Toussaint Louverture Read online

  Among the victims was Louverture’s daughter Marie-Marthe, who was probably no more than a teenager when she gave birth to a mixed-race son whom she named Toussaint after her father and two brothers. Details about the child’s background, starting with his white father’s identity, are not known to us (the Bréda attorney Bayon de Libertat, whose wife had extended stays in France in the 1770s, is a good candidate); the child’s very existence was only discovered in 2013.9

  So common was interracial intercourse in Saint-Domingue that the free population of color was almost as large as the white population by the time the Haitian Revolution began. In addition to Marie-Marthe’s son, there were three other mixed-race children on the Bréda plantation in the 1770s: two boys and a girl. The girl was Louverture’s goddaughter. Four mixed-race domestics from other plantations later took up residence in the master’s house as well. All of them were living proof of the unchecked power of the white personnel on the plantations.

  Contemporary white planters liked to describe themselves as the victims of conniving colored seductresses eager to appropriate their manhood, but it is difficult to describe the union between Marie-Marthe and her sexual partner as anything other than statutory rape, given her young age and the unequal relationship between them. Toussaint’s grandchild must have experienced his share of hardships as well: white women could be quite cruel to mixed-race slaves, who were daily reminders of their husbands’ philandering ways.

  Male slaves were indirect victims, as they had no way of fighting back if a master violated their wives or daughters. Louverture never spoke of his daughter and her mixed-race child, but one suspects that he shared the feelings of a fellow coachman and revolutionary leader who railed against the white planters who “soil our daughters after they barely emerge from childhood.” Such powerlessness was emasculating. Many years passed before Louverture finally got his revenge: as governor of Saint-Domingue, he made it his habit to use as mistresses the wives of white planters.10

  Rather than abort or kill their child, some female slaves chose to make the best of a bad situation. On the Bréda plantation in Plaine-du-Nord, the white manager Rouillan was known for his many liaisons with enslaved women, whom he would then reward with extra rations of food. He also offered to buy and free a mixed-race son, though Pantaléon Jr. demanded such a high price to punish him for impregnating one of his slaves that it took the manager six years to gather the sum. The sugar refiner Rousseau also bought and freed his mixed-race son. In the twisted world of plantation slavery, rape could result in freedom.

  Not so with Louverture’s daughter. Her white partner took no apparent step to free their child, so it was only years later, after Marie-Marthe married a freedman and obtained her own freedom, that she was finally able to purchase and free the mixed-race boy named after Toussaint Louverture.

  Before 1492, Caribbean islands like Saint-Domingue had been a Garden of Eden where contagious diseases were virtually unknown. Their geographic isolation and the dearth of domesticated animals had protected them, but all this changed when the Columbian Exchange introduced all the diseases of the Old World. Within fifty years, most of the Taino Amerindians were wiped out by Eurasian diseases like measles and whooping cough. By the late 1600s, mosquito-borne African diseases like yellow fever and malaria had also found a congenial environment in the swampy plains where sugarcane grew best, making Saint-Domingue very unhealthy for whites as well. Smallpox, so feared in West Africa that it was worshiped as a god, also took its toll: it hit the Haut-du-Cap plantation in 1772 and returned in 1778, 1785, and 1787.

  Though newly imported African slaves were less susceptible to tropical fevers than Europeans, their death rate was still estimated at 7 to 14 percent a year. On the Haut-du-Cap plantation, 95 slaves died in 1774–1785 out of a total workforce of 130 to 150 slaves. That meant a 70 percent turnover in a decade’s time. Only Caribbean-born Creoles like Louverture, who had been exposed to the colony’s deadly microbiological brew all their lives, stood a fighting chance of making it to old age.11

  The hostile environment of the Caribbean did not make the survivors’ lives easy. Each year brought its cataclysm. An earthquake roiled Port-au-Prince in 1770, then Cap in 1785; hurricanes ravaged the colony in 1765, 1772, 1775, 1780, and 1785; the Bréda plantation always seemed to be fighting a drought or a flood. Man-made disasters filled in the gaps, as France and Britain waged seemingly continuous wars for much of the eighteenth century.

