Toussaint Louverture Read online

  SIXTEEN

  PLANTER

  1800–1801

  ON 25 PLUVIÔSE of the year IV in the French revolutionary calendar (February 14, 1796), Toussaint Louverture learned that soldiers and workers from the region of Port-de-Paix were in open rebellion. Leaving his headquarters in Gonaïves, he made his way north, picking up troops along the way, until he reached the Andro plantation. There he met the commander of the rebellious troops, Etienne Datty, who had come with five hundred armed men and field workers to confront him. Louverture was undeterred by their menacing presence. “I entered the circle and, after preaching to them morals and reason and reproaching them for the murders they had committed, I told them that if they wished to preserve their liberty they needed to obey the laws of the Republic, be docile, and work.” If they had any grievances, they should have contacted him first instead of rebelling. “God said: ask and you will receive, knock and the door will be open to you.”1

  A spokesman for the rebels stepped forward and explained that their leader, Datty, had been unjustly stripped of his command. Datty was the one “who ate misery to win our liberty” during the slave revolt, he said. Also, no one had paid the field laborers for their work, and they were convinced that a restoration of slavery was at hand. All present nodded in agreement.

  Louverture listened attentively and sympathized with the workers’ plight, but he could not help but fault them for resorting to violence. By rebelling, he said, they were helping the enemies of liberty, who thought that “blacks are not made to be free,” because then “they don’t work anymore and commit thefts and murders.” Instead, they should prove “to the whole universe that Saint-Domingue can become rich again with free laborers.” The argument struck a chord, and the rebels agreed to go back to work. They vowed to become “so good that everyone will forget what we just did.”

  Leaving the Andro plantation, Louverture crisscrossed the region of Port-de-Paix to negotiate with other rebel groups, give more speeches, and arrest some of the troublemakers. After five days of this, he was nodding off during a celebratory dance organized by local cultivators when he received word that another commander had revolted during his absence from the western province. Galloping into the tired night, he headed south to suppress the uprising.

  Over the next few weeks, Louverture had to deal with the unruly leader Makaya (February 23, 1796); other unruly leaders named Paul Charrite, Thomas André, and Noël Artaud (April 5); upheavals in Gros-Morne (April 7) and Marmelade (April 9); and then another one in Gros-Morne (April 11); before another revolt broke out near Port-de-Paix, led by none other than the ever-troublesome Etienne Datty (April 14). After putting down three more revolts in Bombarde, Môle, and Saint-Louis du Nord, he finally had had enough: “My African brothers! How long will you let yourselves be manipulated by your most dangerous enemies like blind men?” He got his answer on May 11 when he faced another insurgency in Gros-Morne—and then one in Jean-Rabel—and on and on for most of 1796, and 1797, and the rest of his life.2

  This pattern of unrest was unsurprising in a colony beset by years of revolutionary upheavals. Only with the end of the War of the South in July 1800 did Saint-Domingue experience something it had not known for a decade: peace. For almost two years thereafter, with the exception of the occasional cultivator uprising and an attack on Santo Domingo, the colony enjoyed an unusually restful period. The reprieve gave Louverture an opportunity to focus on an issue that was of particular interest to him: the recovery of the plantation sector.

  His main obstacle was how to convince former slaves—such as the rebels of the Andro plantation—to get back to work. His solution—to enforce a labor status halfway between slavery and complete freedom—was typical of his desire to reconcile the interests of the planter class and the aspirations of former slaves. His efforts were unceasing, but the results were disappointing. The colonial economy bounced back, but only partly, and the many compromises he had to make along the way enraged his black base without gaining him the full acceptance of the white planter class.

  Whether sugar colonies could function without resorting to forced labor was a long-standing debate in Europe and the Caribbean. Apologists of slavery had long argued that no one worked in the tropics unless they were forced to do so, least of all lazy and childlike Africans, so abolishing slavery would lead to economic ruin. Abolitionists had replied that plantations could flourish with free workers, but aside from one inconclusive experiment by the Marquis of Lafayette, who had purchased a clove plantation in French Guiana in 1785 and then freed its slaves, this had not been demonstrated.3

  The Haitian Revolution was the abolitionist movement’s greatest test case—and an economic embarrassment. As soon as they had the chance, field hands fled their plantations in droves (sometimes killing their master first), and the colonial economy collapsed. In the weeks that followed the August 1791 slave revolt, in the region of Cap alone, 1,400 sugar- and coffee-growing estates were reduced to ashes. With a major commodities exporter suddenly out of world markets, prices skyrocketed while other producers (most notably Jamaica and Cuba) scrambled to make up for the shortfall.4

  When France formally abolished slavery two years later, abolitionist societies in the United States waited eagerly for the result of an experiment that, in their view, could prove or disprove their claim that free blacks could become productive members of society. They were disappointed. According to free-market economists, the promise of a salary should have been enough to entice black laborers back to work. But former slaves associated plantation labor with servitude: they preferred growing subsistence crops on a plot of their own to working on a former master’s estate, even as a salaried employee. The total production of colonial crops plunged 98 percent, declining from 226 million colonial livres in 1789 to 4 million in 1796. The Spanish and British invasions (1793–1798), the War of the South (1799–1800), and a major flood of the Artibonite River (1800) destroyed what the slave revolt had spared. In this context, Louverture did not so much seize power as inherit an economic wasteland. A planter who visited the plain of Cap in 1799 described it as a “desert.”5

