Toussaint Louverture Read online

  Although women had been a minority on prerevolutionary plantations, they now formed the bulk of the labor force. The reason was that so many men had died in the Revolution or were still serving in the army. The demographic shift was not lost on Louverture, who went out of his way to use both the masculine and the feminine versions of the French word for “cultivator” in his labor code. He expressly forbade female field hands from entering army camps, presumably so they could not forge alliances with the men charged with enforcing the new labor laws. He also railed against women who moved to towns and cities to live of “libertinage.” Equal work did not bring equal pay: when the plantation’s crop was distributed as salary, female field hands received two-thirds of the share their male counterparts got. Women were also denied the higher-paying jobs, such as sugar refiner (which paid double the usual male share) and foreman (three shares).20

  In a nod to black public opinion, Louverture did ban the use of chains and the whip, and he expelled a planter who was accused of branding one of her young cultivators. But these measures were not always enough to quiet his critics. Days after he issued the October 1800 regulations, some planters told their former slaves, “I will command you as in the past, and you will see that you are not free.” The claim traveled like wildfire among the black population. Louverture had to threaten any planter making such “incendiary” remarks with jail time to avert a revolt.21

  More regulations followed. In February 1801, Louverture banned land sales of fewer than 50 carreaux (about 160 acres) to prevent plantation laborers from establishing subsistence farms. In July, he declared that cultivators, who had once been able to sign one-year (then three-year) contracts and change employers, would now have to work on the same plantation for life, which essentially turned them into serfs. In September, he decreed that cultivators would need his personal authorization before marrying someone from another plantation, a rule that had been in place under the Old Regime. Some cultivators wondered if Louverture’s strict labor regulations had brought the Revolution back full circle to the days of the Black Code.22

  Louverture emphasized that being sent back to the fields was not the same as being re-enslaved, but the legal distinction between a cultivator and a slave seemed overly theoretical to many freedmen. For them, true liberty was more tangible: it meant cultivating one’s own land, settling in town if one wished, and being allowed to marry someone from a different plantation without having to seek prior authorization. The harsh manner in which Louverture’s officers implemented his regulations did nothing to allay their fears. The ten-day week of the new revolutionary calendar also meant that laborers only got three days of rest for each thirty-day month, instead of the four or five days a month they had been entitled to under the old seven-day week. This was a notable change for people who had begun their slave revolt as a fight for three days of rest a week.

  Had the Revolution’s true purpose been to end labor exploitation, former slaves asked themselves, or had they fought a revolution so that rebel leaders could confiscate the plantations of white colonists? Had they traded one master for another? Surely they hadn’t fought so they could be herded into the fields to work at gunpoint. The social struggle that emerged was in many ways a reprise of the rivalries that had pitted African-born field hands against Caribbean-born skilled workers on prerevolutionary plantations. The African-born freedmen who formed the vast majority of the plantation workforce had the nagging suspicion that the creole elite and the formerly free had used them as a “stepping stone” and hijacked the slave revolt for their own purposes.23

  The cultivators did not give in. They groused and they grumbled; they disobeyed; they rebelled; they threatened to kill their managers; they ran away. In short, they used all the modes of resistance that they had developed as slaves. During one of the many social upheavals that roiled post-abolition Saint-Domingue, an agitator killed a plantation supervisor and spread the word that Louverture was planning to restore slavery. Louverture rushed to the scene and tried to reason with the cultivators, but “they took up arms against me and my only reward was a bullet in my leg,” he protested. In a fit of anger, he decreed that stealing plantation produce was henceforth punishable by death. That was a penalty harsher than the one prescribed by the old Black Code.24