  Even when accounting for births, the natural growth rate was a negative 1 to 5 percent per year, by different estimates, so the slave population only grew because of massive imports from Africa. “More [African slaves] are bought every year to make up for the mortality rate, which is considerable,” lamented the accountant of Haut-du-Cap. Louverture barely got a chance to know many of the incoming slaves before they headed for the cemetery. Sixteen Alladas were brought to the plantation in 1774, speaking the Fon language of his parents; six were dead within six months, so twelve Congolese were purchased in 1775. Sixty-four percent of Haut-du-Cap’s slaves were African-born by 1785, the highest percentage in the area. As a result, many of the slaves of Haut-du-Cap had only been in Saint-Domingue for a few years by the time the Haitian Revolution began in 1791, which helps explain why creole old-timers like Louverture took over most of the leadership roles.12

  Two names stand out in this litany of deaths. In April 1774, the Bréda attorney notified the absentee owner of the deaths of “the black woman Pauline and her husband Hippolyte, both of them afflicted with chest disease. They left five creole children.” Louverture’s parents had died within three months of one another. As the oldest child, Louverture, who had just turned thirty, found himself in charge of the family’s future, which included four siblings (two of them still breastfed), as well as a wife and children of his own.13

  No doubt heartbroken by the loss of his mother and father, Louverture coped by adopting two older slaves as surrogate parents. “The good and virtuous Pélagie” became like a “second mother” to him. Like his biological mother, she hailed from the Aja tribe. Plantation records indicate that she was “robust and dance[d] well, according to the custom of her native country,” and that she was a laundress and caregiver.14

  Louverture’s surrogate father, Pierre Baptiste, worked as a carpenter and gatekeeper on the plantation. He was also Louverture’s godfather, the father of his second wife, and a man he deeply respected—so much in fact that many historians have mistakenly described him as Louverture’s biological father. According to a family tradition, Baptiste “knew French and some Latin . . . and even a bit of geometry,” which he had learned from the Jesuits. He passed on some of his knowledge to his godson, a precious gift at a time when slave literacy was a rarity (only 31 percent of black freedmen rich enough to use a notary were literate). But Louverture’s writing skills remained basic until the Revolution, which deeply troubled him. Of all the indignities he had suffered during his years of enslavement, his belated education was the one he mentioned most often.15

  Baptiste remained an important father figure throughout Louverture’s life. He lived through most of the Haitian Revolution, eventually dying in 1802 at the remarkable age of 105—a survivor, just like Louverture.

  In the eighteenth century, friendships were at once fewer and more meaningful. Louverture spent decades in close proximity with his fellow slaves and family members, rarely traveling more than a few miles from his home. In the process, he developed a close-knit network that served as a mutual aid society when he was a slave, and that later, during the Revolution, became his political base.

  Louverture’s church family was part and parcel of this relationship network. In 1768, five years after the Jesuits were expelled from Saint-Domingue, the Capuchin order officially replaced them at the head of the Catholic Church in northern Saint-Domingue. The Capuchins were often mocked in the colony for their loose sexual and financial mores, but they were fairly progressive on racial matters. Contrary to the Domi
nicans and the Jesuits, they did not own plantations (though they employed enslaved domestics). They also continued the Jesuit practice of celebrating special Masses for blacks in the Cap area. Slaves who, like Louverture, were baptized and married formed the most elite group and sat in a special section of the nave. Six of them even led others in prayers under a second skin of cassocks and surplices. Louverture, who may already have dabbled in missionary work under the Jesuits, was presumably one of them, because a fellow revolutionary later described him as an “old Capuchin.” Slaves who were merely baptized sat in a different section of the church, and catechumens in yet another; runaways and abortionists knelt at the church’s threshold as a form of penance, as if crimes against one’s master were also crimes against God. Unbaptized slaves were denied entry into the church altogether.16

  For Louverture, Sunday rituals were familiar and comforting. “On Sundays and holidays, we would go to Mass, my wife, I, and my relatives,” he later recalled. “Back to our home, after a pleasant meal, we would spend the rest of the day together, which we would finish with a prayer.” His involvement in the Church provided some solace in the difficult circumstances in which he lived, but it also allowed him to bypass the planter hierarchy and form independent bonds with black parishioners and white priests. He made so many allies in that manner that many priests sided with him when the slave revolt broke out in 1791.17