  If the colony was going to be a major economic power, sugar was the only option. With the exception of pottery works and rum distilleries, Saint-Domingue had no manufacturing sector. Unlike Spanish colonies like Mexico and Peru, it had no silver mines. Nor was it a trading center like Curaçao or a privateering haven like the Bahamas. Saint-Domingue’s wealth derived from one thing and one thing only: the exportation of sugar, coffee, and other tropical crops. As Louverture, put it, “our mines are our plantations.”6

  Without sugar production on a massive scale, Saint-Domingue could not pay for imports of flour and gunpowder, and without flour and gunpowder it was exposed to famine, foreign invasion, and re-enslavement. If he could not get the plantations operating again, Louverture’s regime, which was financed by taxes on the production and exportation of tropical crops, could not function. His government came dangerously close to bankruptcy during the last months of the War of the South: the colonial treasury had to suspend all payments, raise taxes, fire half of the public servants, and cut the salaries of those who were left in order to avoid immediate default.7

  One way or another, Saint-Domingue needed plantations: large ones, too. Former slaves could conceivably have grown coffee on small plots (this became the norm in postindependence Haiti), but yeomanry was incompatible with the cultivation of sugarcane. Sugar plantations required large capital investments, so a sugar plantation could not hope to turn a profit without achieving economies of scale. Breaking apart large estates and distributing the land would have pleased Louverture’s supporters, but it would have forced him to abandon the colony’s iconic crop.

  The barrier was not only economic but psychological. Louverture was not nursed on the Jeffersonian ideal of an independent citizen-farmer. He came of age in a region of the globe where social prestige was bestowed upon large landowners—the “big whites”—and specifically, s
ugar planters like the Brédas. Despite (or because of) his servile past, Louverture desperately wanted to re-create a planter class, albeit one in which he and his fellow black generals would play the leading role, so that he could become what Haitians today call a gwo nèg, a “big black” or “big shot.” The most enthusiastic white converts to the Revolution were known as “white blacks”; in many ways, he was a “black white” who had made the economic worldview of his former masters his own.8

  Louverture saw many reasons to foster the recovery of the plantations, but ultimately the most compelling of them was that he stood to benefit financially. Prior to the Revolution, he had only owned a small plot of land in Haut-du-Cap, slivers of which he had sold in 1779–1781 to finance his failed foray into coffee-growing. After the outbreak of the slave revolt in 1791, during the years of his military and political ascent, his landholdings had multiplied. He acquired a cattle ranch in Santo Domingo (probably when he served Spain in 1793–1794), plantations around Gonaïves (possibly when he conquered the area for France in 1794), a house in Môle Saint-Nicolas (which Britain gave him when evacuating the town in 1798), and coffee estates near the southern town of Jérémie (which he leased after the War of the South). Toussaint and Suzanne Louverture eventually owned or leased a staggering thirty-one estates across Hispaniola. This self-made man, who did not even own his own body as a child, was now the richest individual in the colony. If he could only get his plantations to achieve their full potential, he could be the richest in the Americas.9

  It would have been impossible in ordinary times to acquire so many plantations. A single sugar estate could be worth more than a million colonial livres before the Revolution, so even the princely salary of 300,000 colonial francs a year that Louverture awarded himself as leader of the colony would not have sufficed to buy a single estate. “I never had much cash,” he later insisted. “I had many animals, I was rich with land, but I never had much cash.”10

  Louverture owed his landowning prowess to the peculiar circumstances of the Revolution. As violence spread, thousands of planters left Saint-Domingue. The colonial administration seized their assets, so by the late 1790s over half of the colony’s plantations were under state control. The colony then leased sequestered estates to private managers who paid a share of the production as rent. Here was an endless opportunity to enrich oneself off an exiled planter’s land.11

  A January 1798 French law specified that public servants and army officers could not lease plantations from the state. The law was designed to prevent them from using their influence to negotiate favorable terms. Louverture, however, simply used front men, such as his brother Paul, to circumvent the law. When the French agent Hédouville required that leases be awarded at public auctions to avoid any backroom deals, Louverture freed himself from the constraints by ousting Hédouville. In the months that followed, he rented numerous plantations in the western province that Britain had recently evacuated, and he did not hesitate to use his influence to lower his rent. It was easy to ignore the law when one had an army. Other officers of color did the same.12

  Louverture’s acquisitiveness put him on a collision course with his usual allies, the white colonists. They had hoped that he would help them contain the revolutionary impulses of the black population; they had worried that if he died, some uncouth radical like Moïse or Dessalines was next in line. With time, however, the white planters realized that Louverture had deceived them, and that he had no intention of giving back the estates that he had leased in their absence.

