Toussaint Louverture Page 13
The slave revolt of August 1791 was uniquely successful because it was a carefully planned operation overseen by the elite of the slave population. Louverture’s exact role in that operation has been the focus of much speculation. Did he personally instigate the revolt? Or did he stay at the margins for several months to see how events would unfold? It is difficult to reach a definite conclusion when Louverture carefully hid the exact nature of his involvement, but the most likely answer is “both”: he was apparently the revolt’s mastermind even though he remained behind the scenes for four months to protect himself and his family.
Louverture’s most daunting task as he planned the revolt was to convince the slaves to rise up despite the very real risk of defeat and death. For that he employed the clever trick of implying that he was acting on behalf of the king of France. He spread a story that his former boss Bayon, now living on his sugar plantation in Limbé after being fired by the Brédas, had personally asked him to organize a revolt on behalf of “big whites” close to Governor Louis de Blanchelande. Their goal was to scare the colonial assembly away from any plan to declare independence. In return for rising up in his name, a grateful king would grant the rebels three days of rest a week. This convoluted story was not as outlandish as it seemed, since Louis XVI had just tried to flee Paris to ask for help abroad.8
The tale, which reduces the Haitian Revolution to a royalist conspiracy gone laughingly awry, may seem preposterous today, but a century of progressive royal regulations had convinced the slaves that the mysterious French king who lived across the ocean was their most loyal defender. Reassuringly, the uprising would not truly be a revolt but a counterrevolution. There were historical precedents aplenty: mentions of an alleged royal emancipation decree had played a role in virtually all Caribbean slave revolts to that point.9
The mysterious power of the written word gave credibility to Louverture’s claims. “He was the only one who knew how to read and write,” reported a well-informed French officer. “This made him an oracle. He was, or claimed to be, in possession of documents that authorized the rebellion. . . . He had a repertoire of princely letters, gubernatorial orders, and royal edicts and proclamations . . . which he cleverly used to encourage the Africans, who had a natural affinity for monarchy.” So successful was Louverture’s deception that some of the rebellion’s own leaders were convinced that they were indeed part of a royalist conspiracy, as were many contemporary royal officials.10
On August 14, 1791, two hundred slave foremen (most of them Creoles) from the plain of Cap met on the Lenormand de Mézy plantation in Morne-Rouge. According to a slave who was present at the meeting, one of the participants showed some official documents and “told us that the king had granted us three days [of rest] per week and that white [planters] were opposed to this; but that the king and the National Assembly would send troops to uphold our rights.” One of these documents may have been an inflammatory pamphlet by the French abolitionist Henri Grégoire that had just reached the colony. Another was probably a forged letter in which royal officials allegedly asked Louverture to start a revolt.11
Louverture did not put his name forward when it came time to select a leader. Known popularly as fatras bâton (sickly stick), he argued that he did not have the requisite physique to head a revolt. Best to appoint more towering figures, such as Georges Biassou, the son of a slave at the nearby Charité hospital. “Hidden behind the curtain,” Louverture would play the role of coordinator while others carried the rebel standard into battle. Rounding out the rebel leadership were Jeannot Bullet, the slave of Bayon’s brother-in-law; Dutty Boukman (aka François Bouqueman), a fellow coachman from the Clément plantation; and Jean-François Papillon (aka Petecou), a runaway whose original owner was a merchant in Cap. Louverture had probably befriended all of them while crisscrossing the region as coachman. The network of friends and partners he had built over the previous decade was now proving invaluable.12
Louverture had good reasons to be wary of publicly taking the helm of the revolt. A slave uprising, even one ostensibly fought on behalf of the king of France, was a dangerous undertaking. Throughout his life, he had seen many a rebel die a horrible death for opposing the planter class. Just six months earlier, the bones of Vincent Ogé had cracked open under the executioner’s blows in nearby Cap. His young boys and his many relatives might also pay the ultimate price. But Biassou saw Louverture’s reticence as cowardice more than common sense: Louverture “proposed to me that we mobilize our comrades, but when the time came to get started, no one could convince him to act,” he noted mockingly. “Not daring to put himself at the head of our group, Toussaint begged me to make myself chief.”13
Louverture’s elusive way of opposing authority, which continued to characterize his political activism throughout the Revolution, meant that few people were initially aware of his role—or even his existence. He was initially a secondary figure in the public eye, choosing to wield power through his influence over leaders like Biassou rather than in person. It was only two years after the 1791 slave uprising that he finally revealed that he had helped initiate it. “Have you forgotten that I was the first to raise the standard of insurrection against tyranny?” he declared. Most people had.14
Some firebrands called for immediate action at the August 14, 1791, planning meeting, but the general consensus was to wait until the new colonial assembly gathered in Cap on August 25, which also happened to be the feast day of Saint Louis, Louis XVI’s namesake and ancestor. This way, the rebels could strike in the plain and the town simultaneously and decapitate the colony’s entire power structure at once. This was a clever plan, but events took on a momentum of their own. On the night of the 17th, some overeager slaves set fire to a building of the Chabaud plantation in Limbé. On the 20th, others attacked the manager of the Gallifet plantation in La Gossette. Suspects were captured and tortured, and on the 21st, one of them revealed an ambitious plot to “set the plantations on fire, cut the throat of the whites, seize their arms,” and march on the city of Cap. Fortunately for the revolutionaries, Governor Blanchelande did not immediately realize that these early stirrings were the omen of a much larger upheaval, and he failed to take the necessary precautions.15
