Toussaint Louverture Read online

  The slave rebels were no more successful when trying to expand their revolt to the rest of the colony. In the North, the French established a military cordon that effectively sealed off the plain of Cap. In the South, a conspiracy involving several plantations was foiled when faithful slaves denounced it; another was diffused when white colonists concluded an alliance with free people of color. In the West, a serious crisis erupted when free people of color armed some of their slaves and demanded voting rights. But white colonists granted their demands in exchange for deporting their armed slaves to Central America. Tensions continued to flare up episodically: most of Port-au-Prince even burned in November 1791 during a riot led by racist “little whites” and mutinous soldiers, but there was no large black-led uprising akin to the northern revolt, just an escalation of the previous years’ factional disputes. Slaves in the West and South, though they were as oppressed as their northern brothers, apparently lacked a leader able to plan a large-scale revolt.28

  Once the initial crisis had subsided, the garrison of Cap organized sorties to disband nearby rebel camps and destroy the crops that fed them. A raid on the rebel camp of Charitte on September 19, 1791, resulted in “horrible carnage.” Another sortie on the 27th forced the rebels to evacuate their biggest camp, located on the Gallifet plantation.29

  The French counteroffensive stung. There were possibly 50,000 rebels in the North, one hundred times more than in the largest slave revolt in US history. Ultimately, the Haitian Revolution would engulf the totality of the colony’s slave population and add another zero to that number. But the rebels, many of whom had originated as prisoners of war in Africa, knew little of European-style warfare. They did not know how to load the cannons they had captured from the French. Encouraged by their creole leaders, they attacked en masse, hoping to be protected by their talismans and war chants, only to be cut down by the disciplined fire of French troops. “Their chiefs were careful to send ahead of them the African-born negroes, fresh off the ship and stupid,” snickered a French observer. “Gun and cannon fire would mow down scores of them.” Three thousand rebels died in the first month of combat, ten times more than their French foes.30

  The strategic picture was no brighter. Although Louverture and his allies had organized the largest slave revolt in Caribbean history, its premature start meant that it had failed to take Cap or spread beyond the neighboring plain. By October 1791, they were relegated to the swath of mountains south and east of Cap, alongside the border with Santo Domingo. Victory was impossible in such conditions. With time, as colonial authorities were pleased to inform the rebel leadership, French reinforcements would reach the colony and crush the revolt with the help of free people of color. Then they would punish the leaders with the utmost cruelty. The giddiness of the early days was gone. The rebels were now a weary group plagued by food shortages, battle deaths, and doubt. Some hungry rebels began to flee to French lines and beg their previous owners for forgiveness.31

  It was time for the rebel leaders to reevaluate their options. As a freedman, Louverture could have joined the French, who had begun to offer legal equality to free people, but he had good reason to fear that the white colonists would renege on their promises as soon as the military emergency subsided (which they did). Also, many of Louverture’s relatives were still enslaved, so it was essential to obtain their freedom before he laid down his arms. He had to negotiate a deal. So did Jean-François, whose family had been taken prisoner in Cap, and Biassou, who feared for his mother, a slave at the Charité hospital.32

  After some initial overtures by Governor Blanchelande, the gears of peace cranked into action on November 1. Though Jean-François and Biassou nominally acted in the rebels’ name, because Louverture was still hiding his involvement in the revolt, Louverture’s influence is discernible throughout—after all, it was All Saints’ Day, his feast day. Jeannot, whose vicious treatment of white prisoners was a roadblock to any reconciliation, was arrested, put on trial, and shot. Boukman’s serendipitous death in combat a few days later only left moderate figures in charge. A formal offer followed: the rebels demanded official freedom papers for themselves and their families and a general amnesty, in exchange for which they would send their followers back to work. The deal, which benefited all the parties except the slaves, may have been inspired by a similar one recently signed with free people of color in the western province. It was neither the first nor the last time that Saint-Domingue’s laboring masses were betrayed by their elites.33

