Toussaint Louverture Read online

  Blanchelande found refuge in Cap, which was traditionally more Francophile due to its close commercial ties with the mother country, but the city was only slightly less restive. “Surrounded by mulattoes and negroes, [colonists] indulge themselves in the most imprudent discussions on liberty,” remarked a visitor, who chose to leave Saint-Domingue before imprudent discussions turned into imprudent actions.24

  Saint-Domingue’s second-most-affluent community, free people of color, was the second group to join the Haitian Revolution. Their main objective was not emancipation, since many owned slaves, but the repeal of the discriminatory laws passed since the 1760s. The wealthy mixed-race planter Julien Raimond was in France as early as 1784 to demand equal rights for his kin, but it was the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 that really brought the issue of free-colored rights to center stage. In Paris, Raimond received the support of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, which focused its initial efforts on enfranchising free people of color rather than the more distant goal of abolishing slavery. Even this modest proposal was considered heretical by the colonial lobby, which adamantly opposed the admission of free people of color as deputies to the French National Assembly, even when they were rich, mixed-race, and slave-owning. Afraid of pushing white colonists into open secession, the National Assembly chose not to intervene. French deputies did not formally list free people of color as voting citizens in a March 1790 law, and then explicitly excluded them from the body politic in October of that year.25

  Advocates of racial equality in Saint-Domingue were no more successful than their allies in Paris. Racist “little whites” seized upon the political chaos to harass or kill people of color with impunity. Louverture came close to the same fate while walking back from Mass one day with his prayer book. According to the story, which he shared ten years later, “a white man broke my head with a wooden stick while telling me ‘do you not know that a negro should not read?’” Louverture prudently begged for forgiveness and slipped away, a decision that likely saved his life. But he kept his blood-soaked vest as a reminder and neither forgot nor forgave. Running into the same man years later, after the outbreak of the slave revolt, he killed him on the spot.26

  Louverture was not alone in thinking that racial slights warranted physical retaliation. So did Vincent Ogé, a light-skinned coffee planter and merchant of substantial means who spent the first two years of the French Revolution in Paris lobbying for voting rights for free people of color. He also tried to convince absentee owners that some labor reforms were needed, “lest the Slave raise the standard of revolt.” He failed on both counts.27

  Unwilling to wait for the National Assembly to finally take a stand on racial equality, Ogé vowed to resort to force when politics failed (one suspects that he got his fighting spirit from his mother, a forceful and defiant woman). “I begin not to care whether the National Assembly will admit us [as deputies] or not,” he told the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, with whom he was dining at the home of the Marquis of Lafayette, another early opponent of slavery. “We can produce soldiers on our estates who are as good as any found in France. Our own arms shall make us respectable.” Ogé purchased a fancy uniform and a colonel commission and secretly headed back to Saint-Domingue to begin the revolutionary struggle.28

  Upon landing in Cap in October 1790, Ogé met up with Jean-Baptiste Chavanne and other free people of color from the towns of Grande-Rivière and Dondon, both a few miles southeast of Cap. Chavanne, who had served in the 1779 Savannah expedition, was a radical figure who had named his son after the French-American abolitionist Antoine Bénézet. He further radicalized Ogé, and the two young men wrote to Governor Blanchelande to demand the right to vote.

  Blanchelande’s response was to send the mounted police to arrest them. Ogé eluded his pursuers, set up a fortified camp with four hundred followers, and encouraged free people of color in other provinces to join him. His initial moderation had melted away. “We will participate in elections,” he insisted. If not, “we will fortify ourselves. We will use force to defend ourselves.” To avoid scaring away mixed-race planters, he added that “advocating . . . for enslaved negroes” was not on the agenda for now.29

  In Haut-du-Cap, the Bréda attorney immediately saw the risk that Ogé’s limited uprising might spread colony-wide. “If we only have to face these enemies we have nothing to fear, but shouldn’t we also fear those who surround us [the slaves], who have as much right as Ogé to ask for the rights of man? The entire French part of the island will experience similar upheavals because the timing seems favorable: whites are politically divided.”30

