Toussaint Louverture Read online

  Being separated from their sons was hard for Toussaint and Suzanne Louverture. It took one to three months for a ship to cross the Atlantic, and more in wartime, because most ships had to transit through neutral ports in the United States. As a result, letters from Isaac and Placide were few and far between. Worse, Louverture suspected that his sons’ letters were “dictated” to them by his French enemies, because they dwelt at length on the shortcomings of his policies.25

  When Louverture set in motion his plans to annex Santo Domingo and sideline Roume, he simultaneously began a desperate campaign to repatriate his sons. “My intention would be to get one of them back . . . to offer me a bit of happiness and consolation, as well as to his sweet mother,” he implored, even offering to send his youngest son, Saint-Jean, as a replacement at a future date. But the first consul would not let go of his sons when his spies’ reports informed him that “Toussaint is very attached to his children.” Napoléon had no other means of pressure at his disposal.26

  In 1800, Louverture sent two trusted envoys, Augustin d’Hébécourt and Christophe Huin, to France. As they passed through Philadelphia, the French consul learned that their mission was to bring Louverture’s sons back to Saint-Domingue by any means necessary, which would “entirely free this general of his ties to France.” At the consul’s urging, Huin and Hébécourt were placed under surveillance as soon as they reached France and prevented from getting anywhere near the school where Placide and Isaac were studying. Napoléon’s extensive police network later uncovered two other plots to abduct the boys.27

  After the kidnapping plots were foiled, Louverture begged Napoléon again and again in 1801 to send his children back. His sons pled their own case, too, but to no avail. His letters took on a sorrowful tone when he realized that his sons would remain in France indefinitely. “Your mother wishes, just as I do, for you to return, and kisses you tenderly,” he wrote. “I kiss you with all my Heart and will remain your good father for the rest of my life.” He could not declare independence as long as there was a glimmer of hope that his sons might return.28

  Another moderating influence as Louverture flirted with independence in the summer of 1801 was Charles de Vincent, a white fortifications expert who had served him loyally over the years while refusing at the same time to forsake his native France. After learning of the main clauses of the constitution, Vincent warned Louverture that he was being “dangerously ambitious against the interests of our mother [France], to which you owe far more than I do.” All that was left for France to do was to appoint “chargés d’affaires and ambassadors,” Vincent quipped, because Saint-Domingue was now effectively an independent dominion. No longer accustomed to brooking any dissent, Louverture reacted with anger and explained that some “occult force” was pushing him onwards and that nothing could hold him back.29

  But Louverture soon concluded that Vincent, who had gone back and forth between France and Saint-Domingue many times during the Revolution as an official envoy and knew the first consul personally, might have a point. He ordered that printed copies of his constitution, which he had presented to the public with so much fanfare during the July 7, 1801, ceremony, not be distributed to avoid bringing too much attention to its content. He then sent Vincent to France with a manuscript copy of the constitution and a most delicate mission: to obtain Napoléon’s blessing.30

  In three successive strikes, each of them brilliantly executed over the span of six months, Louverture had invaded Santo Domingo, ousted Roume, and passed a constitution making him governor general for life. He would soon enough learn whether France would forgive him for his actions, as it had so often done in the past, or if he had overreached. After accomplishing so much in so little time, he could have rested on his laurels. Instead, he spent the second half of 1801 exercising a power that was as absolute as it was tenuous.

  EIGHTEEN

  GOD?

  Late 1801

  TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE VISITED Port-Républicain in the fall of 1801 to set up one of the tribunals specified by his new constitution. An impressive ceremony in his honor awaited him there. The town’s notables in tow, he marched between rows of soldiers clad in full dress uniform and proceeded under a triumphal arch, as if he were a Roman emperor back from campaigning against the Gauls. He then took his seat on a gilded chair worthy of a king’s throne, where he listened to speeches as fawning as those intended for a prerevolutionary governor. He was Hercules, the new Spartacus, and Alexander the Great, his admirers explained. He was the black Napoléon. The day ended with a Te Deum Mass, which was fitting for a man who had begun to compare himself to Jesus Christ. “Man proposes and God disposes of him,” he liked to say. In many ways, he was now God made man.1

