Toussaint Louverture Read online

  Louverture quickly understood that his white peers would never treat him as an equal as long as he could not express himself as well as they did. Though he had learned the basics of writing from his godfather before the Revolution, he was still functionally illiterate as late as the fall of 1791, when he was about forty-eight years old. Other rebel leaders simply relied on secretaries, but Louverture, always eager to control his own destiny, was unwilling to settle for white mediation. He studied with various educated whites and blacks, including a French tutor whom he ostensibly hired for his sons because he was too proud to be the young man’s pupil (he snuck in at class time and listened to the lesson from the back of the room).14

  The word proved even trickier to master than the sword, but Louverture, a gifted learner, made significant progress over time. To showcase his erudition, he built up an extensive library of ponderous tomes on military history and Greek political thought, though it is unlikely that he had the time to read them all. Within a decade, he was able to write a lengthy memoir largely on his own. His handwriting remained hesitant, possibly because he badly hurt his right hand during one battle and had to use his left hand thereafter; his grammar was wayward, his spelling phonetic. Concerned that his limitations as a writer might reflect poorly on his intellect, he employed secretaries to draft all but his most sensitive letters and contented himself with adding his signature. But he had his secretaries pen multiple copies and then spent his nights comparing them under the flickering light of a candle to ensure that no one had misrepresented his thoughts.15

  By mastering the art of writing, Louverture had entered the historical record. He could at long last begin to tell his story.

  By the time Biassou summoned Louverture and his other officers to celebrate Louis XVI’s feast day on August 24, 1792, their king was actually no longer ruling France. Unbeknownst to them, two weeks earlier in Paris bloody street battles had led to his downfall and imprisonment. The end of the Bourbon monarchy made a great impression on Louverture when he finally heard of it. For the rest of his life, he would refer to the events of August 10, 1792—not Bastille Day in 1789, or, amazingly, the 1791 slave revolt—as the true beginning of the Revolution.16

  The news of Louis XVI’s demise reached Saint-Domingue in October 1792, shortly after a relief force of 6,000 French troops landed in Cap. These were two heavy blows for the rebels. After six months of relative calm, the French went back on the offensive and recaptured the towns of Ouanaminthe (Jean-François’s headquarters) and Dondon (in Biassou’s area of command). They then launched a coordinated assault on the rebel camp of Morne-Pelé. Surrounded and almost captured in the whirlwind of a defeat, Louverture had to consider himself lucky to survive the battle, though he was wounded.17

  At this difficult juncture, the rebels could have forsaken their allegiance to Louis XVI and laid down their arms. They did not. On Christmas Day 1792, feast day of his other Lord, Biassou gathered his army in his “royal palace” and had the throngs recognize him as “viceroy of all conquered lands” who would rule Saint-Domingue in the Bourbons’ name while awaiting the restoration of the monarchy in France. He promoted Louverture to general of the royal army-in-exile for the occasion.18

  Biassou then charged Father Delahaye with organizing a proper coronation ceremony and setting up a constitutional arrangement. “Please draft a speech to thank the people for their trust,” he instructed the priest, and “establish a law, which is to say a form of government to restore order while we await the orders of the king our master.” Unfortunately, no copy has survived of the document, which was in effect Haiti’s second constitution after the one drafted by the white deputies of Saint-Marc in 1790.

  With time, Biassou’s vice-royalty could have evolved into an autonomous polity allied with Spain and nominally loyal to the French monarch. Indeed, a runaway community in that mold had existed for hundreds of years in Maniel, in the borderland between Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo. But momentous events in France and Saint-Domingue would send the Revolution in a new direction. The year about to begin, 1793, would prove more cataclysmic than even 1791.19

  TWELVE

  SPANISH OFFICER

  1793–1794

  WHEN THE NEWS REACHED Saint-Domingue, in September 1792, that a French relief force of 6,000 was about to land in Cap, a wave of panic swept through the rebel army. The rebels had lost their chance to beat the French colonists when they were weak. Now, with France’s support, the planters would go on the offensive and destroy them. However large and well planned at its inception, the Saint-Domingue slave revolt would join the countless failed Caribbean uprisings.

  The situation was so dire that the rebels put their internal disputes aside and jointly pushed for a negotiated settlement. Louverture (acting as Biassou’s representative) and Jean-François contacted Spanish officials in Santo Domingo and asked them to pass on an offer to the king of France: they would send their followers back to their plantations by assuring the rebel slaves that they would now work “as free people and with a daily or weekly pension.” Then the rebels would be disarmed and put back under the “yoke of slavery.” As a reward for betraying their followers, Jean-François and Louverture would get “protection and freedom papers signed by the King.” Their proposal went nowhere. If it had, Louverture would have gone down in history not as the great liberator of the slaves of Saint-Domingue, but as an accessory to their re-enslavement. This was Louverture a year after the slave revolt had begun: a secondary figure, still living under the shadow of Biassou and Jean-François, though of superior intellect; and an ambivalent revolutionary.1

  Much happened over the next two years. White political infighting and the slave revolt continued like a fever that would not break; meanwhile, Louis XVI was executed in France, after which Britain and Spain invaded Saint-Domingue. In a few short months, to everyone’s surprise, emancipation became the law, not only in Saint-Domingue but in the rest of the French colonial empire as well.