  But Ogé made a strategic mistake: unwilling to incite slaves to revolt, because he was “trying to be assimilated to whites,” he decided that he would only “encourage black slaves to rise against their masters” if his forces were overwhelmed. He never had a chance to follow through on this claim. His men held their ground at first when the royal troops attacked them, but they had to retreat when reinforcements arrived from Cap. Ogé, Chavanne, and a few followers crossed the border into Santo Domingo (today’s Dominican Republic) and asked for asylum. But French authorities demanded that these “brigands” be extradited, and Spanish authorities complied.31

  Louverture must have personally known several participants in the Ogé rebellion from the two years he spent managing the coffee estate in Grande-Rivière, from which most of Ogé’s followers came. He probably also knew Jean-Baptiste Cap, a free black from Cap who tried to arm slaves and free Ogé from prison after his capture. He surely heard of Ogé’s trial, which was major news on the Haut-du-Cap plantation. In all likelihood, he personally witnessed Ogé’s final moments in Cap.32

  By quickly giving up their fight, Ogé and Chavanne had hoped for mercy. They received none. “They shall be led to the main square of this town,” their sentence went, “where, on the side opposite the one used for the execution of whites, they shall have their arms, shins, thighs, and pelvis broken while alive on a scaffold erected for this purpose. The High Executioner shall then place them on wheels with their faces turned toward heaven for however long it pleases God to maintain their lives.” Their execution was meant to be not only painful but also humiliating, since the breaking wheel was normally used in Saint-Domingue to execute slaves who had revolted against their master, not elite mixed-race planters. More gruesome executions followed in ensuing weeks, including that of Ogé’s brother Jacques.33

  Louverture was accustomed to the horrors of eighteenth-century justice, but he found Ogé’s death particularly troubling. Louverture admired Ogé for giving his life for the “liberty” of free people of color, though he later came to resent his failure to include slave emancipation among his immediate goals. “Toussaint’s hatred for the city and inhabitants of Cap was born on the day this poor Ogé was executed,” a colleague of his would write in 1801. Tactically, the lessons to be drawn from Ogé’s defeat were similar to those from the Makandal conspiracy in 1758: the white planters would not give up their privileges without a fight, and any revolt would have to be successful, lest its perpetrators meet a gruesome end.34

  French deputies, who had failed to take a stance on free-colored rights when Ogé was in Paris, were horrified when they learned of his death; executions by the breaking wheel were in the process of being banned in France. In a kind of legal eulogy to Ogé, the National Assembly passed a law allowing people of color born of two free parents to vote in May 1791. Recent freedmen, including Louverture, remained disenfranchised, as did all slaves. “I’d sooner see the colonies perish than betray a principle,” Maximilien de Robespierre, a leader of the French Revolution, allegedly proclaimed. The French government prepared to send three commissioners to Saint-Domingue to enforce the law and bring an end to “displays of disorder that are singularly dangerous in the colonies, where they cannot be hidden from a class of men [the slaves] that can only be cowed by force.”35

  News of the May 1791 law reached Saint-Domingue in June. Th
e outcry was unprecedented. However modest in scope, the law established the precedent that the French National Assembly could legislate on the status of people of color in the colonies: What could prevent it from abolishing slavery in the future? White separatists advocated “massive resistance,” and a US consul predicted “civil war.” Governor Blanchelande immediately promised that he would not enforce the law in order to appease radical racists, but an all-white electorate selected yet another colonial assembly that was scheduled to convene in Cap in August 1791. Some deputies spoke of declaring independence outright.36

  Louverture and the slaves of northern Saint-Domingue had other plans. For two years they had stood by while whites and free people of color had fought their revolution. It was now their turn to set the colony afire. After spending most of his life as a passive witness, Louverture was finally ready to make his mark on history.

