Toussaint Louverture Read online

  In early May 1794, after evacuating his family from San Rafael, Louverture handed over the city of Gonaïves to the French. He had his men murder many white planters in the process. Details are hazy, because Louverture did his best to hide his involvement in the massacre, but he probably intended to permanently weaken the colonists’ camp by culling their numbers. Jean-François carried out a similar massacre of white colonists a few months later in Fort-Dauphin; in that incident, Louverture’s old boss François Bayon de Libertat, who had just returned from exile in the United States, was almost killed.42

  In August 1791, Louverture had played the role of the dutiful slave while planning a slave revolt; in May 1794, he defected to the French Army while assuring his Spanish overlords that he was still on their side. Amazingly, he managed to continue this charade for five months, which he spent assuring both France and Spain of his loyalty while also encouraging the British to court him, for good measure.43

  France itself was wracked by political disputes. After abolishing slavery in August 1793, Commissioner Sonthonax had sent a six-man delegation to France to get his government’s approval. Three of the delegates absconded on the way to France for fear of retribution; the others were assaulted by conservative exiles during a stop in Philadelphia, and then briefly imprisoned when they landed in France. As they finally approached Paris, the deputies wondered whether they would be met with garlands or the guillotine: aside from abolishing the slave trade, the French National Convention had not been particularly forward-thinking when it came to racial equality.44

  In the event, when the three members of the Saint-Domingue delegation—one white, one black, and one of mixed race—entered the legislative chamber in February 1794, they were welcomed as heroes. The black delegate, Jean-Baptiste Belley, who had been part of Louverture’s extended circle in Cap prior to the Revolution, became the first black deputy to serve in the French parliament. His personal journey, Belley told French deputies, had taken him from Senegal in West Africa to Saint-Domingue, to Savannah in 1779 as a soldier, and now to Paris. He had known three continents and three revolutions. He had been a slave, a slave owner, and a slave emancipator. The story seemed almost too good to be true—and to some extent it was: Belley, who is listed as a native of Saint-Domingue on other documents, likely invented his African birth to reinforce the symbolism of his election as deputy.45

  Sonthonax’s bold decision to abolish slavery without obtaining France’s prior permission was ratified by the Convention. Not only that, but France declared that slavery was now abolished in all French colonies, not just Saint-Domingue, and that freed slaves would become full-fledged citizens of France, not just freedmen with a lesser legal status. Contrary to many other abolition laws passed over the next one hundred years, this decree did not provide for a transition period or for financial compensation for the planters. Encouraged by the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue, French revolutionaries had finally put behind their equivocations and brought the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to its logical conclusion. Commoners, Jews, and people of color now all shared the same rights under French law in keeping with the revolutionary motto “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” (Sisterhood was not on the list: women, whether they were white or black, remained disenfranchised until 1944.) The law proved popular in France, where many stories about labor abuse on plantations had circulated in recent years, and where public opinion was hostile to the planters.46

  Granting freed slaves French citizenship was particularly significant. Many abolitionists viewed emancipation as a humane gesture toward a suffering group, but they did not necessarily see blacks as their intellectual equals. As a result, free people of color retained a subordinate legal status in the Americas even after emancipation became the norm in the nineteenth century. In France, by contrast, black males entered the body politic outright after they were freed.

  Because the February 1794 law of universal emancipation in France and Louverture’s May 1794 defection from the Spanish to the French in Hispaniola happened around the same time, he was later able to present his volte-face as an idealistic act motivated by his love of freedom. In reality, news of the abolition law only reached him in July, so the passage of the law cemented rather than triggered his decision. This is not to say that Louverture’s growing unease with slavery played no role in his abandonment of Spain; rather, as so often in his life, he carefully considered his personal career, which had reached a dead end in the Spanish ranks, and his political goals, which also pushed him toward France. Surviving while defending one’s ideals: such is the difficult task of individuals caught in a revolution.47

  THIRTEEN

  FRENCH PATRIOT

  1794–1796

  A SHIP ARRIVED in the south of Saint-Domingue bearing formal orders to recall the commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax in June 1794. He was accused of having overstepped his authority by unilaterally abolishing slavery. In a curious two-step, the National Convention had confirmed Sonthonax’s abolition of slavery in 1794 and then demanded that he come to France to answer for his actions. Accordingly, the man who welcomed Louverture into the French Army was not Sonthonax but Etienne Laveaux, a native of eastern France who had served as governor of Saint-Domingue since 1793.1

  Laveaux would eventually become very close to Louverture, but the first letter he sent him after he joined the French Army was rather cold. Concerned by Louverture’s monarchist past, Laveaux began with a little refresher on French civics and reminded him that he now fought for a republic committed to the rights of man. “Thank God, you have now understood your mistake and have rejoined your fatherland. You must serve it with fidelity and attachment.” Unsure how valuable Louverture’s defection would prove to be, Laveaux also asked him to provide a detailed report on the size of his army and the territories he controlled.2

  Over the next two years, Louverture assuaged all of Laveaux’s concerns as he fought and defeated Spain, Britain, and various internal enemies. But war was a continuation of politics at a time when France stood alone in defense of universal liberty. Because of his social background and newfound embrace of emancipation, Louverture’s military successes made him a lodestar of the abolitionist cause in the French Republic and, ultimately, around the world. In return, he fully imbibed its ideals as he strove to become something that had been denied to him all his life: a Frenchman.

