Toussaint Louverture Read online

  This increase was made possible by the unstable political context along the Slave Coast, and ultimately by the willingness of local officials like Hippolyte’s father to sell their enemies to European traders. At once predator and prey, the Alladas fought the vassal state of Whydah to the south and then the expanding kingdoms of Akwamu, Dahomey, and Oyo to the west, north, and east. The wars reached their tragic climax in 1724–1726 when King Agaja of Dahomey conquered Allada. The Dahomey king’s pacification of Allada and its successor states, and then his further expansion to Whydah and the coast, lasted until 1740, at which point Agaja died and his people became embroiled in a succession war of their own. These troubled times provided plenty of opportunities to raid and kidnap and sell. From the 1720s to the 1740s, Dahomey alone exported 6,000 slaves a year, most of them captured in and around the old Allada kingdom.

  Louverture’s father, Hippolyte, “made prisoner and sold” when “his great tribe was incorporated into the kingdom of Dahomey,” was among the casualties of Dahomean imperialism. So was his first wife. Their children were apparently deported alongside their parents as well.5

  Slaves who had been purchased or captured in the interior of Allada were usually taken to the slave emporium of Glehue near the coast, where they awaited their fate in a dreadful stockade. This must have been a traumatic experience for Hippolyte, who could legitimately fear the worst for himself and his family. Slaves who attracted no buyers could be killed outright. His only hope was to be ransomed by relatives or sold locally so that he could at least remain in his homeland.

  Both of those options eluded him, however, and in or around 1740, Hippolyte and his family were sold to French slave traders. A family tradition specifies that it was an Arab merchant who arranged the sale, which is possible, as some Arab merchants were active in Glehue. The main currency in western Africa was the cowry, a type of seashell from the Maldives; Hippolyte’s life was worth three hundred pounds of those.6

  Because Glehue is located three miles inland, Hippolyte and his family were then taken across a lagoon to a sandbar, where they were stripped of their clothes, branded, and handed over to their European buyers. Louverture’s father, whose tattoos and scarifications were a sign of pride, because they indicated his rank as an Allada aristocrat, now bore a shameful mark of his servile status on his burning skin. So did his wife and crying children. They were led onto a shallop, which battled the frightful surf all the way to a European ship waiting offshore. In time, this ship would ferry the hapless family to some unknown destination.

  It probably took several months for the ship to fill up with enough captives to make the trip. Meanwhile, the white sailors, who had no immunity against African fevers, would have fretted about the delays. But the delays gave Hippolyte some time to familiarize himself with the floating prison that had become his home. Women and children were probably few on his ship, because two-thirds of all the slaves bought by French slavers were adult men, and probably more so in a war zone like the Slave Coast.7

  French slaving records rarely mention the names of individual slaves, so we cannot know definitively on which ship Hippolyte and his family embarked. But the ship was probably outfitted in Nantes, which was the main slave-trading port in France, or Le Havre, where the French planters who eventually bought Louverture’s father had a business partner. The ship that best fits the timeline is the Hermione, a slave trader that visited the Slave Coast in the fall of 1739 and left the island of Principe, just off the African continent, on May 7, 1740, with a cargo of 260 souls.

  Two generations before the Haitian Revolution, resistance was already the order of the day. No fewer than 37 crewmen were on the Hermione to guard against a slave revolt (a distinct possibility, since revolts broke out on 150 of the 3,300 slaving expeditions launched from France). Despite such tight security, two men and three women managed to throw themselves overboard and drown, regaining in death a degree of control over their own fate that they had lost as living beings. Altogether, the Atlantic claimed the lives of 26 of the slaves and 7 of the crewmen on board the Hermione. As an adult, Louverture was deathly afraid of sea travel, and it is not hard to see why: he must have heard many a horrifying tale of the Middle Passage from his father while growing up.8

  When sailing, men spent most of their time packed and locked below decks while women stayed in the main quarters, where they were expected to entertain the crew in any way the crewmen deemed fit. Hippolyte may have found himself just a few feet away from his wife, close enough to hear what was happening, yet bound and impotent to do anything about it.