  Two lists of the slaves of Haut-du-Cap, dated April and December 1785, are our main source on the identity of the people who toiled on the Bréda plantation alongside Louverture in the first decades of his life. In keeping with colonial practices, their names were drawn from the Bible, Greco-Roman antiquity, and Africa in accordance with each slave’s social status. The man who worked with Louverture as a carriage driver bore the Christian name of André, while their assistants had French nicknames, including Janvier and Jeudy (“January” and “Thursday”). The sugar makers to whom they delivered sugarcane stalks also had Christian names, such as Laurent and Augustin, and proud classical names, such as César and Alexandre. Many field hands had to content themselves with African names, like Azor and Zaïre.18

  The April 1785 roster gives us little information beyond each slave’s age, ethnicity, and occupation, but the December roster, discovered in 2013, also describes each slave’s idiosyncrasies, bringing out something of their individual characters—albeit from the perspective of their overseers. We thus learn that Louverture’s colleague André was “debauched, libertine, plagued with venereal disease, insolent and dangerous” (or so thought the accountant who annotated the roster); that Janvier was “prone to drinking rum, sleepy and lazy”; and that Jeudy “wears irons that are wounding him and is a bad subject living of thievery.”

  Other acquaintances of Louverture leap from the page, from Rémy (Congolese, nineteen, “rather good subject”) to Flore (Congolese, seventeen, “maliciously maintains an ulcer on her leg” so as to be assigned to the chicken coop in lieu of the master’s house, presumably because she was getting too much attention there). The accountant often emphasized the slaves’ flaws, but he described Louverture as a “sweet” and “intelligent subject, knowing how to care for injured animals.” The future leader of the Haitian Revolution, on the surface at least, was a model worker.19

  For Louverture, these were not mere names but coworkers, friends, neighbors, and cousins. These were the people who greeted him in the morning as he left his home; these were the people who shared stories with him at night. Many were relatives. His godfather’s progeny included the laundress Suzanne (whom Louverture later married) and the mason Gilles, himself a father of six. Louverture’s two goddaughters were the nieces of his colleague André.

  Many of the relatives of Louverture listed on the roster later became important figures in his regime. His brother Paul, listed as a personal servant and cook (“good domestic, sweet and obedient”), later became a general. His other brother, Pierre, listed as a field hand, died fighting by his side in 1794. His nephew Moïse was a mason apprentice and later became a general. Charles Bélair (usually described as Louverture’s nephew) was a shepherd and later became a general. Louverture’s illegitimate son Jean-Pierre served as colonel, his stepson Placide as sublieutenant.20

  Other relatives, not living on the plantation, included Louverture’s brother-in-law Claude Martin (later a colonel), his step-nephew Bernard Chancy (an aide-de-camp), his step-nephew Jacques Chancy (a captain), and his cousin Félix (a battalion chief). Step-nieces also married into the families of the revolutionary generals André Vernet, Jean Villatte, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. These family ties were not coincidental: in the unstable context of a slave revolt, Louverture preferred to rely on people he had known for decades. “These are the only ones I can trust,” he later wrote.21

  One historian has compared the leaders of the American Revolution to a “band of brothers”: so it was with Haitian revolutionaries, most of whom, in the northern province, were related by blood or marriage to Toussaint Louverture. By cultivating this network of relationships, he was not just establishing himself as a leading figure of the Haut-du-Cap plantation: he was unwittingly laying the groundwork for the revolution to come.22

  SIX

  FREEDMAN

  c. 1772–1779

  ON APRIL 7, 1776 (a Sunday), a mixed-race baby girl was baptized under the name of Marie-Josèphe in the church of Le Borgne in northern Saint-Domingue. Her godfather was Toussaint Louverture. A church attendant had to stand at the font in his stead because Le Borgne is thirty-five miles distant from Haut-du-Cap and Louverture could not make it to the ceremony, but being asked to serve as godfather was an honor that reflected Louverture’s piety and his high standing in the black community. A few years later in the church of Cap, he again took on the role of a godfather, this time for Marie-Josèphe’s black half-sister Marie-Egyptienne. Both of Louverture’s goddaughters were slaves on the Bréda plantation of Haut-du-Cap, as was their mother.1