  In this changing landscape, Louverture followed a sinuous path that took him from the rebel army to the Spanish Army and eventually the French Army. These two years were for him a time of political maturation as he shook off the trappings of the Old Regime to don the new revolutionary mantle of universal liberty. Out went the old, in came the new, including a last name full of promise: it was during this period that he took the name Louverture. This personal journey reached its endpoint in 1794, when, for the first time in his life, Louverture unambiguously and publicly embraced the cause of liberty for all.

  After debating for months whether to relieve the beleaguered colonists, France decided in the spring of 1792 to send a second group of commissioners and an army to Saint-Domingue. Their primary mission was to disband the all-white colonial assemblies that had toyed with independence and enforce a law passed in April 1792 granting political rights to free people of color. The commissioners’ instructions said remarkably little of the slave revolt itself; the French government assumed that it would be easily subdued once the conflict between free whites and free blacks was brought to an end.2

  After the fleet reached Saint-Domingue in September, the French commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, a rotund man of twenty-nine, took over the northern province, while his colleague Etienne de Polverel, a lawyer from Bordeaux, headed for Port-au-Prince in the West (the third commissioner, who was supposed to oversee the South, left as quickly as he arrived). One of the commissioners’ first acts was to dismiss the pusillanimous governor Louis de Blanchelande and send him back to France to account for his conduct. There, he was put on trial and guillotined for his failure to contain the slave revolt. The nagging suspicion that he had secretly encouraged the slaves in the first place, which Louverture had done much to cultivate, sealed his fate.3

  The new French commissioners expected the worst from white colonists, but the colonists proved surprisingly pliant. In short order, they accepted the dissolution of the colonial assemblies and the enfranchisement of free people o
f color. In exchange, the commissioners promised to launch a major offensive against rebel positions. The 6,000 men they had brought from France, who were later reinforced by an additional 3,000 men, brought the garrison of Cap to a total of 11,000 men. France had sent fewer men across the Atlantic during the US War of Independence.4

  Victory seemed imminent, but the political unity only lasted a month. The French soldiers the commissioners brought with them began quarreling over revolutionary dogma before they even set foot in Saint-Domingue. The fall of Louis XVI in France then gave white colonists an excuse to denounce the commissioners’ appointment as invalid. Sonthonax, a formidable figure with a short fuse, had little patience for those whom he called “the aristocrats of the epidermis,” and would not let himself be bullied like his predecessors. Chaos followed. Sonthonax deported Jean-Jacques d’Esparbès, Blanchelande’s successor as governor, because he considered him too attached to the old monarchy; three more governors came and went over the following eight months.5

  France took an even more radical turn when, on January 1793, Louis XVI was put on trial and guillotined in Paris. As a new regime, called the National Convention, seized power, civil war broke out between partisans and enemies of the king. Already at war with Austria and Prussia, France was also attacked by Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain, and Spain, each of them eager to stamp out the radical experiment that was Jacobinism.

  Britain, the largest naval power in the world, was a formidable foe. Louverture, who had already experienced three Anglo-French wars in his lifetime, knew that previous conflicts had caused crippling food shortages in Cap. The newly arrived French regiments would probably go hungry, and France was unlikely to reinforce them as long as the European war lasted. His own troops, by contrast, could live off the land or smuggle cattle from Santo Domingo. They could also attract new recruits from the colony’s vast black population.

  Spain was past its heyday as a world power, but its entry into the war, news of which reached Saint-Domingue in May 1793, was nevertheless significant because Spain controlled Santo Domingo. The possibility arose of a formal alliance with the rebels. What if, despite the odds, the rebels were to prevail after all?

  Because their troops were not yet proficient on the battlefield, the rebel leaders employed what we would call today guerrilla tactics. Success in such conflicts depends on the support of the civilian population, access to food and ammunition, and the assistance of sovereign neighbors willing to offer a safe haven in times of peril. Without Spain’s help, the rebels could be cornered and starved; with it, they might outrun and outlast their enemy.6

  The Spanish and British invasions of Saint-Domingue (1793–1798). Map by the author.

  Within two months of the initial August 1791 uprising, the rebels were already in contact with someone they described as “the Spanish man,” who was probably a merchant. Commercial exchanges multiplied when the rebels took control of the border town of Ouanaminthe in January 1792. Though Santo Domingo’s governor, Joaquín García, officially adopted a neutral stance to avoid upsetting French authorities, in practice local Spanish officials condoned the contraband trade (the rebels even sent García a thank-you note). This accommodating policy ran against instructions from Madrid that called for “perfect neutrality” regarding the slave revolt, but who would reprove the governor of Santo Domingo when it often took nine months for his dispatches to travel from his colonial backwater to Spain and back? At any rate, García lived in Santo Domingo’s capital and did not visit the border regions until 1794, so local Spanish commanders did as they pleased. And it pleased them very much to make easy money by trading with the rebels.7

