Toussaint Louverture Read online

  As a result, instead of citing the specific date of his official manumission, as required by law, Louverture simply introduced himself as a “free negro” whenever his name appeared in church or notarial documents, as if he could become a freedman merely by asserting that he was one. Friendly notaries and church clerks went along with the deception, but only a manumission deed could prove one’s freedom in court. This left Louverture in a precarious legal position. The governor could re-enslave a freedman if his owner had not followed the proper procedure. Nominally but not formally free, Louverture had not completely severed his ties to slavery.

  Despite the lack of formal recognition, Louverture joined the community of free people of color in Saint-Domingue, which was unusually large by Caribbean standards. From 6,897 free people of color around the time of his manumission, the size of the community would jump to 27,548 by the time of the Haitian Revolution. By then free people of color were almost as numerous as whites (30,826), who had outnumbered them 20 to 1 just a century earlier (both groups were dwarfed by the enslaved population, which stood at 465,429 in 1789). By comparison, there were only 4,093 free people of color in British Jamaica, a colony that otherwise closely resembled Saint-Domingue.7

  Just as there were “big whites” and “little whites,” there were “big” and “little” free people of color. Some were the mixed-race descendants of white colonists whose skin color was described by a rich racial vocabulary, ranging from mulâtre (mulatto) to quarteron (quadroon) and métif (octoroon); others, such as Louverture, were blacks of pure African ancestry. Some came from families that had been free for several generations; others, including Louverture, had been freed during their own lifetimes, sometimes unofficially. Some had inherited plantations from their French fathers; Louverture and others owned little or nothing. A member of the plantation elite when he was a slave, Louverture now found himself at the lowest rung of the free community.

  Collectively, free people of color claimed to own one-third of the plantations of Saint-Domingue. The figure was probably closer to 10 percent, but there is no doubt that they were active participants in the plantation economy. Like whites, they traded, owned, and exploited crops, land—and human beings.8

  Louverture was typical in this regard. In or before 1776, he acquired a slave named Jean-Baptiste, a native of the West African coast.9

  Louverture’s slave-owning past came as a shock when it was first made public in 1977: How could the future leader of the Haitian Revolution have exploited slaves? The evidence is a bit less damning when set in its proper historical context. We only know of Jean-Baptiste because Louverture legally freed him so that he could marry. Louverture may have simply bought and then freed someone he cared about, a common practice among free people of color. The only mystery is why Louverture chose to free Jean-Baptiste, who had no known family tie to him, rather than his many relatives who were still enslaved. Perhaps Louverture owed a moral debt to Jean-Baptiste, who had been tortured by the attorney Delribal during the cattle epidemic of 1773, and may have protected him in some unknown way at the time.10

  A freedman with limited financial resources, Louverture faced a moral dilemma that is unfathomable to us: Which slaves should he help free? A child or an old person? Both were relatively cheap to buy, but their freedom would be largely symbolic, because they did relatively little work and lived at the master’s expense. Or a woman of childbearing age, who was far more expensive to free, because of a punitive manumission tax, but who would otherwise continue to produce enslaved children, because slavery was matrilineal?11

  Aside from Jean-Baptiste, the first person Louverture bought was apparently his wife Cécile, whom he freed “so that the children to be born of their marriage could be free,” according to a later account. Cécile immediately tried to buy the liberty of her brother Tony, a coachman on the Bréda plantation. She may also have bought a slave of her own.12

  Cécile and Toussaint Louverture’s children were next. Their daughter, Marie-Marthe, was married by 1779 to an affluent free black, who presumably bought her freedom if Louverture had not already done so. Their sons, Toussaint and Gabriel Toussaint, were freed sometime between 1778 and 1785.13

  Louverture also had siblings and relatives to think about. His brothers Paul and Pierre were still listed as slaves on 1785 plantation registers, and they likely remained enslaved until the Haitian Revolution. But his sister, Marie-Jeanne, was not on the registers, so perhaps by then she was free. So was Marie-Rose, the mother of his goddaughters. Then, in 1789, Louverture arranged for his surrogate mother, Pélagie, to be freed. Ladies, as potential bearers of slaves, came first in his mind.14