  Most of the exiles who returned to Saint-Domingue during Louverture’s ascendance experienced only frustration. Begging Louverture for a personal favor was the only way to recover one’s land, and even that humiliating experience was not always enough. One such planter, Pierre Chazotte, who returned from the United States in December 1800, endured months of delays; finally he concluded that Louverture had a “scheme of appropriating to himself the kingly revenues of all the estates belonging to absentees.” Broke but not yet broken, Chazotte went to Louverture’s personal residence to push his claims in person. Louverture made him wait all day in the parlor before peremptorily sending him away. “Get yourself away from my presence! Away! Away!” Louverture told him. Rather than settle for a subordinate role in the new Saint-Domingue, Chazotte left the colony and waited for better days to come.13

  Confiscating the plantations of exiled planters was just a first step. Outside the plain of Cap, which had been settled early in Saint-Domingue’s history, land was relatively plentiful, and it only became more so as white colonists died or fled. Far more valuable than land was the labor force needed to operate a large plantation: dozens of workers for a coffee plantation and hundreds for a sugar plantation. The challenge was to get field hands to work, now that slavery was no longer there to force them.

  After declaring emancipation in 1793–1794, French colonial administrators had tried hard to convince former slaves to keep working. Luxury goods were desirable, former slaves were told, and they could only acquire them if they earned a salary: idleness was evil, work was a moral duty, and freedmen should do their part to enrich a republic that had welcomed them as citizens. “Do not think that liberty . . . is a state of laziness and idleness,” Commissioner Sonthonax had warned them on the day he abolished slavery. Racists everywhere were convinced that “a freed African will no longer work,” he had said. “Prove them wrong.”14

  No one argued these two points better or more often than Louverture. “Work is necessary, it is a virtue” (March 1795). Disprove “the enemies of liberty . . . who think that blacks are not ready to be free” (February 1796). “No! Man cannot be free if he does not work” (July 1798). “Prove to the enemies of liberty that Saint-Domingue, cultivated by free hands, will recover its former splendor” (October 1798). “Liberty imposes more obligations on you than slavery did” (November 1798). “The safety of liberty imperiously requires it” (October 1800). “Shun idleness, it is the mother of all vices” (July 1801).15

  Louverture employed every tool at his disposal to deliver his message to every segment of the population. He outlawed the practice of Vodou, a religion he described as “an utterly vicious doctrine, because it only breeds disorder and idleness,” and promoted Christianity instead. He used his fluency in Kreyòl and a stock of parables, many of them borrowed directly from the Gospels, to reach out to the black population. After throwing a handful of white corn kernels into a jar filled with black corn kernels, he would remind his audience that they formed the vast majority of the colonial population: they had nothing to fear from a handful of white planters. At other times, he would mix water and wine, and ask field hands to separate one from the other. When they replied that it was impossible, he pointed out to them that this was precisely the point: whites and blacks were now inseparable.16

  By and large, former slaves turned a deaf ear to these admonitions. When propaganda failed them, Louverture and other French colonial officials switched from the proverbial carrot to the stick to keep laborers in the fields. They did not restore slavery, which was morally objectionable and politically unfeasible; instead, they designed an intermediate system. Former slaves became “cultivators,” for whom paid work was both a right and an obligation. We are accustomed to think of slavery and freedom as polar opposites today, but in the Caribbean, where labor forms like repartimiento (for Amerindians) and indentured servitude (for whites) had once been the norm, slavery and freedom were two endpoints on a continuum. The roots of the cultivator system can be traced back to the immediate aftermath of the slave revolt, when rebel leaders like Georges Biassou first outlined its main principles in an effort to contain the radicalism of their base. Sonthonax formalized it in French-controlled areas as soon as he abolished slavery in 1793. He announced that cultivators were no longer “someone else’s property,” could not be whipped, and had to be paid—but he also required that they sign one-year contracts on a plantation, because “in France, everyone is free but everyone w
orks.” Every colonial official, from Etienne de Polverel to Etienne Laveaux, André Rigaud, and Gabriel de Hédouville, maintained Sonthonax’s restrictive cultivator system, which was also employed in the French colonies of Guadeloupe and Guiana.17

  Louverture served French officials until 1798 and then vied with Rigaud for popular support, so it was only after winning the War of the South in July 1800 that he could truly make his mark on the cultivator system. He lost no time. On August 4, he complained that cultivators in the South were “merely running to and fro and taking absolutely no care of cultivation,” and he ordered them back to work. The cultivator system of his predecessors, which he had occasionally criticized for political advantage, was here to stay. In a novel move, he asked the army to enforce labor regulations. This militarization of plantation work would become the hallmark of his rule.18

  In October 1800, Louverture unveiled a comprehensive set of labor regulations that remained in place for the rest of his career. It was arguably the most important piece of legislation of his career because it clarified his thinking on the Revolution’s signature issue, labor. When it came time to pick between two extremes—slavery and unfettered freedom—Louverture stopped well short of the latter. By order of General Louverture, all former field slaves, even those who had settled in urban areas during the Revolution, would return to their original plantations, sometimes under their former masters. Those who refused would be “arrested and punished as severely as soldiers,” which implied that plantation runaways could be shot as deserters. He thereby merged the two worlds he knew best—the sugar plantation and the army camp—into a kind of military-agricultural complex.19