On August 21, a second gathering took place on the Choiseul plantation. We know little of the Bois-Caïman ceremony, as this second meeting is now known, except that it was a Vodou ritual that was probably designed to inspire African-born field hands. Louverture’s presence is not mentioned in the few available sources, which is logical, as a pious Catholic would not have been comfortable with these rituals. According to Haitian lore, which has grown ever more elaborate over the years, a priestess sacrificed a black pig to the spirit of war, and one of the rebel leaders, Boukman, asked all the people present to take a sacred oath. Boukman then made a call to action: “Let us start a nobler vengeance! . . . May the plantations turn to ashes and ruin!” The crackle of a lightning bolt punctuated his last words and a tropical storm unleashed its fury. Drenched in blood and sweat, the attendees disbanded to their home plantations and prepared for the great battle to come.16
One day after the ceremony, the 22nd, the impetuous Boukman, concerned that the rebellion would fail if they waited any longer, decided to act. Workers from a few plantations in Acul county, including the Clément plantation on which Boukman was a coachman, gathered silently in the night. The Manquets plantation, which Louverture knew well because it belonged to a Bréda heir, was their first target. “The plantation staff was making sugar while an apprentice watched on,” wrote a contemporary witness:17
A sugar-maker grabbed him by his hair and told him that all whites would die, then killed him with a machete. Several slaves then went to slit the throat of the refiner, who was in his bed. The attorney (M. Dumesnil), hearing all this noise, got up, ran to the balcony of the main house and asked what was going on. A gunshot killed him on the spot. The surgeon [Monge] was spared on the condition that he take care of the sick negroes.
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br /> This outburst forced other rebels, including those of the Bréda plantation in Plaine-du-Nord, to follow suit in haphazard fashion. One after the other, the sugar estates that had made Saint-Domingue famous went up in smoke. The rebels broke machinery, burned buildings, and killed or captured planters, managers, and their families. Within a month, the tally of burned estates in the plain of Cap rose to 1,400, including 172 sugar plantations.18
Survivors fled to the city of Cap, where the atmosphere hovered between denial, panic, and bloodlust. But the hundreds of roaring black columns of smoke, which rose from the horizon before blanketing the city under a layer of ashes, gave evidence enough that the revolt was real. It finally dawned on colonists that they faced a general uprising, and that Cap could easily be overrun. It only had sea fortifications, to defend the city in the event of a British assault.
The white inhabitants of Cap were terrified of the slaves and freedmen in their midst, who far outnumbered them. There was no segregation in Cap: blacks were on every block, in every home and every bedroom. A white mob took preemptive action, massacring seventeen free people of color in the street. Then, as the legal system took over, two wheels and five scaffolds were erected on the market square. In a gruesome ritual, day after day, suspected conspirators were broken or hanged while women and men looked on from nearby balconies.19
Louverture probably heard of the slave revolt when some haggard refugee from the plain stopped on the plantation of Haut-du-Cap on her way to Cap with a tale of destruction. Pretending to be shocked was not difficult for Louverture: this is not how things were supposed to happen. The initial plan had called for a coordinated attack on the 25th, just as the colonial assembly began its session. Instead, on that day, colonial authorities were already on high alert and dispatched 250 royal troops from Cap to Haut-du-Cap to guard the main road. Governor Blanchelande personally paid a visit to the Bréda plantation to inspect the camp. A hastily built palisade soon surrounded Cap on the landward side, making any surprise attack against the town impossible. The revolt was the largest ever in Caribbean history, but the impatience of hotheads like Boukman had ruined the rebels’ blueprint for a quick victory.20
Bloodshed was relatively limited at first as rebels killed a few plantation managers while taking other whites prisoner, especially women, priests, and surgeons. Atrocities became more common as the weeks passed, either in response to the tortures inflicted on black suspects in Cap, or because rebel leaders found it increasingly difficult to contain those whom they nominally commanded. White contemporaries were quick to emphasize these atrocities, especially when the victims were white women and children. “Young and virtuous women perished while being ravished by brigands between the corpses of their father and spouse,” recounted a planter. “Young children impaled on bayonets were the bloody flags that accompanied this horde of cannibals.” In retribution for the sexual exploitation that had been their lot, some female rebels also forced their male prisoners to serve them naked or to smell their genitals. In all, the immediate aftermath of the uprising claimed the lives of about three hundred white planters and their families, a tally that seemed staggering at the time but that would eventually represent only one-thousandth of the Haitian Revolution’s total human cost—a rounding error.21
