Toussaint Louverture Page 4

  Plantation slavery in French colonies was regulated by the 1685 Black Code. It is rightly decried today for its brutality, but it was actually intended in its time as a paternalistic piece of legislation that balanced the interests of slave owners with their duties toward their wards. Under the Black Code, masters could exploit and whip their slaves, but they could not torture, kill, or rape them, and they had to feed and clothe them appropriately. The very idea that a master could not do as he wished with his property was groundbreaking for its time—so groundbreaking in fact that the Black Code was rarely enforced.8

  To prevent planters from resorting to excessive brutality, the royal courts were theoretically charged with handling many slave transgressions. Prison time and the “chain” (hard labor on public projects) were common punishments for lesser crimes. Branding words like “theft” on a slave’s chest was also a way to keep a permanent record of his misdeeds. The sentences for graver crimes were downright bestial. An official fee schedule informs us that it cost 15 livres to cut a slave’s hand or ears, 60 livres to break all the limbs of a slave with an iron bar and leave him to die (the typical penalty for killing one’s master), and 120 livres to burn a slave alive (the typical penalty for poisoners). With chilling bureaucratic exactitude, the fee schedule noted that carrying the wood and cleaning up the ashes entailed extra fees. To give the masters of troublesome slaves a financial incentive to resort to royal justice, they were reimbursed a set price whenever one of their slaves was sentenced to death (always eager to profit from their slaves, even dead ones, the Brédas were known to haggle for more money).9

  There was no way for slaves like Louverture to avoid the gruesome spectacle of “justice.” The eighteenth-century legal system did not lock away criminals in a prison for decades, out of sight of the general public, in the belief that the privation of liberty would reform souls; instead, it inflicted punishments that were public, immediate, and physical. Executions were carried out on the main plaza of Cap on market day or at major crossroads so as to make a lasting impression on passersby, and punishments were rendered directly onto the criminals’ bodies. At once victims and audience, slaves were also participants because the royal executioner was often a convicted slave whose life had been spared for taking on the job.

  These torments differed little from those inflicted against white criminals in prerevolutionary France, so contemporaries rarely questioned whether it was moral for royal courts to torture and execute slaves. Instead, they debated whether masters routinely inflicted extrajudicial punishments as well. Advocates of slavery claimed that private abuse was the exception rather than the norm, and that Caribbean slaves were so coddled that they were “the happy slaves of humane, or rather very mild, masters” and lived better than French and African farmers. But visitors to the colony, who had not yet become inured to plantation cruelty, mentioned illegal private punishments that included mutilation, castration, burning, and death: “The most cruel torment, fire, being buried to the neck, nothing is enough to sate the rage of these infamous executioners,” wrote an appalled visitor. Neither side bothered to ask the slaves where the truth lay, but as soon as the Haitian Revolution gave them a chance to speak up, the “happy slaves” revealed that their masters had routinely “mistreated them with all sorts of tortures[,] . . . did not care for them even in times of sickness, and let them die destitute.”10

  There is no indication that Louverture ever personally endured cruel and unusual punishments: “He only knew slavery by name,” a well-informed critic later wrote. But he cannot have ignored the violence swarming about him. In the food-growing estates of Vertières and Charrier, both of them located in the hamlet of Haut-du-Cap, slaves who failed to sell enough vegetables on market day were punished with the quatre piquets: they were tied to four stakes, suspended just above the ground, and then whipped mercilessly. Farther away in Plaine-du-Nord, where the Brédas owned another estate, the sugar planter Pierre Chapuizet sewed up cattle drivers inside deceased mules and let them suffocate to death whenever he suspected them of using poison. Owners of nearby plantations burned the limbs of their slaves to force them to confess to alleged crimes. For Louverture and his fellow slaves, who reenacted Jesus’s final hours every year at Easter, life was an endless Passion play. Louverture never forgot “the insults, the misery, the tortures, and the flagellations” that, by his own account, were slavery’s daily bread.11

  In practice, the treatment of slaves varied greatly depending on the work to which they were assigned (labor on sugar plantations was more strenuous than work on other types of plantations, and field work was more demanding than domestic and skilled labor); whether the owner was present (slaves of absentee owners were at greater risk of being mistreated); and the specific period in which they were working (the treatment of slaves seems to have improved over time due to the humanizing effects of the Enlightenment, or more likely, because imported slaves were becoming more costly). The Bréda plantation in Haut-du-Cap fit the pattern deemed most oppressive to slaves: that of an absentee-owned sugar plantation.