  With his new post came new colleagues. Louverture’s boss, Governor Laveaux, was stationed in Port-de-Paix, a town located west of Cap on the northern coast of Saint-Domingue. His two main peers were the mixed-race officers Jean Villatte, who commanded the North from his headquarters in Cap, and André Rigaud, who commanded the South from his headquarters in Cayes. Laveaux entrusted Louverture with the cordon of the West, a strategic region abutting the territories controlled by Spain and Britain in central Saint-Domingue, but he demoted him from general to colonel. Louverture, who had already undergone the indignity of losing his generalship when joining the Spanish cause, would have to prove himself yet again.

  To overcome Laveaux’s initial suspicion, Louverture insisted that he had been drawn to the French ranks by his love of liberty rather than political expediency. More important, he brought a formidable force with him. Because of disease and combat, in the North and West only 1,000 French troops remained of the 12,000 who had been sent in various installments since 1791. Louverture, who commanded 4,000 black soldiers, immediately made his mark. The towns of the western province that he had conquered for Spain, including Gonaïves and Dondon, were the first to fall back into his hands. Most of the northern province soon followed. Then, in October 1794, he moved into Santo Domingo proper and captured the towns of San Miguel and San Rafael, where his family had lived when he was in Spanish service. So many recruits flocked to his side that he was able to add two new regiments to his command. As usual, he relied on brains rather than brawn—or, to use his terms, “cabals” and “ruses.” His crowning achievement was the capture of Mirebalais in
July 1795, which fell “without a drop of blood” after he spent three months secretly encouraging the town’s inhabitants to switch sides.3

  Spain could call on few professional troops to stop Louverture. Santo Domingo’s garrison mostly kept to the Spanish side of the border, and regiments sent from Cuba in 1794 were decimated by an epidemic that almost claimed the life of Governor Joaquín García as well. The losses forced Spain to rely on the auxiliary units of Jean-François and Biassou, who did not command a large following among the black population because they traded slaves.

  Jean-François tried to seduce some of Louverture’s officers by warning them that “the type of liberty mentioned by Republicans is false”: liberty was an individual privilege that could only be granted by one’s master or king. After consulting Louverture, the officers replied that they were “free by natural right” per the universalist principles of the Enlightenment, but the concept was lost on Jean-François.4

  Within a year of defecting, Louverture had retaken almost all the French towns he had previously conquered for Spain. These and other military setbacks in Europe forced Spain to sue for peace. Signed in July 1795, the Peace of Basel stipulated that Spain would cede Santo Domingo, which had been in Spanish hands since the second voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1493, to France. Spain was the first major European power that Louverture had defeated; two more would follow.

  After learning of the Peace of Basel, Governor Laveaux made plans to take possession of Santo Domingo and apply the 1794 French law abolishing slavery, marking the first time that the principles of the Haitian Revolution had been exported outside French territories. To that end, Laveaux appointed three envoys (one black, one white, and one of mixed race), who distributed a “decree of liberty” about the upcoming abolition of slavery as they made their way from Saint-Domingue to Santo Domingo to take possession of the colony. Freedom was on the march—literally.5

  Being absorbed by a black-dominated, abolitionist colony was inconceivable to Governor García and his white countrymen in Santo Domingo, especially since the radical ideas planted by Laveaux’s envoys seemed to prompt a slave revolt in Oyarzábal, the colony’s only modern sugar plantation. García brutally suppressed the revolt and did all he could to delay the French takeover. Louverture did not involve himself directly in the negotiations, but with newfound republican fervor he noted reproachfully that “Spanish inhabitants do not want to hear of general liberty.” In the end, France was in no rush to administer a colony that depended on Spanish subsidies and decided not to push the issue. A few border towns aside, the takeover of Santo Domingo did not occur until Louverture took the matter in his own hands six years later.6

  The fate of Spain’s black auxiliary units was a more pressing issue in the short term. Louverture was keen to enlist privates into his army, but he insisted that their officers, especially his rivals Jean-François and Biassou, leave the island at once. He got his wish. The Spanish, who were equally eager to rid themselves of their black allies now that they no longer had any use for them, abruptly deported eight hundred leading auxiliary troops and their families in December 1795—so fast, in fact, that Biassou’s mother was left behind. The black auxiliaries headed for Havana, where Cuban authorities, fearing for the safety of their own slave system, broke up the so-called “French negroes” into smaller and more manageable groups and dispatched them to the Isle of Pines and various spots along the Central American coast. The British would similarly exile many of their own black auxiliary units in 1798, as would the French in 1802, creating a wide-ranging diaspora of Haitian veterans and deportees throughout the Americas and Europe.7

  Biassou headed for Saint-Augustine in Spanish Florida, where he died in 1801, while Jean-François ended up in Cádiz, Spain, where he died in 1805. Louverture never saw them again, though he remained in contact with members of their families whom he had known before the Revolution. The obscure ends of these once-formidable leaders confirmed to Louverture that he had gambled smartly in aligning his fortunes with those of the French Republic.8

  Though he had defeated Spain, Louverture still had to face Britain, the preeminent colonial and naval power of the day. During the winter of 1793–1794, white colonists had handed over many ports of western and southern Saint-Domingue to the British. Britain initially lacked the troops to garrison them effectively, but in 1794 and 1795 it sent two large expeditions to the Caribbean in an attempt to destroy French power in the region. Saint-Domingue’s administrative capital of Port-au-Prince fell in June 1794.

