Toussaint Louverture Read online

  Liberty in Saint-Domingue left an imprint that was both symbolic and tangible. Port-au-Prince was renamed Port-Républicain; Fort-Dauphin became Fort-Liberté. A neoclassical monument dedicated to the law of emancipation was erected in Cap, and images of liberty replaced the fleur-de-lys on coins, monuments, and letterheads. The white flag of monarchy gave way to the flag of the French Revolution, with the added twist that the blue, white, and red stripes of the French tricolor (which normally referenced the Parisian National Guard) were intended to symbolize blacks, whites, and mixed-race people in the colonial context.

  From time to time, the colony’s leadership organized revolutionary celebrations where they planted trees of liberty and made speeches celebrating the new era of freedom. Most notable was the 1794 Bastille Day ceremony, during which Laveaux officially presented the French law of abolition. Fireworks and a rollicking party guaranteed that the day would never be forgotten. The last dancers only disbanded with the dawn of the new era, at 7 a.m.14

  French revolutionaries sought to remake time itself when they replaced the Gregorian calendar of the popes with a new Republican calendar. Avowedly secular, it began with a September 1792 French military victory instead of Jesus’s birth. Traditional Catholic holidays disappeared, so All Saints’ Day, Louverture’s feast day, was renamed after the oyster plant, a European vegetable he had never seen. Sunday gave way to décadi, the last day of a new ten-day week that was dedicated to some nondenominational “Supreme Being” rather than the Catholic God. This was too much for the pious Louverture. He dutifully employed the revolutionary calendar in his official letters, but he never warmed to it, and abandoned it as soon as he got the chance.15

  Louverture remained friendly to priests, a courageous move at a time when the Catholic Church had become controversial in revolutionary France because of its associations with the monarchy. But he was also careful to adopt the lingo of the French Republic and named one of his regiments the “Sans-culottes” in reference to the radical revolutionary group. The term, which meant “without britches” in French, could be taken literally, since many of Louverture’s men wore no uniform and went “naked as worms.”16

  Louverture knew how to adapt his rhetoric to his audience. He ended his letters to Governor Laveaux and other French officials with patriotic “salutations in the name of the fatherland,” but the term “abolition” disappeared from his vocabulary when he tried to convince white planters to join his side. When it came time to court a group of African-born plantation runaways, he rediscovered his Allada roots and addressed them in their native tongue. A political shape-shifter, he prompts a question that is ultimately unanswerable: Who among his multiple incarnations was the real Louverture?17

  This former leader of a slave revolt and convert to the Republic remained friendly toward aristocratic planters, partly to convince them to throw off their allegiance to Britain, but also because he had always dreamed of joining the rarefied world of the “big whites.” When the Marquis of Espinville was taken prisoner during the fall of Mirebalais, French patriots demanded that he be put on trial as a traitor. But Louverture begged Governor Laveaux to spare d’Espinville’s life because he had promised him “protection.” “I would sooner abandon my command than break my word,” Louverture said. Indeed, an officer’s word of honor was central to his sense of self; to ask Louverture to break it would have implied that a black man lacked the requisite character needed to wear an epaulet. Laveaux relented, and a glowing Louverture was feted by d’Espinville’s grateful friends. This was one of the proudest moments in his life: “I remember being complimented by all these gentlemen who were present for having defended the honor and the dignity of my government,” he later explained in considerable detail. “Yet I never received an education nor instructed, but my big common sense made me understand that a man must keep his word.”18

  Defending aristocrats like d’Espinville was politically risky: these were the kinds of counterrevolutionaries who were routinely sent off to the guillotine in France. But Louverture, eager to dispel stereotypes of black rebels as bloodthirsty African savages, avoided unnecessary bloodshed whenever he could. Meanwhile, he also kept silent about his early manumission and his slave-holding past so as to protect his reputation as a revolutionary. Only through this delicate balancing act could he build a broad coalition in these fractious times.

