Toussaint Louverture Read online

  This difficult environment proved deadly for Louverture’s fledgling business. Two of the thirteen slaves under his care died, costing him 3,000 colonial livres in penalties, as well as, one hopes, some moral qualms about his involvement in plantation slavery. In a desperate effort to raise cash, in May 1781 he sold another strip of land from his small lot in Haut-du-Cap, which netted him a meager 175 colonial livres. In July, Louverture and Désir (just back, presumably, from the Savannah expedition) agreed to cancel the lease on the coffee plantation, which was initially scheduled to last for nine years.21

  After it first came to light in the 1970s that Louverture had rented slaves from his son-in-law, some historians began to argue that his values were virtually interchangeable with those of a white planter of the Old Regime, a view as extreme as the idealistic paradigm it tried to displace. Some biographies made the most outlandish claims: that Louverture was worth 648,000 livres by the time the Haitian Revolution began (an extraordinary sum); that he traveled to France as the business associate of the Bréda attorney (the evidence is thin); that he was a Freemason (the evidence is thinner). We were suddenly introduced, complained a skeptic, to “a wealthy planter but also a Freemason . . . who hob-nobbed with the island elite.”22

  Anointing Louverture as an abolitionist saint is a mistake, but so is depicting him as an elite individual completely cut off from the realities of slavery. Mixed-race planters who had inherited land from their fathers could be very rich, but the typical black freedman occupied a low rung in the colonial hierarchy. By default, many whites assumed that a black man was a slave until proven otherwise—which, assuming that Louverture had not properly registered his manumission, was technically true. He was no “big white”: he was a “little black” of limited means embarking on a new life at a late age, which explains why so few people knew of him when he first burst onto the scene during the Haitian Revolution.

  Historians have also sought to account for what happened to Louverture after the lease on the coffee plantation ended in the summer of 1781. Did he start another business? If so, where? A slave register uncovered in a private collection in 2013 provides a sobering response: Louverture simply headed back to the Bréda plantation in Haut-du-Cap, where he resumed the duties that had been his as a slave. Though a freedman, he lived among slaves and enslaved relatives; his name appeared on plantation documents as if he had never been freed.23

  Louverture returned to a plantation in upheaval. During the war, Haut-du-Cap was used to garrison French and Spanish soldiers, whose rowdy behavior did nothing to foster discipline in the workforce. In addition to stealing and damaging property, the soldiers started an epidemic of venereal diseases among the slaves that took years to extinguish. (Elderly nuns from the convent of Cap were housed on the nearby plantation of Charrier, but were probably not subject to the same treatment.) Also notable was the visit of Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid, the former governor of Louisiana, who spent a year on the nearby Charrier plantation while overseeing a Spanish attack on the Bahamas. His presence must have made an impression on Louverture, who had a penchant for bright uniforms and impressive titles.24

  In the summer of 1781, Admiral François de Grasse dropped anchor in Cap with a massive force of 26 ships of the line and a convoy of 200 sails. Taking 3,000 soldiers from the local garrison with him, he set sail in August for the United States, where his men took part in the two battles—the Battle of the Capes and the Battle of Yorktown—that sealed Britain’s defeat and the independence of the United States. Peace negotiations began in Paris in 1782.

  Before leaving for North America, de Grasse had left behind his sick, who were admitted to a makeshift hospital in Haut-du-Cap that housed up to 400 souls. The staggering death rate of European soldiers stationed in Saint-Domingue was not lost on Louverture. Many years later, he would make the deadly epidemiological environment created by the Columbian Exchange a centerpiece of his military strategy.25

  The war years claimed another casualty: Louverture’s marriage. In 1777, the Bréda attorney Bayon had hired a contractor named Pierre-Guillaume Provoyeur to expand the sugar mill of Haut-du-Cap. Provoyeur was a free mulatto, a slave owner, and a successful entrepreneur worth almost 70,000 livres, which put him in the upper tier of the free population of color in Cap. He apparently developed a close bond with Louverture’s wife, Cécile, while working on the Bréda plantation, which was no doubt facilitated by Louverture’s lengthy absences while managing the coffee estate in Petit Cormier. A suspiciously generous man, Provoyeur promised Cécile the sum of 1,800 livres in 1778, along with a house that he would build for her in Haut-du-Cap. He then bought lots in Haut-du-Cap in 1781 (presumably so that he could build the house for Cécile) and reiterated his financial promises in a 1782 will. Louverture, who was desperately trying and failing to keep his coffee estate afloat at the time, could not match his rival’s munificence.26