  Just three years earlier, when visiting the same city, Louverture had reprimanded the population for celebrating his arrival with too much fanfare. “Only God,” he replied, “should be venerated like that.” By 1801, he expected elaborate ceremonies in every town that he graced with his lofty presence. “I took flight among eagles,” he explained, so “I must be mindful when returning to the ground.” Louverture no longer inhabited the realm of mere mortals.2

  As Louverture’s career reached its climax in the second half of 1801, the sheer range and scale of his activity is hard to grasp. The series of accomplishments began in the days after he presented his constitution to the public: On July 12 (a Sunday), he settled a dispute over the quartering of troops in Cap and requested new officers from France. On July 14 he celebrated Bastille Day, reproved his nephew Moïse for his troops’ indiscipline, and redrew the internal borders of Saint-Domingue. He then met with Charles de Vincent several times to discuss his constitution. He wrote a letter on the matter to Napoléon on the 16th, making sure to raise the issue of his sons’ return one more time. The same day, he sent a report to the minister of the navy on his ongoing efforts to revive plantation agriculture. He negotiated with a new US commercial agent on the 16th and 17th. By the 18th, he was back to debating his constitution with Vincent before dashing off to the town of Saint-Marc on the 19th for wide-ranging negotiations with a British envoy. On and on it went. “His movements are very rapid and uncertain,” marveled the US agent on the 20th. “He is certainly an extraordinary man.” “Those who view General Toussaint Louverture as an ordinary man have been grossly mistaken,” agreed his secretary on July 21. “He is even more astonishing seen up close than from a distance.”3

  With the constitution in place he began legislating at a fast clip, passing no fewer than eighteen laws between July 18 and August 12, 1801. These ranged from the mundane (regulating the uniform of colonial officials) to the spiritual (making Catholicism the official religion of Saint-Domingue, just as it had been before the French Revolution). Most dealt with his central project, the restoration of the plantation economy. Debts, deeds, property lines, tribunals, and absentee ownership: no detail escaped his attention. Louverture also claimed for himself the right to appoint priests and bishops, normally the prerogative of God’s representative in Rome.4

  Even racist contemporaries who were quick to disparage former slaves’ capacity for self-government were impressed by Louverture’s intellectual abilities. Like Napoléon, to whom he was often and aptly compared, Louverture was a micromanager who made his influence felt at all levels of government. He was not formally educated and wrote with difficulty, but with the help of secretaries he drafted letters at all hours of the day and night. He personally decided on all matters in the colony, no matter how trivial. “Cabinet work . . . is for him a pleasure as sharp as enjoying a meal or possessing a woman would be to most men,” wrote his secretary. “Seeing everything for himself, crossing the colony like lightning, and answering 100, 200, 300 letters in a day are for him an ecstasy, a need.” To accommodate the workload, he employed multiple secretaries at once. To ensure secrecy, they each wrote a portion of his most sensitive letters, which he then assembled in private like an alchemist synthesizing a dangerous chemical compound.5

/>   Louverture dictating a letter to a secretary. Lacoste Jeune, Toussaint Louverture, nineteenth-century engraving. Personal collection of the author.

  No one was beyond his reach. When his maid stole cash from his cabinet with the collusion of his aide-de-camp, the court sentenced the woman to prison and the man to hard labor, which the judges thought was punitive enough since she was pregnant and he was a mere accomplice. Louverture did not agree. The man was shot on his orders, as was the woman, once her fetus was disposed of “by people skilled with this trade.” He subsequently changed the law to ensure that military tribunals, which directly answered to him, had jurisdiction over all thefts, even those committed by civilians. He also issued a penal code that stipulated the death penalty for crimes as diverse as rape, conspiracy, arson, breaking and entering, and—appropriately enough for a former coachman—horse theft.6

  Over the years, Louverture had constructed an elaborate public relations operation in Paris to lobby the French government and spin the news in his favor. At the height of his power he went further: he tried to learn everything that happened in France and Saint-Domingue and to eliminate rival viewpoints outright.