  It took two months and two thousand leagues over the sea before the Hermione finally reached the small islands of the Lesser Antilles in the southern Caribbean, veered to the northwest, and proceeded on a broad reach with the trade winds behind her until the island of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic today) rose above the horizon. Louverture’s father was bound for France’s largest and richest Caribbean colony, Saint-Domingue, which alone consumed 80 percent of the slaves sold in France’s American empire.

  Officially ceded by Spain in 1697, Saint-Domingue was a young colony compared with Santo Domingo (conquered by Spain in 1493), Cuba (Spain, 1511), Guadeloupe and Martinique (France, 1635), and Jamaica (Britain, 1659). A haven for stateless hunters and pirates in the early decades of French rule, the colony was still rough around the edges in the 1740s. But this late bloomer, blessed with fertile soil, abundant rain and sun, and the entrepreneurial spirit of its inhabitants, was destined to surpass all other Caribbean colonies, French and otherwise.

  Saint-Domingue’s economic rise was accompanied by a dramatic increase in slave imports, which eventually totaled over 900,000. By comparison, the United States imported fewer than 500,000. But the death rate in Saint-Domingue was so high, even for African natives with some degree of immunity to tropical diseases, that the slave population only rose gradually, from 9,000 in 1700 to 47,000 in 1720, 148,000 in 1751, and 465,000 in 1789, by which point there were already 694,000 slaves in the United States, even though Saint-Domingue had imported far more slaves.9

  Had Hippolyte landed in South Carolina instead of Saint-Domingue, Toussaint Louverture would have lived through the American Revolution instead of the Haitian Revolution, and history might have unfolded differently. But the Hermione was bound for Saint-Domingue, which she finally reached after seventy-five days of sailing. The ship surgeon was concerned that thirty slaves were in immediate danger of dying and urged the captain to stop in the first major port of Saint-Domingue. It was the city of Cap, which the Hermione reached on August 21, 1740.

  For Louverture’s father and his family, the Middle Passage ended the day their ship sailed into the Bay of Cap on the northern coast of Saint-Domingue. The town was wedged between a row of steep hills and the bay, which was dotted with warships and merchantmen. It was a recent French settlement that had only become the capital of the colony in 1711. Half of Cap had burned in a fire in 1735—one of many conflagrations it would endure in Louverture’s time—but it had been rebuilt in stone and was fast becoming a sizable town. The plain of Cap, dominated by sugar plantations, loomed farther to the south.

  The anchor dropped. As was the norm, slaves would have been prepped for sale, fed, and oiled while they wondered what would become of them. Equally bewildering was the Jesuit priest who guided the slaves into performing the sign of the cross before baptizing them under a deluge of Latin and French phrases. A doctor certified that the ship did not carry epidemic diseases, and eager purchasers then rushed onboard to get first pick, all the while complaining about the rising price of Allada slaves. “Almost all sugar makers want slaves from this nation,” wrote an overseer of the plantation where Louverture grew up, so “they cost a lot.” Natives of Allada were particularly sought after by French planters, who viewed them as “hard-working” and “intelligent” people who were “better suited to sugar work” than other West Africans, but one should be wary of using ethnic stereotypes to unders
tand Louverture, especially since he never defined himself as an Allada as an adult.10

  Hippolyte could understand nothing of the rapid-fire French of the negotiators, but he must have sensed that something was taking place that was a matter of life and death. Some slaves changed hands, while others, too sickly to be sold, were sent ashore to holding pens that even apologists of slavery found “heartbreaking.”11