  Louverture’s marriage to Cécile broke down, and he never mentioned her thereafter. Perhaps his wife’s betrayal was too great a humiliation; or perhaps he wished to hide the fact that his relationship to his second wife began while he was still technically married to Cécile, divorce being illegal in France until the French Revolution. He was either a cuckold or a sinner, and neither was flattering.27

  Louverture’s first family quickly disintegrated. His son-in-law Désir died in 1784, aged forty-five. His firstborn son, Toussaint, followed Désir into the grave in 1785, aged twenty-four. His other son, Gabriel, simply disappeared. His widowed daughter, Marie-Marthe, briefly returned to the Bréda plantation and then remarried in 1787.28

  Louverture’s new son-in-law, like his previous one, was a free black and a slave owner who had served in the Savannah expedition. Named Janvier Dessalines, he bequeathed his last name to Marie-Marthe and to the slaves she had inherited from her first husband, which is how the slave Jean-Jacques came to be known to history as Jean-Jacques Dessalines.29

  The demise of Louverture’s first marriage coincided with the end of a period that had proved anything but tranquil for the colony, free people of color, and Louverture. Thankfully, the 1783 Treaty of Paris brought peace at last. France’s victory over Britain avenged the military humiliation of the Seven Years’ War, the colony’s economy rebounded, and Louverture began to rebuild his personal life.

  EIGHT

  MULETEER

  1781–1789

  TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE SPENT the last years leading up to the Haitian Revolution on the Bréda plantation of Haut-du-Cap, his birthplace. It was the first plantation that travelers encountered when leaving Cap on the road to Port-au-Prince. Though it was not the largest or the most valuable of the Bréda estates, it was usually there that their attorney resided because it was close to Cap, breezy, and scenic. The view from the balcony of the main house during an early Caribbean morning, when the rising sun bounced off the dewy leaves of a balisier, enchanted many a visitor. “It is one of the most beautiful panoramas in the world,” marveled one.1

  The view of the lowlands below the plantation was less pleasing. Malnourished slaves, their steamy skin glistening in the early light, were already at work cutting cane. A train of carriages, their axles creaking under heavy loads, snaked up from the fields, across a crumbling bridge, and over the river of Haut-du-Cap to the plantation’s main production buildings, from which the acrid smoke of burning cane soared to the sky. Louverture straddled both processes: listed as a “master miller and muleteer” on a plantation register, he oversaw the mules that hauled the canes from the fields and then powered the mill that crushed them.2

  The scene—industrial machinery, harnessed nature, and economic success—brings to mind mid-nineteenth-century British landscapes in which painters proudly showcased the steel mills and coal pits of the modern age. This is no coincidence. Saint-Domingue underwent its own agro-industrial revolution in the 1780s as it combined slave labor with the latest capitalist innovations. The heyday of the plantation system would forever remain Louverture’s economic
point of reference. Whether the entrepreneurial spirit of the planters and the exploitation of their slaves were enough to wrest a fortune from the island’s unforgiving climate, however, remains an open question.

  Sugarcane had been the main moneymaker in the plain of Cap since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Each decade, new production records were set. Frequent wars with Britain entailed financial setbacks, particularly the Seven Years’ War (1756–1764), which cost France its claims to Canada and Louisiana. Luckily, quipped Voltaire (who had never visited Louisiana), these were just “a few acres of snow.” Saint-Domingue, which was far more valuable to France than the rest of North America, forged ahead in the war’s aftermath. By the 1780s, sugarcane had spread to the valley of the Artibonite and the plains of Port-au-Prince and Cayes. Saint-Domingue was the world’s largest sugar exporter.3