  The passage of time diminished neither the cultivators’ obstinacy nor Louverture’s willingness to use force to impose his economic model. Just one month after he issued his October 1800 regulations, a major revolt broke out in western and southern Saint-Domingue. Over 1,000 cultivators died in the ensuing repression. Another uprising hit Cayes in May 1801, and then an even larger one took place near Cap in October 1801, after which Louverture had 5,000 cultivators put to death. As was his habit, Louverture delegated purely repressive tasks to his subordinates, who had acquired plantations of their own and had a vested interest in forcing the laborers back to work. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who served as inspector of cultivation in the western province, was particularly feared. He was known to strike and even kill the laborers and the foremen who did not meet their production quotas.25

  To Louverture, the level of violence was justified. The only material consequence of the 1791 slave revolt had been the destruction of the plantation economy, which was replaced by chaos and thievery, a point that buttressed the arguments of the critics of abolition. Louverture was trying to build a functioning state that the rest of the world would see as a model. In curtailing the cultivators’ individual freedoms, so as to defend emancipation’s good name, he saw himself as safeguarding liberty for all.

  Regulating labor was bound to achieve little as there were not enough laborers in the first place. The age-old problem of the shortage of workers in Saint-Domingue only became more acute after 1791: the war ravaged the black population, planters took some of their slaves with them into exile, the slave trade ended, and the army drafted all the able-bodied males. “The Revolution was a prodigious reaper,” wrote the French agent Roume, who estimated that the population dropped by one-third (to 400,000) between 1791 and 1800. In addition to plantation laborers, Louverture needed a standing army of about 20,000 soldiers to maintain internal order and protect Saint-Domingue against foreign invasion.26

  Like the rulers of prerevolutionary Saint-Domingue, Louverture looked overseas for a solution to his labor shortage. He asked the planters who had taken their slaves with them to the United States to send them back. After an incident in which a US merchant tried to kidnap a black man, he began to search outgoing vessels. He accused Spanish traders of taking black laborers to Santo Domingo. Most importantly, while negotiating with a British diplomat, Louverture confided that he was eager to encourage “the importation of negroes from Guinea who are to be purchased as formerly.” Louverture would free them “after the labour of a certain number of years” in a system reminiscent of indentured servitude. That was arguably better than the fate Africans would endure if they were sold in another colony, but the fact remained that he was willing to sign a Faustian bargain with British slave traders to import African flesh by the boatful. The project was so politically sensitive that Louverture kept it a closely guarded secret; we only know of it through British sources. His own son thought his father actually had a “vast project” to “fling himself, with a handful of brave men, on the African continent, to abolish the slave trade and slavery.”27

  Louverture formally legalized the restoration of the slave trade in July 1801 and then sent his trusted diplomatic envoy, Joseph Bunel, to Jamaica to purchase laborers. Bunel probably did not have the time to buy anyone, because the British broke off diplomatic negotiations during his visit. But Louverture’s willingness to do business with slave traders underlines how far he was willing to go. It had been a long time since Louverture had denounced his colleagues Georges Biassou and Jean-François Papillon for their willingness to trade slaves in Santo Domingo, and even longer since his parents had left their homeland as part of the Atlantic slave trade.28

  The exact sta
te of the Dominguan economy was the subject of fierce debates in Europe in the late 1790s. Critics of emancipation described Saint-Domingue as a backwater, arguing that restoring slavery was a prerequisite to the colony’s revival. Well aware that Saint-Domingue’s economic record would reflect on the merits of emancipation, and more generally his worth as a colonial administrator, Louverture countered that the plantation sector was actually booming. “The cultivators’ zeal is as satisfying as can be hoped,” he wrote in 1797. He hoped to “live long enough to see the colony brought to a degree of prosperity unknown before the Revolution.” By 1802, he proudly declared his mission accomplished: “Cultivation and commerce were flourishing and the island had reached a degree of splendor never seen before.”29