  Because Pantaléon de Bréda Jr. spent most of his life in France, he appointed an attorney (procureur) to represent him legally in the colony and managers (gérants) to oversee day-to-day operations on each of his plantations. Louverture’s fate was thus highly dependent on the white men who were the Brédas’ public face on the plantation. Attorneys had a particularly bad reputation: paid a commission on the value of the sugar shipped to France, they had a vested interest in boosting short-term production at the expense of the slaves’ long-term well-being. Judging by the surviving evidence (which is incomplete prior to the 1770s), their record ran the gamut from the humane to the sadistic. Virtually nothing is known of the two attorneys, named Béagé and Faure, who oversaw Haut-du-Cap in Louverture’s early years. A third, Gilly, who held the job from 1764 until his death in 1772, was apparently accommodating. “He had the weakness,” complained his successor, “of negotiating with the slaves when selecting a new accountant or slave driver, and he believed whatever the slaves would tell him so as not to irk them.” Gilly rarely even visited the plantation. His successor, Jean Delribal, resorted to imprisoning slaves and using chains, whipping, and torture during his short tenure in 1773. The next attorney, François Bayon de Libertat (1772–1773, 1773–1789), has a better reputation, but he kept his predecessor’s repressive apparatus intact. A later manager named Valsemey was fired in 1790 for using “so much harshness” that a slave died.12

  These comments were all made by white attorneys, white managers, and white accountants, who only relayed bad news when they wanted to besmirch a rival. Dead slaves could tell no tales. Numbers, however, speak for themselves: life expectancy on the Bréda plantations was a measly thirty-seven. “A few were good,” Louverture later wrote in reference to the planter class, “but most of them were truly tormentors.”13

  Louverture had to tread carefully when dealing with “big whites” like the Brédas and their attorneys, because hitting or killing a member of the elite was normally punished by mutilation and a painful death. Not all white employees were worthy of the same level of respect, however. In the colony were many “little whites,” who eked out a modest existence because most of the jobs were done by slaves. Some of these white people descended from the pirates who had settled the colony in the mid-1600s, from indentured servants who had come in the late 1600s, or from the vagabonds and prostitutes who had been deported from France en masse in the early 1720s. Others were newer to Saint-Domingue, and more came every year. Most were wrenchingly poor.

  To distinguish “big” from “little” whites, slaves also spoke of the “white whites,” the rich planters who were the only true whites, and the “white negroes,” who had nothing going for them except for the color of their skin. This imaginative slang is indicative of the extent to which race in early Saint-Domingue was defined not simply by biological traits, but also by social status. One could lose the prestige attached to whiteness by being
poor; conversely, talented blacks like Louverture could raise their standing through financial success. There was hope still.14

  The most fortunate of the “little whites” served as specialized workers on plantations. In Haut-du-Cap, a surgeon named Rousseau made regular rounds; an accountant named Valsemey did the books; a carpenter named Cusson helped with construction projects; and refiners named Dupont, Martissans, and Couture oversaw the sugar-making process. In contrast with the owners and managers of the Bréda plantations, with whom Louverture stayed in contact throughout the Revolution, Louverture never mentioned these employees in later years, presumably because he held them in low esteem.

  Further down the social ladder, white society crawled with bandits, woodsmen, beggars, smugglers, prostitutes, professional gamblers, and other assorted riffraff whose restlessness would later help bring about the Revolution. Leaving aside the transient sailor community, with which Louverture had few contacts, members of the two colonial regiments were the largest component of the “little white” community in Saint-Domingue. Rank-and-file soldiers were so destitute that for extra pay they occasionally hired themselves out to the Brédas to mine rocks in the hills above the plantation. These men, who had sometimes been recruited against their will in France, toiled alongside African slaves and occasionally ran away with them.