  Sugar is such a cheap and undistinguished commodity today that it is difficult to understand its eighteenth-century cachet. Like coffee, it was a luxury item consumed by the rich and the aspiring middle classes. It was also rare. In the 1780s most of Europe’s sugar came from cane grown in the Caribbean and Brazil. Small Caribbean islands, such as Saint Lucia and Martinique, became economic powerhouses. With its 793 sugar plantations, Saint-Domingue was in a class of its own. The total value of its exports reached 137 million livres in 1788, putting it far ahead of Jamaica (45 million livres), Martinique (26), Guadeloupe (23), and the Spanish Caribbean (18).4

  Little remains of the Haut-du-Cap Bréda plantation today, but its physical footprint, judging by contemporary maps and surviving foundations, was typical of the sugar estates of the era. At the center of the estate stood the master’s main house, a hospital, a prison, a kitchen, slave quarters, and stables. Farther away were workshops, such as the forge and the lime kiln, along with the buildings required for the transformation of sugarcane: a mill (to crush the cane), vats (to boil cane juice), a purging house (to purify raw sugar), a drying tower (to dry purified sugar), and storehouses. Just across the road, pottery works owned by the Bréda family manufactured the clay molds used to purify sugar, fragments of which can still be found on the site today.

  Sugar plantations like Haut-du-Cap were the largest and most heavily capitalized agricultural estates in the New World. Because they required expensive facilities like aqueducts and mills in order to operate, they also required significant initial investment. At a time when a manual laborer earned 1 or 1½ French livres a day in France, the total value of a single estate could top 1 million colonial livres. At a time when a typical US planter might own half a dozen slaves, Haut-du-Cap employed 150, its sister plantation in Plaine-du-Nord 200, and the Manquets plantation, the crown jewel of the Bréda empire, 400. Because of the many processes needed to transform the cane, plantations were as much industrial as agricultural in nature.5

  Cane grew best on the level, well-watered fields of the alluvial plain of Cap. Farther up the slopes, as the plantation merged into the gravelly hillsides of Morne du Cap, cane fields gave way to individual gardens, where slaves were expected to grow their own food in their spare time, a practice that was illegal yet commonplace. A banana grove on an islet of the Haut-du-Cap River supplemented their diet (bananas were grown for local consumption only; they did not become an export crop until the advent of fast refrigerated ships in the late nineteenth century). Other areas were left uncultivated, often as grazing grounds.

  Sugarcane cultivation was physically demanding. Slaves first had to clear old-growth jungles. Even on established plantations like Haut-du-Cap, they often undertook labor-intensive improvements, such as digging drainage ditches or renovating buildings. The wooden bridge over the Haut-du-Cap River was often damaged by floods and had to be repaired countless times. Some plantations used an aqueduct or a windmill to power the sugar mill (one colonist even suggested using the steam produced by boiling the sugarcane juice as a source of energy), but in Haut-du-Cap mules and slaves were the only source of mechanical power.6

  Growing cane was a never-ending process. Slaves first plowed the fields by hand before planting the cane. The seedlings were then carefully weeded and watered until the mature stalks were cut about one year later, also by hand, and stripped of their razor-sharp leaves. Throughout, slaves were pushed and pulled by the threat of the driver’s lash and a call-and-response chant (the practice has endured in Haiti as kombit, a form of communal farm labor accompanied by singing).7

  Growing the cane was just a starting point. On a typical plantation, about half the slaves toiled in the fields; the rest, including a majority of the men, served as blacksmiths, wheelwrights, carpenters, coopers, and sugar refiners. Because sugarcane juice sours fast, Louverture and other muleteers rushed the freshly harvested stalks to the plantation for further processing. After they had milled the canes, a refiner boiled the juice to separate the gooey molasses from the brown sugar, which was then dried and purified into “clayed” sugar. It was not rare, during the harvest period, for slaves to work well into the night and then wake up before dawn for the next day’s labors. Injuries due to overwork and exhaustion, such as losing one’s hand in the drums of the sugar mill or getting scalded by boiling cane juice, were common. Sugar was a bitter crop.

  On the plantation of Haut-du-Cap, Toussaint Louverture worked at a mule-driven mill of this type. From Anon., “Moulin à sucre” (painted version of an engraving originally published in Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie). Personal collection of the author.