  The person Louverture most needed to seduce was Governor Laveaux. After three months of epistolary courtship, the two men first met in person in August 1794. Laveaux was immediately won over. He concluded after their conversation that Louverture was a true abolitionist. Not only was he “trusted by all negroes,” but by some miracle, he also managed to be “respected and venerated” by “at least 600 planters.” Louverture’s slave roots gave him credibility, while his record of moderation toward whites gave him wide appeal. To Laveaux, he was the perfect revolutionary hero, at once genuine and nonthreatening.19

  Over time, Louverture’s military successes and personal charisma earned him a special place in Laveaux’s heart. In October 1794, Laveaux offered him the feathery plume of a grenadier infantryman, which Louverture proudly displayed thereafter on his hat. In 1795, Laveaux described Louverture as a man “filled with virtue, courage, military talent, obedient toward his superiors . . . knowing how to read and write, and even better how to think.” In response, Louverture nicknamed him “Papa Laveaux,” although Laveaux was younger than him. He wrote that he “kissed” him “with all my heart,” assuring his “dear papa” that “I often dream of you” and that “I will forever be your affectionate and submissive son.” Men of that era occasionally described their friendship in baroque terms; an officer once wrote to Laveaux’s predecessor, “I love you like the lover idolizes his mistress.” But such displays of affection were unusual for Louverture. The two men must also have socialized outside of work, because they frequently made inquiries about their spouses in their correspondence. Officer status, universal abolition, the planters’ gratitude, and the governor’s ear and heart: these were heady times for a muleteer just three years removed from the sugar mill of the Bréda plantation.20

  Whether France was as committed as Laveaux to the cause of abolition remained an open question. The Convention had confirmed Sonthonax’s abolition of slavery in 1794, but it had then recalled him. Sonthonax was eventually cleared, but Louverture might have wondered how long the Convention would last.21

  As it turned out, not long at all. In July 1794, the main architect of the Reign of Terror, Maximilien de Robespierre, was sent to the guillotine, after which a more conservative regime, calling itself the Directory, replaced the National Convention. Exiled planters smelled blood. For the first eight months of 1795, a rancorous debate over the colonies raged in the French parliament, where conservative deputies denounced the law of abolition as rushed and ill-advised. Echoes reached Saint-Domingue in the summer and fall. Louverture, who was waging hard-fought defensive battles against the British Army at the time, had good reason to fear for his and the colony’s future.22

  The uncertainty proved short-lived. In October, an envoy arrived from France with good news. Peace with Spain had been ratified, and conservatives had lost the colonial debate. The military successes of Louverture had proved instrumental: when planters had decried abolition as an economic disaster, their opponents had countered that black freedmen had saved Saint-Domingue from foreign occupation. This contest between France’s economic and strategic interests would continue to pull the abolitionist debate in opposite directions. Louverture’s freedom was safe—as long as he continued being useful to France.23

  To influence future policymaking, Louverture sent three deputies to Paris and asked them to remind everyone of his “great and memorable services to the fatherland” and to combat “the enemies of the liberty of the people of Saint-Domingue.” They were the vanguard of a public relations operation that would become ever more sophisticated over the years.24

  As evidence of its grati
tude, France promoted Laveaux to division general and Louverture to brigadier general in 1795. Such rapid promotions were not uncommon during the French Revolution, when constant wars and the exile of aristocratic officers gave men of talent many opportunities to rise through the ranks; the most famous example was Napoléon’s elevation to brigadier general at age twenty-four. Color was no longer an obstacle. There were three mixed-race brigadier generals in Saint-Domingue and one mixed-race division general in France, the father of the famed novelist Alexandre Dumas. But Louverture still stood out as the highest-ranking black officer in the French Army.

  Because voting rights under the Directory were restricted to males who owned property or served in the army, officers of color and landowners like Louverture were the main beneficiaries of the Republic’s racial egalitarianism in the colonies. His wife Suzanne had likely been freed when her husband was in Spain’s service, and then again as part of France’s general abolition law, but by law she could not vote. War, a male endeavor, was the main form of social promotion during the Revolution; freedwomen remained on plantations, where they eventually formed the majority of the workforce and as such were the main victims of attempts to keep freed slaves in the fields.