  Just then, three French commissioners landed in Cap. It was difficult to keep up with revolutionary events when it took up to three months for sailing ships to cross the Atlantic, so the commissioners’ orders were woefully out of date. They brought news that the French National Assembly, informed of the white planters’ opposition to the May 1791 law enfranchising some free people of color, had repealed it to appease white colonists. Upon landing, they learned that a slave revolt had broken out in the interval and that white colonists had actually decided on their own to ally themselves with their mixed-race rivals. Casting aside their orders, the commissioners refocused their energies on a more pressing agenda: extinguishing the slave revolt, preferably by political means, since they had brought relatively few troops with them.34

  It was at this juncture that, for the first time in the archival record, Louverture unambiguously came out as one of the rebel leaders—not to expand the slave revolt but to bring a negotiated end to it. On December 12, when the rebels yet again offered terms, a hesitant and misspelled “Tousaint” appeared at the bottom of the document, the earliest confirmed sample of his writing found so far. A prisoner of the rebels also noted that it was “the negro Toussaint, belonging to Bréda,” who convinced his fellow leaders to reduce the number of family members to be freed from three hundred to just fifty to increase the likelihood of a deal.35

  On December 21, Jean-François met the French commissioners in the outskirts of Cap to finalize an agreement; Louverture may have been part of the peace delegation. Frantic about the fate of his common-law wife, Charlotte, who had been taken prisoner by the French, Jean-François threw himself on his knees and begged for a pardon. His act of contrition moved the commissioners, but convincing his followers to return to work proved difficult: “We worked ceaselessly to appease the negro slaves, who are very worked up,” he noted. The slaves feared being “betrayed” after surrendering; memories of the “bad treatments” they had suffered at the hands of their masters were still too fresh in their minds. Biassou, who reported that “the negroes are in a general state of effervescence,” was no more successful. The chasm between the Revolution’s rank and file and its leadership would continue to complicate Louverture’s political agenda for years to come, and become the Haitian Revolution’s main subtext. It was not only social but also gender-based: Biassou specifically listed “negresses” as the most apt to be sent back to work in the fields. Black women, who were often the most radical of the rebels, begged to disagree.36

  In the end, Louverture’s first foray into politics proved futile when the planter-dominated colonial assembly refused to grant the necessary manumissions and criticized the French commissioners for even negotiating with the rebels. An outraged Biassou prepared to execute his white prisoners, only to change his mind when Louverture counseled moderation. Instead, in January 1792, the rebels launched a surprise raid on Cap. Moving stealthily, they swam across the Haut-du-Cap River near Louverture’s old plantation and seized Fort Bélair, one of Cap’s main strongpoints. Their goal was apparently limited to freeing Biassou’s mother, and they prudently retreated when the French counterattacked.37

  Pressured by French sorties, the rebels fell back to Ouanaminthe along the border with the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo. There, they made yet another attempt at compromise: Why not bypass the colonial assembly, which had blocked all negotiations so far, use Spain as a go-between, and appeal directly to Louis XVI, in whose name they had ostensibly rebelled? Spanish authoritie
s, whose monarch was a Bourbon cousin of the French king, were interested. But renewed factional disputes in Cap meant that French military pressure was light for the next few months, and the rebels eventually shelved their proposal.38

  For the remainder of 1792, the military situation remained evenly matched. A large group led by the rebel leader Candi joined the French side in January, while a slave rebellion broke out near the town of Port-de-Paix west of Cap in March. The French nearly pacified the western province over the summer, only to suffer a major defeat when attacking the rebel camp of Platons in the South. Overall, the French retained control of most of western and southern Saint-Domingue, but they failed to annihilate the rebel army in the interior of the northern province—nor did they really try, since they were too busy fighting each other again now that the crisis had ebbed. This temporary lull gave Louverture some time to pause and regroup after the turmoil of the past few months.39

  ELEVEN

  MONARCHIST

  1792

  AN AIDE-DE-CAMP hand-delivered to Toussaint Louverture an invitation from Georges Biassou, his fellow rebel and longtime acquaintance, on August 24, 1792. In highly formal French, Biassou’s secretary requested that Louverture and all “messires the colonels and commandants” of the army present themselves at 2 p.m. to observe the feast day of their king, Louis XVI. They should see to it that their troops were “well armed and equipped” and that they arrived on time. The setting was Grande-Rivière in northern Saint-Domingue, but it could just as well have been Versailles.1