  Entrusted with the comparatively undemanding task of caring for the plantation’s mules, Louverture was a lucky man. The imaginative names he chose for the animals of Haut-du-Cap also suggest that he had a sense of humor: Trahison (treason) worked alongside L’argent bon (money’s good), Ça yo voir (let’s see), and the cheekily named Nègre maître (negro master) and Gouverneur (governor).8

  Saint-Domingue on the eve of the Revolution was a blend of Enlightenment progress and antiquated labor exploitation. In April 1784, just six months after the world’s first demonstration of a hot-air balloon in France, the first balloon to fly on the American continent took off from the Gallifet plantation a few miles from where Louverture lived. It may have represented the latest advances in chemistry and physics, but it flew over slaves who were among the most poorly treated in the colony. Later that year, a scientific society started meeting in Cap, and its members began to exchange findings with scientists in Philadelphia; but the meeting room was located a short distance from the spot where slave ships unloaded their African cargo.9

  Saint-Domingue stood at the center of a busy trading network that stretched from the slave-trading outposts of West Africa and the banking center of Amsterdam to Newfoundland cod fisheries, the cattle ranches of Santo Domingo, the wharves of Bordeaux, the silver mines of Mexico, contraband havens like Curaçao, and the plantations where African slaves transformed black sweat into sweet gold. This was no triangular trade; this was a mercantile octagon.

  Though they depended on slavery, sugar plantations bore all the characteristics of a modern capitalist enterprise: a large workforce, the division of labor, industrial processes, large capital investments, complex financial transactions, and long-distance trade. “Each planter is, strictly speaking, an industrialist,” proudly noted the colonial assembly.10

  The sugar economy’s far-reaching connections gave Louverture a cosmopolitan outlook that would have been uncommon among the parochial European peasantry of the time. This may explain why, when he took over the reins of the colony in the 1790s, he seemed equally at ease writing letters to a US president and negotiating with African-born laborers in their native tongue. He was, in many ways, a citizen of the modern, capitalist world.

  The attorney who oversaw Haut-du-Cap when Louverture returned to the plantation in 1781, François Bayon de Libertat, had occupied the position almost continuously since 1772. So close were the two men that some early historians described Bayon as a “friend” who went on “sexual escapades” with Louverture, though the yawning
social gap between the “big white” and the black freedman probably precluded such close intimacy.11

  A native of Aix-en-Provence in southeastern France, Bayon oversaw multiple estates for the Brédas and other absentee owners. It was a lucrative occupation. He received 10 percent of the overall income whether the plantation ran a profit or not. He also owned a coffee estate for a time, and in 1777 he purchased a sugar plantation of his own in Limbé. Along the way, he managed to finagle his way into a title of nobility, hence the fancy “de Libertat” that he tacked onto his last name.12

  A landowning family man and an adept networker, Bayon embodied Louverture’s aspirations. He lived in Haut-du-Cap’s main house with his wife, Marie-Jeanne de Saint-Martin, and their two daughters, born in 1773 and 1774. He had married well: his wife’s father was the dean of the court of appeals in Cap and her many sisters had all wedded prominent lawyers, officers, and planters. He sent his daughters to complete their education in a French convent in 1780 and immediately began planning their marriages to ensure that they would get a more suitable match than their mother had. They had not yet turned ten.13

  His views on race marked Bayon as a product of his time. He described an employee as “more negro than white” to illustrate his incompetence, and he waged a legal battle for years against his neighbor Pierre Chapuizet over his application to become an officer in a white militia because he suspected him of having a black ancestor. The prevalence of maroonage on the plantations that he owned or managed also suggests that he was not popular with field hands—for good reason. Under his management, living conditions in Haut-du-Cap were downright primitive. A twenty-foot-deep ravine caused by soil erosion bisected the slave quarters. The hospital was no better, especially after Mrs. Bayon, who played the role of unofficial nurse, went to France for an extended stay. The sick were left to fend for themselves: “What an inhumane spectacle to see a poor fellow lying on a cot, without a mattress or sheets, almost naked, longing for a quick death!” lamented the accountant.14