white republic beyond the reach of French administrators.23