  With the fall of the Convention and the advent of the Directory came a new French constitution, the third since 1789. It stated that French colonies were now départements, basic French administrative units. This seemingly minor clause had profound implications. In 1790, autonomist planters, to protect their racial privileges, had insisted that colonies were distinct territories operating under special laws. Integrating Saint-Domingue into the French legal system now meant that former slaves had as strong a claim to citizenship as any Frenchman from Lille to Lyons.25

  The black population of Saint-Domingue saw close bonds with the former country as an asset and welcomed the colony’s ascension to département. The American Revolution’s slogan, “No taxation without representation,” led logically to independence; the slogan of the Haitian Revolution, “Liberty or death,” was better achieved by cultivating ties with revolutionary France. This explains why a declaration of independence was the Haitian Revolution’s closing act, and why Louverture, who is often seen as a precursor to Haiti’s independence, actually spent much of the Haitian Revolution voicing his loyalty to the French Republic. He felt, he explained, “a sense of duty and gratitude toward those who gave liberty to his brothers.” As long, of course, as France continued to support emancipation.26

  Even the most idealistic revolutionaries understood that one could not transform African-born slaves into French citizens overnight by legal fiat. In France, where provincialism ran strong, a true sense of a unified national identity did not emerge until the development of railways, the institution of the draft, and the establishment of universal primary education in the late nineteenth century. In post-emancipation Saint-Domingue, education and the army were also major instruments of integration as colonial authorities strove to turn freedmen into Frenchmen.

  Prerevolutionary authorities had once limited educational opportunities for people of color on the grounds that “our security derives from the ignorance of people of their ilk.” All this changed after the abolition of slavery. Colonial officials established a public school in Cap and asked for teachers to be sent to France so as to promote an effective program of universal education. It would serve two purposes: educating the voting citizenry, and teaching freedmen that hard work was a republican virtue.27

  Louverture, who had only learned recently and imperfectly how to read and write, paid great attention to educational matters. Gabriel Toussaint, one of his sons by his first wife, Cécile, could sign his name, but his daughter, Marie-Marthe, could not (his older son, Toussaint, died without leaving a written record). Louverture saw to it that Placide, Isaac, and Saint-Jean, his sons by his second wife, Suzanne, were properly educated, hiring private tutors for them.28

  Suzanne had also learned to read and write by 1794, presumably from the same teacher as her husband, because the two shared the same handwriting and phonetic spelling. But very few letters by her have survived, and those that have focus on mundane matters that tell us little about her inner life. Her earliest surviving letter is dated July 13, 1794, two months after her husband’s defection to the French side, and one day before the Bastille Day ceremony in which the law of abolition was formally presented to the population of Saint-Domingue. Yet in the letter she merely reminded her husband that his laundry was ready.29

  Despite their lack of political content, this and other letters by Suzanne are revealing: she and her husband addressed each other in standard (if misspelled) French, not Haitian Kreyòl. Because French carried more social cachet than Kreyòl, members of the Haitian elite traditionally employed French in official settings, but they typically still used Kreyòl in everyday family life. The Louvertures went one step further: French crept into their everyday life in a manner that must have come across as snobbish to their contemporaries. “I was poorly received one day when I tried to speak to Louverture in the local patois,” a white visitor noted in reference to Kreyòl. “He only used it to harangue laborers and soldiers.”30

  In the summer of 1795, as his campaign against Spain drew to an end, Louverture moved his family to Gonaïves in the western province in order to be closer to British lines. At Suzanne’s request, he purchased yet another estate, the Sansay plantation in nearby Ennery, which remained the Louverture family’s home for the rest of the Revolution. Louverture was a northerner born and raised in the outskirts of Cap, but for reasons that are not clear, he disliked that city and developed a particular affinity for the region of Gonaïves. He would eventually establish the area as its own province and name it after himself.31