  Tragically, Hippolyte’s wife and children were taken away from him after they reached Saint-Domingue. A French colonist bought them and took them to the region of Cayes in the southern province, where Hippolyte’s wife was baptized and given the Christian name of Catherine. Separated from her husband by two hundred miles, she never adjusted to her new life and the demise of her marriage. According to a family tradition, “a mortal sorrow took over her soul” and she died. She was not forgotten: decades later, Louverture still remembered how the Atlantic slave trade had “torn the son from his mother, the brother from his sister, and the father from his son.” There was little to do but mourn until the wars of the Haitian Revolution finally gave Toussaint Louverture a chance to visit southern Saint-Domingue and reunite with his estranged half-sister.12

  Hippolyte’s journey ended much closer to port: he was taken to the Bréda plantation just outside Cap, which was named after its founder, Pantaléon de Bréda. Bréda was a native of southwestern France, as were many of his employees, which likely explains why Louverture spoke French with a pronounced southern accent (Louverture was otherwise not very impressed by French southerners, whom he viewed as braggarts with a tendency to make toothless threats). Bréda, a fourth son who did not stand to inherit significant property in France, had enrolled in the navy in the late seventeenth century. Once in Saint-Domingue, he had married a local heiress, Elizabeth Bodin. Their marriage, unequal parts love and economic interest, was typical of their milieu: the well-born Bréda gained access to a network of in-laws, while the financial success of the Bodins was validated by a prestigious marriage to a French noble.13

  Bréda had picked a perfect time to come to Saint-Domingue. The colony was still largely unsettled in the early 1700s, so French authorities granted homesteads for free to anyone who promised to develop the land. France had instituted pesky trade restrictions, but they were largely ineffective owing to near-constant wars with Britain and widespread smuggling. The economy was booming. Cattle, tobacco, and indigo had successively dominated, but sugar was now king. The number of sugar estates jumped from 138 in 1713 to 339 in 1730 and 450 in 1739. Within a generation, Saint-Domingue became the world’s largest exporter of sugar.14

  The Bréda plantations. Drawn by Philippe Girard and Jean-Louis Donnadieu.

  At a time when land and slaves were still affordable, a newcomer could make a fortune in his lifetime, especially if, like Pantaléon de Bréda, he got a head start by marrying well. Bréda was a rich man when he died in 1738. The assets of his widow, Elizabeth Bodin-Bréda, who managed the family fortune by the time Louverture’s father landed in Cap, were estimated at the impressive sum of 1.7 million colonial livres in 1750, and 2.3 million in 1754, by which point the Bréda family plantations were scattered all over the plain of Cap. It was on one of those plantations, the Bréda estate in Haut-du-Cap, that Louverture’s father lived out the rest of his life.15

  Transitioning to a Caribbean environment—a process known as “seasoning” in the planter lingo—was hard for African-born slaves. They had to adapt to a new trade, new food, and new people speaking French, unfamiliar tongues from other regions of Africa, and the local Kreyòl pidgin. Ethnic identities, already in flux on the coast of Africa as a result of the disruptions caused by the slave trade, were reshuffled once more. Even one’s gods and name were up for renegotiation: like his estranged wife, Catherine, Louverture’s father was baptized; it was at his baptism that he received the Christian name of Hippolyte. His original African name has been lost to us.

  Unable to adapt, some freshly imported slaves would “let themselves die rather than work,” a plantation overseer later reported. To lessen the risk of suicide and facilitate the transition to plantation life, the Brédas usually placed new imports under the tutelage of an older slave from the same ethnic group. They fed them a richer diet than the rest of their slaves and gave them less demanding tasks, such as weeding the cane fields, until they were able to perform more arduous labor.16

  According to a family tradition, Hippolyte was soon granted his freedom along with the use of five slaves because he was a king’s son, but such privileged treatment is implausible on a for-profit plantation. More likely, he benefited from a large support network because he was of aristocratic background and because there were so many other Alladas in the area. Alladas were the single largest ethnic group in Saint-Domingue in the 1740s. Even in later decades, when they were eclipsed by the growing number of imports from the Congo, people of Allada descent retained a special aura in Saint-Domingue. However low Hippolyte had fallen, there were many slaves in Saint-Domingue who ranked even lower than he did.17