  Fresh from defeating the Spanish, Louverture headed for the region of Port-au-Prince in 1795 and directly engaged the British, but it quickly became clear that he was not yet ready to face a large professional European army in the field. He chose to lift the siege of Saint-Marc when his hand was crushed under a cannon’s wheel. During a later campaign near Mirebalais, his battalion was cut to pieces when it was surprised by British cavalry in the open field. By the fall of 1795, so many British soldiers had landed in Saint-Domingue that Louverture had to fall back to a defensive line established along the Artibonite River.9

  For the next two years Louverture maintained a defensive posture, relying on the most potent weapon in his arsenal, disease. It did not disappoint. British commanders failed to push their initial advantage and remained camped in coastal areas, where their soldiers, many of whom landed at the height of the rainy seasons of 1795 and 1796, were decimated by yellow fever. In 1794, the British lost 10 percent of their troops to disease per month, a rate that rose to 15 percent in 1795 and hovered between 5 and 10 percent throughout 1796 and 1797.10

  Such losses are easily understood today: we now know that epidemics spread fastest when nonimmune hosts live in close quarters, as was the case of the British soldiers garrisoned in mosquito-infested ports. But at the time, most doctors blamed yellow fever on “miasmas,” a kind of foul air. One wonders how Louverture made sense of the providential plague. Throughout his life, and particularly during the Revolution, he saw European invaders die by the tens of thousands while local residents like him were spared. According to one estimate, European powers lost a staggering 180,000 men in the Caribbean during the period of the Haitian Revolution. The last two years of the Haitian Revolution alone saw more French general officers (twenty-seven) die than any other campaign of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. A large majority of them died of disease rather than in combat.

  Did Louverture conclude that Saint-Domingue was a natural home for native Creoles, and that white colonists were short-lived interlopers? Or did he view these epidemics as evidence that God was fighting by his side? He did not say, but his subordinate Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who had followed him from Spanish into French service, had his own theory on the matter: “Our vengeful climate is proof enough that [the whites] are not our brothers and never will be,” he later explained.11

  Caribbean colonies during the Haitian Revolution. Map by the author.

  To compensate for their losses, the British supplemented their forces with locally raised regiments of black and mixed-race auxiliary troops, but it was clear to everyone that they were the defenders of the old order. In the areas they controlled, they showed no intention of abolishing slavery and in fact reestablished racial inequality between whites and free people of color. Louverture publicized the French laws on racial equality (April 1792) and abolition (February 1794) to fortify his support among the people of color, who represented the overwhelming majority of the colonial population.

  Events in the Lesser Antilles, where Britain also sent sizable contingents, underlined the power of revolutionary slogans. The British easily took Martinique, Tobago, and Guadeloupe in 1794 with the support of white colonists, but a French agent armed with a copy of the decree of abolition retook Guadeloupe in 1794 when he freed the slaves and enrolled them as soldiers. French freedmen then joined with local slaves and the so-called Black Caribs (mixed-race Afro-Amerindians) to attack the British in Grenada, Saint-Vincent, and Saint-Lucia, w
hile upheavals roiled Jamaica and Dominica and a French-inspired slave revolt broke out in Dutch Curaçao. Louverture was not involved in any of these events, but he watched them from afar with clear pleasure. “I hope that our new brothers will achieve their goal,” he explained after learning that the Maroons had revolted in Jamaica. “I desire it with all my heart.”12

  Chasing the British from Saint-Domingue was a more daunting task because Britain had committed extraordinary reserves of manpower and treasure to occupying it. But Louverture could afford to wait while his enemies could not. “Slowly goes far and patience beats force,” his favorite proverb, guided him. By 1796, a clamor was growing in Britain to bring an end to its Caribbean ventures, which cost Britain 20,000 casualties in Saint-Domingue alone. France, despite sending no significant forces to the Caribbean in 1794–1798, was eventually able to repulse the British everywhere except Martinique and Tobago. Former slaves like Louverture who became citizen-soldiers fighting for the cause of liberty were the main reason for this miraculous turn of events. For once, idealism and political expediency walked hand in hand.13

  Temple commemorating the abolition of slavery in Cap. M. Rainsford and J. Barlow, View of a Temple Erected by the Blacks to Commemorate Their Emancipation, reprinted from Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (London: Albion Press, 1805), 218.