  In a curious reversal of roles, the rural police employed black freedmen to chase down white deserters. Once caught, these whites were treated little better than slave runaways. Pantaléon de Bréda Sr. once sentenced a deserter to be branded, to have his ears and nose cut, and to spend the rest of his life doing hard labor. The unfortunate soldier who endured that terrifying treatment truly deserved the moniker of “white negro.”15

  In the end, Louverture’s experience of slavery was mixed. Growing up along the plain of Cap, the economic heart of the colony, he was keenly aware of the atrocities committed by judges and planters, but his privileged position as a creole slave spared him from the worst abuses. Slavery, as filtered through his personal experience, must have been less traumatic for him than it was for African-born field hands. This, or perhaps the terrorizing effect of the tortures he had witnessed, may explain why he played no apparent role in the first major labor disturbances that roiled the region of Cap from the 1750s.

  FOUR

  REVOLUTIONARY APPRENTICE

  1757–1773

  IT WAS SOMETIME during his teenage years in the 1750s that Toussaint Louverture learned how to ride a horse. According to the story, which we owe to his son Isaac, he taught himself by bravely jumping on an untamed stallion. Maybe he was trying to impress his father, as horse-breeding was a favored pastime of the Allada elite in Africa. After much bucking and neighing, Louverture ended on the grass with a broken femur, but his reputation was made. In time, his horsemanship would become legendary throughout the colony. This self-taught skill earned him the coveted position of caretaker of the plantation’s oxen and mules, and ultimately coachman.1

  The rest of Isaac’s story is more surprising. One day, when the plantation attorney, Béagé, took one of the plantation’s horses without notifying him, Louverture was so enraged that he cut the girth of the saddle and Béagé tumbled to the ground. Back on his feet, Béagé raised his walking stick high above his head. A defiant Louverture dared him to strike. Time stood still for an instant—until Béagé lowered his cane and left the scene. Hurting one’s master was punishable by death under the Black Code, yet Louverture seems to have escaped punishment somehow.

  Historians tend to emphasize the brutality and dehumanizing nature of the plantation system of Saint-Domingue. Many atrocities did take place—many were even perfectly legal under the Black Code—but such one-dimensional accounts overlook the extent to which slaves remained agents of their own destiny. As one pores over the day-to-day records of a plantation like Haut-du-Cap, one is amazed by the slaves’ capacity to resist their supervisors in so many ways. Chattel they may have been; but human beings they remained, always.

  The Haitian slave revolt that broke out in 1791 was described by white contemporaries as a surprise and an anomaly. Central to this argument was the claim that the slaves of Saint-Domingue were gentle beasts of burden who had proved singularly docile in comparison with their Jamaican brethren—and then somehow buckled and launched the most successful slave revolt in world history. The reality was quite different. There were prerevolutionary troubles in Saint-Domingue, as well as a pattern of day-to-day resistance that one can reconstruct by delving deep into plantation records.2

  The slaves of Haut-du-Cap were a particularly unruly lot. “For many years the plantation has been known to be filled with very bad individuals,” an attorney complained. His successor concurred: the slaves were “excessively lazy,” he said. “The hamlet of Haut-du-Cap completely spoils them.” The accountant agreed: “The workforce has long been infected by all sorts of vices.” So did a later attorney, who wrote of the well-established “bad reputation” of the slaves of Haut-du-Cap.3

  Geography was part of the reason. Located at the foot of the hill of Morne du Cap, on the road from the port of Cap to the plain of Cap, Haut-du-Cap stood at the junction of the colony’s three worlds: the commercial centers of the coast, whose large free black population was independent-minded; the plantations of the plains and their slave networks; and the mountainous areas where runaways would go to hide. By visiting the Brédas’ sister plantations in Plaine-du-Nord, or spending time on nearby estates to recover from disease or learn a trade, Bréda slaves made valuable contacts: this is most likely how Louverture got to know Jeannot Bullet, the slave of the brother-in-law of a Bréda attorney, who later became one of the leading figures of the Haitian slave revolt.4