  He was everywhere. This tireless horseman continually crisscrossed Saint-Domingue on his stallion, Bel Argent, and appeared unannounced in the most remote locations to conduct surprise reviews. When listing the areas of command of the various generals of Saint-Domingue, a French officer jotted down this revealing note next to Louverture’s name: “everywhere (his locomotion was surprising).”7

  He knew everything. He read his mail at all times of day and night, often in his bath, a routine he shared with Napoléon. He subscribed to every newspaper in Paris. He also had the habit, going back to Laveaux’s tenure, of opening the mail of other French officials as it passed through his office. More controversially, he sent his men to intercept French couriers before they could deliver sensitive dispatches to his rivals. Three aides-de-camp died in one such incident, news of which he proceeded to suppress.8

  He controlled everybody. He screened incoming visitors and their luggage to prevent unwelcome news from reaching the colony. He read outgoing mail to censor unflattering accounts. He issued a blanket embargo on commerce whenever he wished to prevent specific events from becoming known at all. “You have no idea what would happen to me if people here learned of the opinions I communicated so boldly to you,” a terrified planter wrote in a letter addressed to a French correspondent. General Moïse had just forced a departing captain to hand over a bag of mail at gunpoint. “Several inhabitants of Cap, whose letters were intercepted, had expressed their opinion on the current regime and were thrown into a cell where they will suffer for a long time,” the planter wrote. Basic rights like privacy and free speech did not exist under Louverture’s rule.9

  Whites were a small but not negligible presence in Saint-Domingue in 1801. Some had remained in the colony despite the Revolution; more had returned from exile after the War of the South in the hope of recovering their plantations. What to do with them was one of the most sensitive matters Louverture had to settle as governor.

  Several of Louverture’s generals urged him to deal with the “white problem” once and for all. His nephew Moïse, whom he had promoted to commander of the northern province during the War of the South, was the loudest of the radicals. A French general overheard him say at the dinner table that “if General Louverture did not finish off the rest of the whites . . . then he would start by killing the general himself.” Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the commander of the western and southern provinces, similarly told his men that they had just won a “small war” (the War of the South) but still had two more wars to wage: “one with the Spanish [of Santo Domingo], who have to be chased from the island, and one with the French, who will return when peace is declared in Europe to steal our liberty.” This was the same Dessalines who eventually massacred most of Haiti’s white population after independence.10

  Louverture rejected Moïse’s and Dessalines’s calls for white blood. As he proceeded to rebuild the colony after 1800, he welcomed the expertise of white secretaries, white merchants, and white planters, because people of color “don’t have enough education to fill such jobs.” Accordingly, the man who drafted many of his laws was a white planter from Port-Républicain. His diplomatic envoy and paymaster was a white merchant from Normandy. Most of his secretaries were white, as were his priests, the comptroller general, and the administrator of public estates. Louverture and other generals had sent their sons to France to be educated: the next generation would finish the Revolution.11

  Employing whites did not mean deferring to them. The white exiles who returned to Saint-Domingue under Louverture were quick to notice the collapse of the old racial hierarchies. During a stay in Cap, a British officer was astonished when a “fat negro” sat next to him at his table and allowed himself to eat from his plate. Such was the way, he surmised, that things were now done in Saint-Domingue. Some whites chose to “laugh when seeing the negresses . . . wear wigs like those of our ladies” and ride carriages as if they were “princesses,” but most were not so amused: “Whites are obliged to submit to the blacks and dare not complain,” lamented an officer after his return to France. “The blacks are extraordinarily insolent toward them.”12