  Fully extirpating slavery from one’s family tree was difficult. Although Louverture’s daughter Marie-Marthe was free by 1779, her mixed-race son was not, because he had been born when she was still a slave. So in 1783 Marie-Marthe had to buy her own son and then petition to have him legally freed.15

  Louverture also found time to think about his own financial future. In 1779, he bought a small lot in Haut-du-Cap. He was probably planning to raise crops to earn extra cash or even build a house of his own.16

  Louverture’s manumission was an opportunity for him to expand his personal network, which had once been limited to fellow slaves from the Bréda plantation but now came to encompass many free blacks from the Cap region. Every carriage ride was an opportunity for Bayon’s coachman to broaden his horizons. Work, church, family, city: he gained friends in every venue.

  The archives hint at some of the stops on Louverture’s rides. His boss, Bayon, liked to dine at La Charité, a religious hospital that had a reputation for terrible care but great food, and Louverture was spotted serving guests at the main table. This is probably how he met the future revolutionary leader Georges Biassou, whose mother was enslaved at the hospital. One can almost picture the two revolutionaries-to-be whispering to one another in the courtyard while their masters sip postprandial liqueurs with the hospital’s monks.17

  Reconstructing Louverture’s personal network in a more systematic manner is a difficult but not impossible task. Church and notarial records list witnesses, godparents, and business associates, so by sifting through old registers it is possible to identify the people known to Louverture, many of whom were destined for great things. The ties seem coincidental at first, but when all the index cards are pinned to the wall, they converge on one man who seems to appear, as if by magic, at the center of it all. One or two steps are usually enough to connect Louverture to every major revolutionary figure in the northern province.

  Detailed maps and tax censuses of Cap also bring to life the city that Louverture visited countless times as Bayon’s coachman before the Revolution, down to the address of many of his acquaintances. The layout of the streets has not changed in three hundred years, so one can literally walk in Louverture’s footsteps, tax census in hand, and follow him as he built up his network.18

  The diminutive town where Louverture’s parents had landed on a slave ship in the 1740s was barely recognizable by the time Louverture obtained his freedom in the 1770s. In thirty years, municipal authorities had raised and paved the streets, traced new squares, and erected public buildings and fountains. Because a fire had burned the original city to the ground, by law most houses in Cap were now made of stone (twice destroyed by an earthquake, Port-au-Prince was purposely rebuilt in wood and had a more ramshackle look).

  Map of Cap showing Louverture’s possible itinerary while visiting the town in the late 1770s and 1780s (north is to the right). Drawn by the author after René Phelipeaux, “Plan de la ville du Cap Français et de ses environs” (1785), Caribbean Map Collection, University of Florida, Gainesville.

  During their visits to Cap, Louverture and Bayon would have approached the city from the south, leaving the cemetery of La Fossette (where Louverture’s son was later buried) to their left and the swampy mouth of the Haut-du-Cap River (which served as a disposing ground for animal carcasses) to their right. That
area remains so unappealing today that the slums of modern Cap are concentrated there. They then entered Cap proper through Espagnole Street, then and now the city’s central thoroughfare. On their way, they passed by La Couronne Inn, whose chef was a free black named Henry Christophe, who later became one of Louverture’s leading generals and a king of Haiti. Their association presumably went back to the 1770s, when Louverture first noted his potential while stopping at the inn.19

  Espagnole Street was the widest and least shaded in Cap, so Bayon would have asked Louverture to hasten on to Montarcher Square, in the political center of Cap, to drop him off before it got too hot. Louverture liked to push his mounts hard (he purposely kept them half-tamed so that they would gallop faster) and was always happy to oblige; perhaps it was one of Louverture’s joy rides that prompted the city of Cap to pass a municipal ordinance barring black coachmen from galloping inside city limits. From Montarcher Square, Bayon could walk up to the government house to his left to meet royal officials, or he could go down the street to his right to the office of Éloi-Michel Grimperel, his favorite notary.20