  Slave resistance could take many forms. Slow work and sabotage were relatively safe, as long as one played the expected role of the faithful but foolish slave. Louverture, who was described as loyal and obedient in plantation records, played that game exceedingly well and developed a talent for deceit (what Haitians call “intellectual maroonage”) that would serve him well during the Revolution.5

  Physical resistance was a much graver transgression, but the Brédas, who were legally responsible for any tort caused to a third party, occasionally protected the perpetrator when the victim was not a “big white”: Pantaléon de Bréda Sr. once refused to punish a slave who had almost killed a white surgeon. The fact that Pantaléon Jr. spent the bulk of his life overseas also gave his slaves some degree of immunity, since he expected to be consulted before a manager inflicted any life-threatening punishment, and contacting him took time.6

  The harsh penalties specified by the Black Code no doubt terrified the slaves, but they were not cowed by them entirely. Acts of resistance included the lynching of two royal executioners in Haut-du-Cap in the 1770s, both of them at the hand of local slaves. Louverture must have witnessed the second incident, because it took place just outside the Bréda plantation. Years before the Haitian Revolution, the Bréda slaves were already fighting back.7

  Louverture was a cautious man who normally avoided opposing authority too overtly, but his emotions occasionally got the better of him. Around 1757, when he was just fourteen, he entered into a brawl with a young white man named Ferret who had insulted him. Louverture fought back, and “Ferret got the worst of it,” Isaac later reported. Amazingly, Louverture seems to have escaped punishment that time, just as he did when he unhorsed the attorney Béagé.8

  Louverture’s teenage years were awkward and uncertain times. France and Britain were in the midst of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), a global battle for colonial supremacy that did not go well for France. In a few years, Britain took Guadeloupe, Martinique, and eventually Québec, as well as French outposts in India and Senegal. Saint-Domingue itself faced a possible invasion when a British fleet threatened the port of Cap.

  It was in this tense context that in May 1757 a slave on another Saint-Domingue plantation, owned by the Lavauds, revealed a startling secret:
the recent death of his mistress was no accident; she had been poisoned by her domestics. The royal prosecutor found it hard to determine the poisoners’ motives, because, “aside from a few negresses, they ferociously withstood bouts of torture without confessing to anything,” but his unyielding efforts eventually uncovered a support network reaching all the way to Cap thirty miles away, where a free black had supplied the poison. Arrests led to more torture, more denunciations, and more arrests. Dozens of planter deaths were reclassified as possible murders, and authorities estimated that the poisoners had killed up to 6,000 slaves as well. Far from being an anomaly, the use of poison was apparently rampant among the slaves of northern Saint-Domingue.9

  Slaves were supposed to be meek and brutish: What, authorities wondered, could drive their animus? Because many planters had been assassinated by the very slaves whom they had promised to free in their wills, authorities concluded that the poisoners simply wished to hasten the dates of their liberation and that they lacked a political agenda. But some fretful planters suspected a far more ambitious plot to kill all whites in Saint-Domingue and seize control of the colony.

  The evidence, which was obtained under torture according to the standard practices of prerevolutionary French justice, was far from conclusive. It is not even certain that poison was actually involved, because royal investigators tested the alleged poison on slave convicts and they survived. The spike in mortality among slaves coincided with a British naval blockade that had been compounded by a drought that caused severe food shortages and forced inhabitants to eat tainted meat and flour. In this context, the poison scare of 1757 may simply have been an episode of mass hysteria caused by societal stress.10

  A different perspective emerges in the deathbed confessions of convicted slaves. The mysterious powders were not poison at all but religious artifacts, they said: the ground bones of unbaptized children, holy water, a crucifix, and nails that had been put into a cloth packet. Holy men had sold the packets to the slaves to serve as protective talismans. They had also organized ceremonies (known as “devil-making”) to feed and then “awake” them. The most successful sorcerers were believed to be able to talk to the talismans and the spirits they embodied, which gave them unfathomable magical powers.11