  TEN

  REBEL

  1791

  JUST AS FRENCH revolutionaries were preparing to assault the Bastille prison in Paris on July 5, 1789, an event took place in the office of the notary Éloi-Michel Grimperel in Cap that had more immediate relevance to the life of Toussaint Louverture. This was the day the four Bréda heirs fired François Bayon de Libertat, the crooked attorney who had overseen the family affairs since 1772, and Louverture lost a longtime ally who had done much to mitigate the effects of slavery in his life.

  To revive their fortune, the Bréda heirs had a clever idea in mind, which they did not put in writing because it was so dishonest. Since the Haut-du-Cap plantation showed no sign of ever being profitable, they planned to transfer twenty to thirty able-bodied slaves to their other plantation in Plaine-du-Nord and an equal number of young and elderly slaves from Plaine-du-Nord to Haut-du-Cap, so that each workforce remained the same on paper. They would then sell Haut-du-Cap to some unsuspecting buyer who would be burdened with an unproductive plantation staffed by the weak and the troublesome. Alternatively, they discussed selling the land piecemeal and disposing of the slaves at auction.

  Both plans would have fragmented Louverture’s family network. He was so concerned for the fate of his surrogate mother, Pélagie, that he negotiated a deal with the Bréda heirs: he gave them “a young negress of the Aja nation, age 22,” whom he must have purchased for the occasion, in exchange for his mother. The deal, first uncovered in 2013, was the second documented instance in which Louverture had owned a slave. The morally ambiguous nature of the arrangement—one woman’s freedom for another’s enslavement—was made even clearer when the young slave provided by Louverture died in childbirth just a few months later. This was Louverture in all of his complexity: at once opposed to and complicit in the slave system. And yet, it was the same man who, two years hence, would help launch the greatest slave revolt in the history of the world.1

  Who or what incited Louverture and the slaves of Saint-Domingue to rebel was and remains a matter of great controversy. Unwilling to admit that their slaves had any reason to complain, contemporary white authors generally argued that they had been manipulated by outside agitators: free people of color, the British, the Spanish, Freemasons, abolitionists, or monarchists. It is customary today to reject such conspiracy theories and emphasize the agency of the slaves, so most historians now depict rebel leaders like Louverture as heroic idealists inspired by the principles of the Enlightenment. Others cite practical demographic factors, such as the size of the colonial garrison, to explain why the slaves picked this particular moment to revolt.

  There is actually evidence for all three theories: the revolt stemmed from an alleged royalist plot, the impact of the French Revolution, and worsening living conditions for the slaves. All these strands converge in one place, the Bréda plantation of Haut-du-Cap, and one man, Toussaint Louverture. He was about forty-seven years old.

  In 1789–1791, as white Saint-Domingue sank into political anarchy, life in Haut-du-Cap became ever more unbearable for the Bréda slaves. Food production, already meager, declined in a context of recurrent droughts followed by flooding. So dire did the situation become that the attorney who replaced Bayon in Haut-du-Cap, Sylvain de Villevaleix, took the unusual step of buying imported food to feed the workforce. But he did not reduce the workload, and the resulting mortality was “frighteningly” high by his own recognition.2

  The plantation was rife with discontent. There were so many runaways by the end of 1789 that authorities had to stage a “hunt” in the hills above the plantation to round them up. Then, in 1790, a slave died after being mistreated by the manager who ran the plantation’s day-to-day operations. Villevaleix launched a discreet inquiry among the workforce—starting, presumably, with old-timers like Louverture—which revealed that bad treatment was the norm. Villevaleix promptly fired the manager. After nine runaways returned the next day, he reported that all the slaves now “seem[ed] perfectly happy.” Or so he thought: within a few months, twenty-seven more slaves had absconded.3

  The slaves’ mood colony-wide was equally volatile. Given the unstable situation in France, royal authorities begged masters to avoid undue cruelty lest the slaves start plotting a revolt. But the colonial assembly of Saint-Marc refused to curtail the masters’ property rights, instead banning manumissions altogether in 1790. When this traditional safety valve disappeared, even people who had previously been willing to collaborate with the planters, such as Louverture, were left with only two options to free their loved ones: flight or fight.