  It was exactly one year since the initial outbreak of the slave revolt. For twelve months, white colonists had disparaged Louverture and other rebel leaders as uncivilized brigands; for twelve months, Louverture and his colleagues had tried their utmost to prove them wrong. Even the word “rebel” was insulting in their eyes. Labeling him an insurgent was pure “calumny,” Biassou complained, when he was actually fighting for his king. Echoing Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Louverture also railed against those who described as “brigandage” what was truly “resistance to oppression.”2

  Eager to show that they were more than a pillaging mob, the rebels took on all the trappings of a European army of the Old Regime, complete with aides-de-camp, laissez-passers, and fancy officer brevets. Formal ceremonies like the one held by Biassou on August 24 were meant to counteract the colonists’ slurs; so were the grandiose titles the rebel leaders adopted. Jean-François Papillon, who was particularly irked when his French adversaries continued to address him by his first name, as if nothing had changed since the days when slaves were confused with “the vilest animals,” went by the title of “grand admiral” (though the rebel force had no navy). Biassou called himself “general of the army of the King” and “knight of the military royal order of Saint Louis” (though he had received no such royal commission). Louverture went more humbly by “Monsieur Toussaint,” which was still a step up from his previous monikers of “Toussaint belonging to Bréda” and “Toussaint, free negro,” since the title of monsieur, equivalent to “sir,” had been reserved exclusively for white men in prerevolutionary times.3

  Because relatively little fighting took place in the middle of 1792—an unusually restful period of the Revolution—Louverture used these months to complete his personal transformation and convince his white foes to take him seriously. He was no brigand, he insisted, but a bona fide revolutionary, a military man, and a fellow human being. This struggle for recognition would occupy him for the next decade—and, tragically, it would fail.

  When trying to encourage the slaves to revolt in August 1791, Louverture had spread rumors that he was acting on Louis XVI’s orders. The claim was spurious, but it took on a life of its own; loyalty to the Bourbon dynasty became the hallmark of the rebel forces fighting under Biassou and Jean-François. Whether they were celebrating Louis XVI’s feast day or flying the white flag of royalist France, the rebels who served with Louverture made it clear that they had taken up arms “to support the rights of the king our master as well as our religion.”4

  The Bourbon kings and the Catholic Church were so closely intertwined in eighteenth-century France that to fight for Louis XVI meant to pray to his God. Eschewing the Vodou ceremonies popular among other rebel groups, Biassou and Jean-François ostentatiously portrayed themselves as fervent Catholics. Neither could out-pray Louverture, who, when no priest was available, even officiated a Mass in his eagerness to put his faith on display (a sacrilegious practice, since he was not ordained). Louverture forged a close bond with several white priests, most notably a Spanish priest named Josef Vásquez and a French one named Jacques Delahaye. The latter, who had been ministering in Cap and Quartier-Morin since the 1760s, must have been known to him for decades.5

  To cultivate the support of the Catholic Church, rebels were willing to condone the very slave system against which they had supposedly rebelled. When two slaves fled from Father Delahaye, who owned them, Biassou personally intervened to have them arrested and returned to the priest (the rebels extended similar courtesies to their Spanish neighbors). “As for the rest of your domestics,” Biassou told the priest, “Monsieur Toussaint ordered them to return to their duty.”6

  The plantation system was not yet dead. Louverture offered “to go on an inspection tour every week to restore order” among field laborers, a policy also embraced by his colleagues (“All these negresses should work,” explained a rebel leader). Some rebels even sold black women and children to Spanish slave traders from Santo Domingo. Their behavior had a precedent: in the eighteenth century, independent black communities in border areas had often agreed to return runaways to their French and Spanish owners in exchange for pacts of nonaggression. The 1791 slave revolt was large enough to turn into a real revolution, but Jean-François and Biassou seemed happy to live as petty chieftains on the margins of a slave-based plantation society. Life was good when one could frolic in a carriage with “demoiselles,” as the handsome Jean-François liked to do.7