  The reality was more complex. Saint-Domingue never matched past production levels under Louverture, let alone exceeded them, but the economy did recover from the low point it had reached during the Revolution. Exports, from an estimated 93 million French livres of sugar and 76 million livres of coffee in 1789, dropped to nearly zero in 1794–1795, but bounced back to 18 million and 43 million livres, respectively, under Louverture’s leadership. Plantations in the West and South performed relatively well, as did the coffee sector in general, but the sugar plantations of the northern plain, which had borne the brunt of the revolutionary upheavals, were still in shambles. A full recovery would take years.30

  The finances of Louverture’s regime remain something of a mystery to this day. Public expenses were exorbitant because of the large peacetime army he maintained to protect himself from his enemies, both internal and external. To raise revenue and balance his budget, he had to increase production taxes and export tariffs several times in 1800–1801. When planters and merchants complained that a convalescent economy could not bear the fiscal burden, he backed down. Officially, his treasury was losing money, but Louverture paid his troops little and late, so there were persistent rumors that he was secretly accumulating a war chest. These rumors were apparently true: in 1802, French forces found stashes of money worth several million francs in various locations.31

  The incomplete recovery of the colonial economy under Louverture was not a reflection of his limitations as an administrator. Louverture spent every waking hour maintaining order, investing in plantations, and urging laborers to work. The main obstacles were the same ones the Brédas had faced in the 1780s: the field hands’ reluctance to work and the staggering investments needed to rebuild the sugar plantations. One French expert estimated that it would have taken anywhere from 40 million to 4 billion colonial francs to get the plantations back into working order after the ten years of constant warfare that had ravaged the colony. Whether the sugar sector would ever be financially sustainable remained an open question.32

  Louverture knew this as well as anyone. One of the plantations he had taken over during the Revolution was the Manquets plantation near Cap, which had once been the largest of the Bréda estates. He invested an immense amount of money into it in an attempt to revive its operations, including over 4,000 gourdes (30,000 colonial francs) to renovate the water mill, but its output amounted to a mere 45,000 colonial francs in 1800 and 97,000 in 1801—an improvement, but still just a fifth of the prerevolutionary revenue. To save funds, Louverture delayed distributing shares to workers, forcing the plantation manager, Jean-Baptiste (possibly the same man Louverture had freed in 1776), to beg him to send some cash. Jean-Baptiste had not been paid for two years, he reminded Louverture, and “the cultivators are always pestering me about their pay.” If they were not paid for their labor, they asked, what differentiated them from slaves?33

  For most of his life, Louverture had been forced to contend with events beyond his control: as a slave of the Brédas, as a subordinate of Biassou, and as a general serving French commissioners, he could not do as he wished, and that makes it difficult for historians to understand his real aims and intentions. The period after 1800 is instructive because for the first time in his life Louverture’s powers were almost limitless. Revealingly, he did not use his newfound authority to fully extirpate slavery from Saint-Domingue; nor did he attempt to export abolition to other shores. Rather, he used it to send former slaves back to work under a reformed labor system. Louverture’s equivocation was representative of an age that had to reconcile Enlightenment principles and the labor requirements of plantations. Like three other great figures of the Age of Revolutions—Thomas Jefferson, Simón Bolívar, and Napoléon—he had conflicted views on the delicate matter of human bondage. As a rebel leading a population of self-emancipated slaves, Louverture could not and would not renounce the ideal of universal freedom. But as a planter and a statesman, he would not and could not let the island’s plantation-based economy founder for lack of workers. He never adequately solved the problem of marrying individual liberty with economic development, not even in 1801, the most successful year of his career.