  The original baptismal record of Marie-Josèphe was lost during the Haitian Revolution, but a copy survived in the French colonial archives in Aix-en-Provence, where it was discovered in 1977 (and then, apparently, lost as well). Two letters in the document startled the researchers who first encountered it: Louverture’s first name was followed by the mention “n.l.,” short for nègre libre (free negro), indicating that he was no longer a slave by the time of Marie-Josèphe’s baptism. This was the first conclusive evidence that, fifteen years before the outbreak of the great slave revolt of 1791, the godfather of the Haitian Revolution was legally free—or at least claimed to be.

  Manumissions (the legal term for freeing a slave) were relatively rare in Saint-Domingue, so the chance of being freed over the course of a lifetime was less than 1 percent. Most of these manumissions benefited a planter’s sexual partner and their mixed-race offspring, as was the case when Geneviève, Louverture’s stepsister from his father’s first marriage, married a white planter in southern Saint-Domingue and obtained official freedom papers in 1776. By contrast, male manumissions were tied to exceptional deeds like military service, so black men represented less than 11 percent of all manumissions even though they formed the majority of the slave population. Louverture had won the lottery.2

  Louverture’s release from bondage was surely one of the most meaningful events in his life, and yet it remains shrouded in mystery. Who freed him? When? Why? Answering these questions is exceedingly difficult because he found it politically convenient during the Haitian Revolution to hide that he had been a freedman for decades, so as to preserve his credibility as the champion of the enslaved masses. “Twenty years ago the heavy burden of Slavery was lifted from my shoulders”: this passage in a confidential 1797 report to the French government was the only reference he ever made to his liberation.3

  The most likely scenario for Louverture’s manumission is provided by a family tradition reporting that “a rigorous punishment convinced Toussaint to flee his earliest masters.” He may have timed
his escape for the summer of 1772, since one of the Bréda attorneys, Gilly, died in August of that year, and for a time no one was officially in charge in Haut-du-Cap. That September, a five-foot-tall, thirty-year-old creole black man named Toussaint was listed as a runaway in Cap, where he had lived for two months while pretending to be free.4

  It was difficult for Louverture to remain in hiding when his name appeared in runaway ads in the local paper. He was soon captured and sent back to his plantation. Gilly’s successor as attorney of Haut-du-Cap, François Bayon de Libertat, could have inflicted a severe punishment, but he recognized Louverture’s potential and instead offered him a promotion. After Louverture was recaptured, the family tradition goes on to explain, “Bailly [Bayon] bought him and made him his coachman,” and then manumitted him. “My former boss, the virtuous Bayon,” Louverture later explained in the 1797 report, “decided to fulfill his duties toward humankind rather than benefit from the labor of a wretched Being.” The event must have taken place between the beginning of Bayon’s tenure in 1772 and the baptism of Marie-Josèphe in 1776, by which point Louverture described himself as free.5

  As best we can tell, this is how history’s most famous slave earned his freedom: by forging a special bond with a “big white.” Manumissions often functioned as motivation, implanting in the most loyal slaves some hope of being freed if they collaborated with the plantation system. This would explain Louverture’s closeness to the planter class and his political moderation just as, coincidentally, authorities were trying to reduce the number of manumissions and the rest of the slave population was becoming increasingly desperate as a result.

  An important question remains: What happened to the evidence? No official manumission deed (or reference to one) has been found, which is surprising, because the manumission process was very formal and should have left a lengthy paper trail. It would seem, then, that Louverture was never formally freed in the manner required by law. Perhaps Bayon wished to avoid paying the manumission tax, which was raised to 1,000 colonial livres in 1775. Perhaps he had defrauded Louverture’s legal owner, Pantaléon de Bréda Jr., who lived in Paris and was apparently never informed that Louverture was no longer his personal property. Neither possibility should surprise us: Bayon was a shifty individual who was eventually sacked for embezzling plantation funds and slaves.6