Personal bonds and simple humanity could still prevail at this early stage. Even as some slaves tortured and killed whites, others denounced the rebel agitators and saved the lives of their masters. Louverture’s attitude was most ambiguous of all. He did not overtly take part in the rebellion, most likely because he feared for himself and his family now that the governor had set up an army camp next to the Bréda plantation. Instead, when rebels came to set the cane fields on fire, he repulsed them and made a show of finishing the harvest. “The loss was not considerable,” he explained apologetically to the manager of the plantation.22
Louverture then headed to the plantation of his former boss Bayon, in Limbé, and helped Bayon and his family hide in a wood. He brought them food from the nearby rebel camp that he had joined. He may have done some reading as well: a Frenchman later found among the ruins of the rebel camp a copy of Raynal’s history of the Caribbean, which, in dramatic fashion, had been left open at the page predicting the second coming of Spartacus. A month after first hiding them, Louverture helped Bayon and his family escape to safety because he was “afraid of being discovered.” In later years, Louverture continued to assist the Bayons financially as they relocated to the United States and France. Humanity probably underpinned his conduct, but also personal interest. Who knew? If the French won, Bayon was the only one who could vouch for Louverture and prove that he was a freedman.23
When leaving Haut-du-Cap for the rebel camp near Limbé, Louverture had probably left his wife Suzanne and his children behind him. (“When the Revolution broke out, the most painful thing I had to do was to leave my wife,” he later recalled.) His youngest son, Saint-Jean, was just eight months old at the time. This would explain why a rebel force led by “coachmen and foremen” attacked the Haut-du-Cap plantation on several occasions in early September: Louverture was most likely trying to rescue stranded relatives.24
His family in tow, Louverture must then have migrated south to the area of Grande-Rivière, where he had once been a coffee planter, and where the main rebel camps were located by that time. There, he joined a leadership wracked by dissent and ideological chaos. “Sometimes they ask for the rights of men, liberty, the Old Regime, three days off a week and to be paid,” reported a French merchant. “Sometimes they say they want no master since the whites want no king.” Those who were swept up in the fervor of the nascent revolution were already considering a radical agenda of general emancipation and fought under the motto “liberty or death,” which had been used in other Atlantic revolutions. They might have learned their politics from the few white liberals who fought alongside the rebels, some of them in blackface. Boukman was among the hardliners, as was Jeannot Bullet, who was quickly acquiring a ghastly reputation for cruelty as he whipped, burned, or hanged white prisoners from hooks.25
By contrast, Louverture, Jean-François Papillon, and to a lesser extent Georges Biassou eschewed random acts of violence, probably because they wished to leave some room for a negotiated settlement if the revolt failed. Louverture, who had owned and leased slaves (as had his daughter and his sons-in-law), made no call for universal emancipation at this time. As for Jean-François, he insisted that he was fighting for labor reforms, not “general liberty,” and he would continue to do so until his death. Rebels literally wore their politics on their sleeves as they proudly showcased the paraphernalia associated with the Old Regime, including white cockades (the king’s color) and crosses of Saint Louis (a royalist medal). They described themselves as “generals of the armies of the king” in their correspondence. These king-loving and God-fearing slaves bring to mind the conservative peasants of the Vendée region, the chouans, who also rebelled against the French Revolution in the name of their Catholic king in the 1790s. Everyone had expected the slaves to stage a second Bastille; instead, Saint-Domingue was turning into a black Vendée. It would take another three years for Louverture to develop a true revolutionary agenda.26
Angry at the French National Assembly for speaking of liberty and poisoning the slaves’ minds, the colonial assembly of Cap did not initially notify the French government of the slave revolt. Instead, it appealed to Jamaica, Cuba, Santo Domingo, and the United States. Money, food, weapons, and above all, soldiers: urgent help was needed to prevent the conflagration in northern Saint-Domingue from bringing down the entire plantation system with it.
It is generally assumed that the Haitian Revolution terrified white planters throughout the Americas, but Saint-Domingue’s neighbors actually felt no sense of urgency and sent little help, beyond a Jamaican envoy who was eager to witness his rivals’ woes for the “gratification of my curiosity.” Surely, other Caribbean colonists thought, their own slaves were better treated than Fren
ch slaves and could not possibly revolt. A Cuban booster even described the revolt in Saint-Domingue as “the hour of our happiness,” because it removed an important competitor from world markets. When it became clear that Saint-Domingue could not expect significant assistance from its neighbors, the colonial assembly finally informed the French government that its most important colony desperately needed help.27
Because of the delay in contacting France, no troops were likely to arrive until 1792, and colonists rushed to shore up the defenses of Cap. Temporarily putting their disputes on hold, they enrolled all civilians, sailors, foreigners, and royal troops to guard the city. They also struck an alliance with free men of color, a pact that was formalized in September when whites grudgingly granted free people of color the political rights they had been requesting since 1789 in exchange for their military assistance. In case this was not enough, whites also took the families of free men of color hostage, so as to guarantee their loyalty. France went one step further in April 1792, when all free people, regardless of their race or colony of origin, became formally equal under French law. This was the Haitian Revolution’s first tangible achievement—but the alliance between free whites and free people of color, who had chosen limited gains over a more profound reordering of colonial society, seemed to condemn the slave revolt to failure.