  SEVENTEEN

  GOVERNOR GENERAL

  Early 1801

  IN THE EARLY DAYS OF APRIL 1800, Toussaint Louverture formally asked the French agent Philippe Roume to authorize him to take over Santo Domingo. The unresolved status of the Spanish colony had vexed him for years. Spain had ceded it to France in 1795 under the Peace of Basel, but no official accession had taken place owing to the opposition of Governor Joaquín García. Then, as Louverture’s power grew, France concluded that it was wise not to add to the territories under his control. France wanted to retain independent access to Santo Domingo’s ports in case it decided to send an expedition to remove Louverture from office. As months turned into years, Santo Domingo thus remained in Spanish hands.1

  It was Louverture who revived the Santo Domingo issue in 1799–1800. Theoretically, seizing Santo Domingo would have enabled him to abolish slavery in a colony where it was still the law of the land. But slavery as practiced in Santo Domingo was considered comparatively benign by the standards of the time, whereas Louverture was enforcing an increasingly strict cultivator system on Saint-Domingue’s plantations, so the contrast between Spanish slavery and French liberty was not a clear one. Louverture actually complained that many cultivators were “fleeing to the Spanish part to avoid work or punishment.” The young men who refused to be drafted into his army also fled there.2

  Strategic considerations other than abolition were foremost on Louverture’s mind. As André Rigaud began to lose ground during the War of the South, many of his supporters found refuge in Santo Domingo, where they received a warm welcome from Governor García and from the French agent in Santo Domingo, who was a mixed-race supporter of Rigaud. Only by seizing Santo Domingo could Louverture forever rid Hispaniola of Rigaud’s clique.3

  In April 1800, after the fall of Jacmel made clear that victory in the War of the South was imminent, Louverture asked Roume to give his blessing to an immediate takeover. He expected Roume’s assent to be a formality, since he held him prisoner in the government house of Cap. But Roume refused, in keeping with his instructions from France. To put pressure on him, Louverture asked various towns of the colony to write petitions demanding his dismissal, a tactic he had employed against Hédouville in the past, but this action did little to sway Roume, who by this point only wanted to return to France.4

  Louverture did not relent. On April 10, 1800, 5,000 cultivators and soldiers marched to the outskirts of Cap and demanded to see Roume. General Moïse, who was at their head, had an intimidating reputation. Everyone dreaded a repeat of the June 1793 riot, which had led to the burning of Cap and the death or exile of thousands of its white inhabitants. To save the city, Roume agreed to follow Moïse to Haut-du-Cap and address the demonstrators. Insults, accusations, and death threats awaited him there. The demonstrators bitterly reproached Roume for opposing the takeover of Santo Domingo. Roume remained calm throughout the ordeal, guessing from past experience that the protest had been staged by order of Moïse’s uncle, a native of Haut-du-Cap. The threats continued for eight full days; Roume, the official representative of
the French Republic, spent much of that time locked up in a chicken coop.

  Louverture had to come in person to deliver the final pitch. When he arrived, he demanded imperiously that Roume present himself at once and account for his obstinacy. Defiant as ever, Roume replied that he was France’s representative and protocol dictated that Louverture come to him. “So much firmness surprised Toussaint, who agreed to appear below the second-floor gallery where Roume was awaiting him with singular aplomb,” wrote a witness. “Without leaving his horse, Toussaint spewed out reproaches and threats,” again without apparent effect. Only when it became clear that the safety of his family and that of the white population of Cap hung in the balance did Roume grudgingly sign the document authorizing Louverture to take over Santo Domingo.5

  Louverture lost no time. In May 1800, he sent a delegation to take possession of the colony. To allay Spanish fears about black rule, Louverture selected the white general Pierre Agé to head it and promised not to abolish slavery. Santo Domingo “will continue to be treated and governed as in the past,” he instructed Agé. “We have often discussed the poor way in which universal liberty was proclaimed in the French part [without a transition period], and how it would be wise to implement it in this part without causing tremors: so we must not change anything to the system that exists.”6

  These reassurances were not enough to convince García. The governor replied that he needed to ask Madrid for guidance, which guaranteed several months’ delay. Next, a Spanish mob chased Agé from Santo Domingo, after which Roume informed García that his approval of the takeover had been extracted against his will, and countermanded it. Word then came that a messenger was on his way from France with orders that Louverture could not have Santo Domingo.