  Despite all evidence to the contrary, the white extremists did not think their uncompromising policies were ill-advised: to them, wild talk of liberty and equality in France was the root problem. What would happen, they wondered, if news of the racial debates taking place in Paris reached the colony, or worse, if some liberal hothead slipped into the colony to spread his views? To forestall this scenario, the Saint-Domingue delegation in Paris urged its constituents to “ARREST SUSPICIOUS PEOPLE AND SEIZE DOCUMENTS THAT MERELY MENTION THE WORD OF LIBERTY.” Colonists in Saint-Domingue began to screen incoming passengers and denied entry to any agitator tied to the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. “Ports and piers are so well guarded that it is nearly impossible for proselytizers to put their projects into action,” Villevaleix reported confidently. “Wiser than the whites, the negroes only think of working. Maybe they even laugh at our ever-increasing folly.” Another Bréda appointee was not so sure: the endless political quarrels of the white minority “set a very bad example for our workforce,” he wrote. “We had several alerts already.” “As soon as unrest began in Saint-Domingue,” Louverture later explained with the benefit of hindsight, “I saw that the whites could not last, because they were divided and heavily outnumbered.”4

  It was impossible to hide the news from France in a port like Cap that was visited by hundreds of ships each year. The French Revolution was on everyone’s lips; political tracts proliferated. As a partly literate man who regularly visited Cap, Louverture was one of the channels through which information about the revolution in France reached the enslaved population in the plain. “Despite all the efforts of our masters to hide from us this happy event [the French Revolution], the most astute among us began to see a glimmer of hope,” he later wrote. One source even claims that he subscribed to French newspapers, or more likely, obtained some bootleg issues. Domestics, like his brother Paul, could also learn much from dinnertime talk. “Indiscreet conversations held in their presence and then obviously repeated to others have informed them of the reforms planned in their favor in France,” complained the governor. The visit of Lord Dunmore, who was best known for freeing the slaves of his political enemies in Virginia during the US War of Independence, must also have caused some heated dinnertime conversations in the presence of enslaved servants.5

  Uneducated slaves could not philosophize on the Rights of Man, as elite free people of color were prone to do, but they got the gist of it: “The white slaves killed their masters,” is how they understood the French Revolution. Louverture’s analysis
was even more perceptive: he saw the inconsistency of colonists who cited the Enlightenment to defend their own privileges, “but who would not let the Revolution destroy the prejudices against the free people of color, nor the enslavement of the blacks.”6

  The only tangible effect of censorship measures was to provide a fertile ground for rumors. The political situation in France and Saint-Domingue was confusing enough, but some colonists purposely spread rumors of an upcoming slave revolt to discredit their enemies. As a result, the slaves of Haut-du-Cap learned of major political developments through hearsay, in the manner of today’s telediol (rumor mill) in Haiti. Every few weeks, someone would burst onto the plantation with some incredible news. Slaves had revolted in the island of Martinique (August 1789). Members of the provincial assembly were on their way to Port-au-Prince to overthrow the intendant (December 1789). The garrison of Cap had mutinied (April 1790). Whites in Cap had just expelled envoys sent by the assembly of Saint-Marc (June 1790).

  However outlandish they seemed at first, all these rumors turned out to be true. This gave credence to the most persistent (though inaccurate) rumor of all: that the king of France had granted slaves three days of rest a week, or maybe even freed them, and that planters were hiding the royal decree. Louverture was probably shrewd enough to distinguish between gossip and fact, and guess that Louis XVI had signed no decree of abolition, but the rumor could be put to good use when the time came to stir the slaves into action.

  By 1791, the slaves of Saint-Domingue seemed ready to act. In January, a small revolt broke out in the southern town of Port-Salut. Others followed near Port-au-Prince in July. The strategic situation was promising: one of Saint-Domingue’s two colonial regiments had revolted, many men of color in the militia had been disarmed after the Ogé uprising, and most of the sailors had left the colony for the hurricane season. The slaves only needed a political colossus to inspire the huddled masses and mold them into a viable revolutionary movement. If none was available, a short and wily coachman would do.7