  Though he forced field hands to continue working, Louverture did not sully his name by trading slaves the way his associates did. Perhaps it was he who convinced Father Delahaye to add an addendum to his will to free his slave Françoise. These were the first signs of an ideological evolution that would quicken over the following two years.8

  On August 25, 1792, just one day after Biassou had summoned his commandants to a ceremony in Louis XVI’s honor, a strange battle erupted in the city of Ouanaminthe, along the border with the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo. It began as rebel soldiers fired on their leader Jean-François and expressed their preference for Biassou. Biassou was far away in Grande-Rivière, probably recovering from the previous day’s party (for he was as loyal to kegs of rum as he was to the king of France), so Jean-François was able to regain control of Ouanaminthe.

  The one-day civil war in Ouanaminthe stemmed from a simple but intractable question that Louverture’s equivocal attitude during the 1791 slave revolt had failed to answer: Who was in control? When the fighting ended, Biassou remained in command of the region of Grande-Rivière directly south of Cap, and Jean-François retained his base farther east in Ouanaminthe, but each continued to claim that he was senior to the other. The status of Monsieur Louverture, who sided with Biassou in the feud, was even less clear. Though Biassou described him as a major general (maréchal de camp) and his subordinate, Louverture later insisted that he had in fact led his own independent force all along.9

  The rebel army was still a long way from becoming effective. Rebel leaders did their best to play the parts of European officers, but most were former plantation foremen and domestics who lacked basic military skills. Louverture’s expertise was animal husbandry.

  Always eager to improve himself, Louverture used the inconclusive year of 1792 to learn the art of soldiering, which would remain his primary occupation for the rest of his career. A black veteran of the militia taught him basic drills, while a French prisoner he had spared gave him fencing lessons, but the
learning curve was steep. Some rebels learned to love the powdery smell of the battlefield, most notably Louverture’s daughter’s former slave, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who joined Louverture’s personal guard as a guide and grew into a formidable warrior. But Louverture’s personal skill set was better suited for politics, and his body became a running log of his military setbacks. “I received a bullet in my right hip that is still in my body,” he later wrote. “I suffered a violent concussion to the head caused by a cannonball that so shook my jaw that most of my teeth fell out and that the few that remain are still very wobbly. Finally, I suffered on different occasions seventeen wounds, of which I still bear honorable scars.”10

  Slaves were slowly becoming aware of their potential. Throughout their lives they had been told by their masters that whites were few but innately superior and even invincible; the slave revolt had put that notion to rest. What made the Revolution so dangerous to the plantation system was the rebel slaves’ realization that they had no reason to cower before their former masters. In Limbé, just west of Cap, black women demanded that their female prisoners serve them during dinner “as if they were their servants,” a Frenchman marveled. As far away as Port-au-Prince, where the slave revolt had not yet taken hold, slaves no longer showed their masters any “respect.”11

  From the white point of view, whether the process was reversible grew more doubtful with each passing month. “The magic [of racism] has disappeared, how will we replace it?” lamented a nostalgic planter. According to a neighbor of the Brédas, planters might have to “sacrifice half of our workforce” to stop the “epidemic” and start fresh with a new batch of imports from Africa. As these genocidal fantasies became more commonplace, defeat came to entail extermination for Louverture and his fellow blacks.12

  Jean-François was sufficiently shaken by the August 25 civil war in Ouanaminthe to ask Spanish authorities across the border for their support. Louverture countered with a letter on Biassou’s behalf. Santo Domingo’s governor, Joaquín García, thought little of Jean-François, who “doesn’t know how to write,” but he was impressed by the letter from Louverture, of whom he had never heard before. Here evidently was a man with “better character.” Though Biassou’s name appeared at the bottom of the letter, García had a hunch that “other hands and heads” with more intellectual ability labored in the background. He wondered who in the rebel army truly held “the reins of their government.”13