  After he was separated from his first wife, Hippolyte remarried a fellow slave named Pauline: Louverture’s mother. Nothing is known of her background except that, like Hippolyte’s first wife, she was a native of the Slave Coast and a member of the Aja ethnic group. She was “beautiful and virtuous,” according to Louverture’s son, who never knew her personally, and so must have gotten his information from his father. Beginning their lives anew, the couple started a family together. They gave their firstborn child a Christian name: Toussaint.18

  TWO

  CHILD

  c. 1743–1754

  PARISHIONERS GATHERED at the Catholic church in Cap on November 1, 1743, to celebrate All Saints’ Day. The Mass unfolded uneventfully until, in the midst of Holy Communion, a kerfuffle broke out in the front pews. As members of the colonial elite lined up to receive the Eucharist, a senior court clerk and the assistant district attorney jostled for position. Elbows flailed and tempers frayed, but neither man was willing to concede that the other stood one step higher on the social ladder and should take Communion before him. Their silly dispute may seem trivial to us, but the matter was considered so important in the highly stratified society of Saint-Domingue that the colonial court of appeals in Cap dedicated its entire session to it the following day (the clerk won).1

  Meanwhile, just a few miles away on the Bréda plantation of Haut-du-Cap, a woman was giving birth to her infant son. Young, black, and enslaved, he was a nobody by the standards of the colony. Yet fifty-eight years later he would become governor of Saint-Domingue and outrank all the elite whites who had towered above him at the moment of his birth.

  Retracing the childhood of a slave is an arduous task. In the documentary record, slaves are little more than entries on accounting ledgers—and these are missing prior to 1785 for the Bréda plantation. Haitian oral traditions help fill in some blanks, but by nature they are unreliable; so are the recollections of Louverture’s offspring and later accounts written by French authors who did not know him during his youth.2

  As a result, the exact circumstances of Louverture’s birth remain a mystery. His full name is usually rendered as “François Dominique Toussaint Louverture,” though early documents only list him as “Toussaint from Bréda,” after the plantation on which he was born. The year of his birth is traditionally listed as 1743, which is plausible, but no baptismal record has been found, and the earliest archival sources list alternate dates, ranging from 1737 to 1756. His birthday fell on May 20, according to oral traditions, but his first name, which means “All Saints’ Day” in French, strongly suggests that he was actually born on November 1.3

  Louverture’s origins are also obscure because he wished to keep them so. After learning to read and write as an adult, he could have recorded his early life for posterity, yet he chose not to. In the lengthy personal memoir that he wrote shortly before his death, he only mentioned in passing that “I was a Slave.” Did he not want his French colleagu
es to think of him as a son of Africa? Did he want to hide from the black population that his experience of slavery had been far from typical? We do not know. Instead, we must turn to surviving plantation and church records to re-create his youth.4

  Louverture entered our world on the Bréda plantation of Haut-du-Cap in the outskirts of Cap-Français. According to Haitian traditions, the midwife foresaw his destiny and raised him skyward, incanting, “Boy, whites will kneel before you.” As was the custom of Allada midwives, she then cauterized his umbilical cord with a glowing ember.5

  Some slaves killed their infants to spare them a life of misery and allow them to rejoin their ancestors in Africa, which the Vodou religion associates with Heaven. Louverture’s parents, who brought one child after another into the world, clearly had different plans. However unwelcome the chain of events that had brought them to Saint-Domingue, the colony was their new home. Louverture inherited their attitude: instead of lamenting his misfortune, he chose to adapt.

  Louverture was the first of Pauline and Hippolyte’s children. More followed as years passed, five of whom survived early childhood. After Toussaint came Marie-Jeanne, then Paul, Pierre, and Jean. Toussaint Louverture was particularly close to his brother Paul, whom he later promoted to general, albeit in the protective and overbearing manner of an older brother. His youngest sibling, nicknamed Gaou because he looked just like his African grandfather, was born in 1774, by which point Louverture was about thirty, so Louverture’s mother must have been very young when she had him.6