  Having spent most of his life genuflecting before white colonists, Louverture thoroughly enjoyed deflating their egos. One day, when his former boss François Bayon de Libertat headed to the government house to embrace him, Louverture stopped him before he could get too close. “Slowly, Mr. manager,” he said, loud enough for all to hear. “There is more distance between you and me today than there was in the past between me and you.” Louverture must also have felt elated when the Count of Noé, the Bréda heir who had once owned a fourth of the Haut-du-Cap plantation (including Louverture’s wife and children), wrote from his British exile with a feigned tone of familiarity. “I just learned, my dear Toussaint, that you provided financial assistance to Mr. Bayon our former attorney. . . . This proves that you have not forgotten those to whom you were bound for so many years.” Noé was of course asking for money. The “big white” was now a beggar.13

  Five feet and two inches in height, Louverture did not have an impressive physique. With “very prominent cheekbones, a flat nose, but quite long . . . and a toothless upper jaw,” he was not particularly handsome, either. But he had the aura of a man too big for his island. When he entered a town on one of his powerful stallions, holding a gold-tipped cane in lieu of a whip, his personal guard galloping by his side, other men felt very small in his presence.14

  Louverture was not bound by terrestrial appetites. He was frugal and even stingy. Horses were his one luxury. He slept little and ate quickly. His guests sat awkwardly at his table while he raced through a wordless meal. He preferred water to drink and unpeeled fruit to eat because he feared being poisoned. Judging by his grocery lists, a few of which have survived, specialties like saucisson and petit salé (cured sausage and salted pork) were his only indulgences. Like many natives of sugar colonies, he also had a sweet tooth and bad teeth.15

  His ego was his sole weakness. A town near the Artibonite River already bore his name, as did a street in Cap. In July 1801, he carved a whole new province in the region of Gonaïves and named it after himself. He liked to organize elaborate receptions worthy of a European court. Keeping lower-class blacks at bay, he mingled with white colonists, who played along. When one of his white guests made a particularly well-crafted compliment, he beamed and whispered to his entourage: “You negroes should try to learn these manners. This is what you get from being raised in France. My children will be the same.”16

  Few white colonists were genuinely committed to Louverture as a leader and to the racial equality he embodied. They bowed as expected and then snickered behind his back about his ridiculous aspirations and the pidgin Latin he spoke to impress them. Louverture understood that their praise was insincere and that they would forever be “the enemies
of the blacks.” Yet he remained a prisoner of the racial preconceptions he had known in his youth.17

  His desk contained a secret compartment where he kept “hair braids of all colors, rings, golden hearts struck with arrows, little keys, boxes, souvenirs, and a multitude of love notes that left no doubt as to the immense success the old Toussaint had enjoyed with the ladies.” His critics lambasted him as a hypocrite who pontificated about the sanctity of marriage between rendezvouses with a mistress—but there was probably more to Louverture’s philandering than mere sexual gratification. He had once watched helplessly as his daughter Marie-Marthe carried a mixed-race child. In a colony where masters had expressed their power by raping their slaves, interracial intercourse was a way for Louverture to avenge past slights and publicize the new racial order.18

  An oft-repeated anecdote holds that Louverture finished his letters to Napoléon with the send-off “the first of the blacks to the first of the whites.” There is no archival evidence for this (Louverture used the traditional Haitian greeting, “Salutations and respect”), but his craving for recognition was real. He wrote directly to the first consul when protocol dictated that he write to the minister of the navy, his immediate superior. He also wrote to the US president, the Cuban governor, and the British premier as if he were the head of a fellow independent state. He was deeply pained when they refused to personally write him. “I would have been utterly contented if [your envoy] had brought me a little note written by you,” he wrote Napoléon in 1800. One year later, no response had come, and Louverture was growing restless. “I wrote several letters to you already and I never received a response from you.”19

  The specter of racial prejudice was never far from Louverture’s mind as he pondered these slights. When the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson took over as US president, he downgraded the rank of the US consul general in Cap to commercial agent and gave no accreditation letter to his new appointee. Louverture noted in disgust that “his color was the cause of his being neglected and not thought worthy of the usual attentions.” White statesmen were willing to strike a pragmatic alliance with him, but they continued to view him as a negro parvenu. “If I were white I would only receive praise,” he complained. “But I actually deserve even more as a black man.”20