  The contraband trade aside, Governor García was careful not to be drawn into the tumultuous politics of his neighbor. He sealed the border and turned away black rebels so that his colony would not be “infected” by the revolutionary virus. Even more concerned by the radical republicanism of the French, he turned away male white refugees as well.8

  The rebels made their first official overtures to Spain in February and September 1792, at times when their military position was weak. Nothing came of them, but they tried again when the French commissioners launched their offensive during the winter of 1792 to 1793. Feeling “hounded like a ferocious beast,” Louverture concluded that the rebels needed a powerful patron. Upon learning of Louis XVI’s death in March 1793, “a black man sent by Biassou” (probably Louverture) went to see the Spanish commander in the border town of San Rafael and offered to integrate the rebel forces into the Spanish Army.9

  The timing was impeccable. Spain had just declared war on France in Europe, and Madrid had ordered Governor García to recruit allies in Saint-Domingue, whether they were royalist whites or “brigands, negroes, and mulattoes.” García chose to rely primarily on the latter: he only wanted “well-disciplined troops,” and the rebels, who had spent 1792 shaping themselves into a respectable army, seemed more reliable than the white colonists who had subjected Saint-Domingue to endless political convulsions. The rebel leadership’s yearlong effort to gain the respect of powerful whites was paying its first dividends.10

  The French commissioners made their own attempts to woo the rebels by promising them manumissions and cash rewards if they joined the French Army. The Spanish offers were no better, but Louverture, Jean-François, and Biassou decided to accept them. Their decision may seem surprising: Spain was a slave-owning power, whereas revolutionary France had just made its first tentative steps toward racial equality. But the rebels had a hard time trusting French promises when no one knew who was in charge from one day to the next. So unstable was the situation in French-controlled areas that Commissioner Sonthonax had to wage two urban battles in April and June 1793 to wrest Port-au-Prince and Cap, the colony’s two largest cities, from the hands of white rivals.

  By contrast, Spain, the oldest colonial power in the Americas and a Catholic kingdom governed by a relative of Louis XVI, represented respectability and legitimacy in the rebels’ eyes. “To die for my King and for Freedom: this is my motto,” explained Louverture. “Give the Spaniard some credit: he fears his God and his Prince.” Having made up his mind, in June 1793 Louverture raised the Spanish flag over the town of Dondon and began yet another stage of his life as a major general (mariscal de campo) in one of the so-called “auxiliary units” of the Spanish Army.11

  In the first half of 1793, almost two years after the outbreak of the slave revolt, slavery was still well entrenched in French Saint-Domingue. A planter opening the paper in Cap could read ads for a slave-trading ship fresh from Africa and a “negro tailor: for sale or lease,” as if the revolt had never taken place. Granted, a rebel army was active in the interior of the northern province, but the reinforcements sent by France would surely bring them to heel. In the end, it took the leadership of a single man to end slavery in the colony. His name was not Louverture but Léger-Félicité Sonthonax.12

  Sonthonax had long harbored reservations about slavery. A friend of the founder of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, he had judged in 1790 that it was useless to oppose “the principles of universal liberty.” He was also a member of a Jacobin club agitating for the abolition of slavery in France. In a bizarre twist, it was this closet abolitionist that France had entrusted with the mission of ending the slave revolt.13

  After landing in Saint-Domingue, Sonthonax warred against the slave rebels because his orders required him to, but his heart was clearly not in it. He begged French legislators to pass some measure in the slaves’ favor, because “the slaves of the New World fight for the same cause as the French armies” in Europe. By May 1793, he concluded that subduing slave rebels would be both impossible (he lacked the troops) and counterproductive (Why kill the colony’s workers?). He also reaffirmed the old regulations of the Black Code, which, in a novel act, he translated into Kreyòl so that slaves would be better informed of their rights. In early June, he began to offer “universal liberty” to the rebels who joined the French side. H
is colleague Etienne de Polverel, also a closet abolitionist, took similar steps in the western province.14

  This gradual move toward abolition gained new momentum on June 20–22, 1793, when Sonthonax fought on the streets of Cap against the fourth governor in a year, François Galbaud. Facing defeat, Sonthonax issued a proclamation promising that all black warriors who joined his side would get their freedom in return. With the assistance of two nearby rebel chiefs, Sonthonax prevailed, and he kept his promise.15

  The three days of intense street fighting destroyed most of the city that Louverture had come to know as a coachman. Estimates of the number of people killed ranged from 3,000 to 10,000. Most of the white survivors fled Cap along with some free people of color and slaves. In time, the Dominguan community-in-exile would grow to more than 20,000 people, most of them in Cuba, Jamaica, Santo Domingo, and the eastern United States. Local planters feared that copycat slave revolts would break out wherever they landed. But the real impact was back in Saint-Domingue: the departure of so many white colonists meant that the demographic imbalance that already favored the black majority now became overwhelming.16

  There was no turning back for Sonthonax after the battle for Cap. The troops he had brought from France were decimated by disease during the summer of 1793. The remaining white colonists hated France for killing their king and enfranchising free people of color. The nascent war with Spain and the threat of a British invasion, which materialized in September, made the commissioner’s situation truly desperate. Free people of color aside, Sonthonax could only count on one group: the colony’s enslaved majority.