  After leaving Bayon at the square, Louverture would have had a few hours to himself. Just opposite the square was the recently expanded theater of Cap. Acting was considered a “criminal profession” worthy of excommunication, and the theater was a raucous place known for its fistfights (a government clerk once bit the soldier who guarded the entrance). But it was also the focal point of the city’s social life (the son of the king of England once attended a play), so Louverture, who could recite lines from Othello from memory, must have attended plays there. If nothing else, it gave him an opportunity to connect with friends and acquaintances.21

  The most logical destination after leaving the theater was the church of Cap, three short blocks downhill on Notre Dame Street. It was a beautiful edifice rebuilt at great expense in 1772–1774 after an earthquake destroyed the previous building. Louverture was a frequent visitor, in part because Mass allowed him to hone his skills as a public speaker and to befriend parishioners and priests, which would serve him well during the Revolution.

  Coming out of the church’s dark recesses, Louverture would have stood in the midday glare at the south end of the Place d’Armes, the largest public square in town. He had no reason to linger on the plaza, where the poisoner Makandal had once been burnt alive, and where public executions of white criminals still took place regularly (black criminals were now executed on the market square, in keeping with a growing emphasis on racial segregation). These executions were not only gruesome but also rowdy and even dangerous: once in 1777, a criminal fought back, and the crowd sided with him. A riot ensued, and it was the executioner who died that day.22

  From the church, Louverture could have crossed the Place d’Armes on his way to the arsenal and the neighborhood of Carénage, at the town’s northern tip, or even trek all the way to Fort Picolet a few miles north of town, which is still standing and offers a beautiful panorama of the Bay of Cap. But he had no business in these elegant neighborhoods, where the presence of an unattached black man could attract unwelcome attention; nor would he have any desire to run into his old tormentor, Delribal, who managed a few houses nearby. Instead, he would most likely have turned around and headed south toward Cimetière Street, where the notary François Bordier often did legal work for Louverture and other free people of color.23

  Street scene in Cap. From La Cauchie, Un marché à Saint-Domingue (c. 1800). Personal collection of the author.

  From Bordier’s office it was only a short walk to the city’s waterfront docks, where longshoremen unloaded cargo in a maelstrom of activity. “A jetty reclaimed from the sea extended quite far,” marveled a visitor. “Storage houses on Capitaines Street were filled with the richest goods, and the amount of business done there defies description. One could see a forest of ships from the jetty, and the sea was covered with small craft loading and unloading them.” But the scene’s allure would have been lost on Louverture, who did not like ships, presumably because of his parents’ traumatic experience during the Middle Passage.24

  Heading away from the docks on Trois Chandeliers Street, Louverture would have passed by the house of Aaron Sasportas, the Jewish merchant who supplied food to the Haut-du-Cap plantation. It was probably there that Louverture first met Aaron’s young son Isaac Sasportas, who later played a notable role as a radical firebrand during the Revolution. Farther down the street, Louverture must often have stopped at the house that stood at the corner of Trois Chandeliers and Vaudreuil streets: it was rented to Corneille Brelle, a white priest who later became a trusted confidant.25

  Just across from Brelle’s residence was the busy expanse of Clugny Square. First opened in 1764, then paved in 1781, it was (and remains) a sight to behold. Up to 15,000 people attended its market on Sundays. Meat, both butchered and live, fish, and countless other products were sold by black women who tried to lure passersby like Louverture with an inviting laugh. Perhaps it was on Clugny Square that Louverture first befriended Marie Mouton (aka Fanchette Estève), a black merchant who later became his mistress. Her common-law husband, Joseph Bunel (a French immigrant who also dabbled in commerce), later became Louverture’s treasurer and diplomatic envoy.26