  Louverture offered the ultimate proof of his loyalty to the Republic when he announced in June 1796 that he wished to send his sons Placide and Isaac, whose “existence . . . make my life happy,” to finish their schooling in France. In doing so, he followed the example set by white colonists like the Brédas and the Bayons before the Revolution. He also wished to keep up with his colleague and rival General André Rigaud, who had recently sent his own son to France to be educated. Louverture’s youngest son, Saint-Jean, who was just five, remained in Saint-Domingue and attended a school in Port-de-Paix.32

  The prospect of her sons traveling to France deeply worried Suzanne Louverture. Placide and Isaac were only fourteen and eleven, respectively. After many delays, they finally left on the seventy-four-gun ship of the line Wattigny in July 1796. Choosing such a large warship for the trip was intentional. A ship of the line could weather a storm better than a smaller ship; it was also less likely to be captured by enemy privateers, who could have re-enslaved the sons of the most promising officer in the French empire. Saint-Domingue may have been in the throes of a revolution, but the outside world was an even more dangerous place for two young black men.33

  Louverture’s sons spent some time in Paris with Jean-Baptiste Belley and Louis Dufaÿ, the two deputies from Saint-Domingue who had secured passage of the law of abolition in 1794. They then headed for the Liancourt school, a dreary and underfunded boarding school where they spent a few miserable months before they did what the slaves of Haut-du-Cap had taught them: they ran away. Informed of their dissatisfaction with the school, the French government then transferred them to the more congenial environment of the National Institute of the Colonies in Paris (aka Collège de la Marche). It was run by a stern but caring defrocked priest named Jean-Baptiste Coisnon who became the boys’ father-in-exile.

  Placide and Isaac’s education was paid for by the French government, which hoped to endear itself to Louverture but also wanted collateral, should General Louverture ever lose his patriotic fervor. The boys studied alongside the sons of prominent colonists, both white and of color. It must have been awkward for white boys orphaned by the Haitian Revolution to share rooms with the sons of the black generals who had launched it. The Louvertures also dined regularly a
t the residence of Joséphine Bonaparte, the daughter of creole planters from Martinique and the wife of Napoléon. Her husband was then in the process of conquering Egypt. They received from her the maternal love they missed so much; in return, Louverture arranged to rebuild a plantation that Joséphine had inherited in Saint-Domingue.34

  The Louvertures made rapid progress at the Institute of the Colonies. “They could not read in the year V [1797],” marveled their teacher Coisnon in 1800. “Now they can analyze Quintus Curtius Rufus and they have studied equations of the second degree and Newton’s binomial theorem.” They displayed their achievements every year in public ceremonies attended by the minister of the navy, who urged them to “bring back to the tropics the example of devotion to the Fatherland and the love of liberty and equality.”35

  The absence of the boys, which eventually stretched to more than five years, was hard to bear for their parents, but it was a necessary price to pay to secure the long-term success of the Louverture line. “Of all the gifts it gave to me, the education that the French government was kind enough to provide for my children is the one that touched me the most,” Louverture later wrote. “If I cannot leave them a personal fortune, then they will have a fine education that is worth more than the largest fortune. If I had not myself received a Christian education . . . I might be lost among the crowd today.” As always in Louverture’s life, the personal and the political overlapped. He regularly ended his official letters to the minister of the navy with a plea to take good care of his sons; meanwhile, he urged them in his private letters to meet the famous abolitionist bishop Henri Grégoire and to “pay close attention to what he will tell you.”36

  Isaac and Placide did not disappoint their father. They were soon able to write to him in perfect French. He replied accordingly, though he had to use a secretary to match their level of proficiency. In time, they fulfilled their father’s most ardent wish: full acculturation. “Raised among the French and their customs, we imbibed their principles,” Isaac proudly noted. “They really were two young Frenchmen,” wrote someone who met them in France—leaving aside, he added ominously, “their color.” Such racial prejudices, inherited from the prerevolutionary era, would do much to sour Louverture’s attachment to the French Republic over the following years.37