  Moving away from the market’s hustle and bustle, Louverture would likely have stopped in nearby Chantier Street at the home of Vincent Olivier, a centenarian who was the unofficial leader of the community of free people of color in the town. He did not live to see the Revolution, but he had many stories to tell, going back to the raid of Cartagena in 1697, at a time when Saint-Domingue was still a base for buccaneering expeditions, and where his bravery had earned him his freedom.27

  Two blocks over, on Boucheries Street, lived another prominent free black named Blaise Bréda, who was very well known to Louverture. Like Louverture, Bréda was a freedman of Allada ancestry who had been a slave on the Bréda plantation. Freed earlier than Louverture, he already owned property worth as much as 50,000 livres, including two houses in Cap. He now bought slaves, sold and leased slaves, and hunted down the slaves who ran away from his home. But he also used his influence to facilitate manumissions, thus providing a blueprint as a financially successful black freedman who had not completely forgotten his roots.28

  Just a block away, where St. Nicolas Street met Espagnole Street, lived another affluent free person of color, the building contractor Pierre-Guillaume Provoyeur, whom Louverture knew well because he often did construction work on the Haut-du-Cap plantation. But Provoyeur showed untoward interest in Louverture’s wife, Cécile, in the late 1770s, so Louverture had every reason to quickly cross Espagnole Street to the black neighborhood of Little Guinea, in the highest part of town, where Cap’s signature stone houses gave way to rickety wooden huts.29

  For Louverture, always accustomed to being on his guard, Little Guinea was a different world. Whites were few and urban blacks were assertive: black freedmen alone represented 46 percent of the population, and even slaves could live quasi-independently, as long as they found employment and paid a monthly fee to rent their own bodies from their masters. It was likely in Little Guinea that Louverture first met César Thélémaque, a free black who lived in a house on Taranne Street, not far from a Masonic Lodge, and who later became the mayor of Cap during the Revolution.

  On the way down from the Little Guinea neighborhood, wedged in between army barracks, lay the oddest street in Cap’s orderly geography. Just one block long, it was nicknamed “Ha Street” by surprised pedestrians who ventured into it by mistake. There lived the freedman Jean Jasmin, who was revered in the free community for setting up a charity hospital for people of color. In the close-knit world of Cap’s free population, where everyone was seemingly related to everyone else, Jean Jasmin was likely the adoptive father of Philippe Jasmin Désir, an affluent free black and Louverture’s son-in-law.30

  From street to street and block to block, in a few hours’ time Louverture could have visited a dozen individuals
known to have played a notable role in the Haitian Revolution. Many others lived nearby on plantations connected to the Brédas by business and family ties. In traditional accounts of the Revolution, it often seems as though rebel leaders pop up like rabbits from a magician’s hat—but in the northern province, most of them were actually known to Louverture long before the Revolution. Did he realize at the time that his rides and strolls through the region and streets of Cap were the first steps on the road to the Haitian Revolution? We cannot tell. As he looped around and headed back to Montarcher Square to pick up Bayon and drive him home to Haut-du-Cap, he again donned the mask of the loyal servant.

  SEVEN

  SLAVE DRIVER

  1779–1781

  TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE ELBOWED his way into Conseil Street in Cap. The streets were even more packed than usual because a fleet of French warships was about to sail for North America to join in the US War of Independence. It was August 17, 1779, and merchants, stevedores, and prostitutes worked overtime to accommodate the expedition. So did notaries: many free men of color from Saint-Domingue who had volunteered for the expedition were drafting their wills before embarking for a war from which they might never return.

  But Louverture was not in Cap to plan for death and destruction. When he finally broke through the throngs and entered the office of the notary Jean-François Doré on Conseil Street, it was to finalize the terms of a business deal with his son-in-law Philippe Jasmin Désir. For 1,000 colonial livres a year, Louverture agreed to lease a sixteen-acre coffee estate that Désir owned near Grande-Rivière, about ten miles southeast of Cap. The transaction included the estate’s land and buildings as well as thirteen of Désir’s slaves, who could be mortgaged and leased in Saint-Domingue like any piece of property.1