Toussaint Louverture

• 1. Introduction

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  François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture was nearly 50 years old when he picked up a soldier's commission and changed the course of an empire. He had been born a slave on the Bréda plantation, manumitted years before the French Revolution, and had spent his middle age as a salaried plantation employee. He even owned coffee plantations of his own at Petit Cormier, Grande Rivière, and Ennery. Then, in the early 1790s, a slave revolt broke out in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. The man who joined it as a lieutenant would die a prisoner in a French fortress, having ruled an entire island in between. How does a freed slave become Governor-General-for-life of a colony, write his own constitution, and end up jailed by the most powerful man in Europe? What did he believe, who did he betray, and who betrayed him? And why did Abraham Lincoln, decades after his death, finally recognize the nation he helped create?

• 2. A Stolen Lineage

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  Hyppolite, an Allada slave from the slave coast of West Africa, was Louverture's father. He had been taken into enslavement during wars of expansion by the Kingdom of Dahomey into Allada territory. To remove political rivals and obtain European trade goods, Dahomean slavers separated Hyppolite from his first wife Catherine, then sold him to the crew of the French slave ship Hermione bound for the French West Indies. The original names of Toussaint's parents are unknown. The Code Noir required that slaves brought to the colonies be made into Catholics, stripped of their African names, and given European ones. Toussaint's father received the name Hyppolite at his baptism on Saint-Domingue. Latin and Greek names were the most fashionable for slaves at this time, followed by French and Biblical Christian names. Louverture's son Isaac would later claim that his great-grandfather, Hyppolite's father, was Gaou Guinou, a son of the King of Allada. Little evidence supports the royal claim. The title deguenon, meaning old man or wise man in the Allada kingdom, suggests the family belonged to the bureaucracy or nobility rather than the royal house. Toussaint was the eldest son, born to Hyppolite and his second wife Pauline, a slave from the Aja ethnic group. He was given the name Toussaint at birth, on the plantation of Bréda at Haut-du-Cap, where he would spend most of his life before the revolution. His parents went on to have several more children, five of whom survived infancy: Marie-Jean, Paul, Pierre, Jean, and Gaou, the last named for his grandfather.

• 3. Fatras-Bâton

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  Fatras-Bâton, meaning sickly stick, was the nickname the young Toussaint earned for his small, thin stature. The same boy would later be famous for his stamina and riding prowess. He and his siblings were trained as domestic servants, and Toussaint became an equestrian and coachman after showing a talent for handling horses and oxen. Working in the manor house and stables kept the children away from the grueling labor and deadly corporal punishment of the sugar-cane fields. Even so, Louverture's pride pushed him into fights with the petits-blancs, the white commoners hired to work on the plantation. A record survives of him beating a young petit blanc named Ferere, escaping punishment thanks to the protection of the overseer François Antoine Bayon de Libertat. De Libertat had become steward of the Bréda property after it was inherited by Pantaléon de Bréda Jr. and managed by Bréda's nephew, the Count of Noah. On one occasion Louverture threw the plantation attorney Bergé off a Bréda horse when Bergé tried to take it beyond the property without permission. The relationship with de Libertat would last for decades; near the end of the revolution Louverture would personally authorize the old overseer's return to the island.

• 4. Freedom And Family

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  Until 1938, historians believed Louverture had remained a slave until the revolution began. The later discovery of a marriage certificate and baptismal record dated between 1776 and 1777 proved he was already a freeman. He had been manumitted sometime between 1772 and 1776, around the time de Libertat became overseer. The finding clarified a private letter Louverture sent the French government in 1797, mentioning that he had been free for more than twenty years. Toussaint took the name Toussaint de Bréda upon being freed, joining the gens de couleur libres, the free people of color. A popular slogan held that the French felt at home in France and the slaves felt at home in Africa, but they felt at home on the island. Louverture rented a small coffee plantation along with its 13 slaves from his future son-in-law. One of the slaves he owned at this time is believed to have been Jean-Jacques Dessalines, his future lieutenant. Between 1761 and 1777 he married his first wife, Cécile, in a Catholic ceremony, and they had three children: Toussaint Jr., Gabrielle-Toussaint, and Marie-Marthe. Buying slaves was one of the few legal ways to free a former slave's relatives, and Louverture bought the freedom of Cécile, their children, his sister Marie-Jean, and others. When his coffee plantation failed, the marriage broke down, and Cécile left him for a wealthy Creole planter. In 1782, Louverture married his second wife, Suzanne Simone-Baptiste, thought to have been his cousin or the daughter of his godfather Pierre-Baptiste. He so completely erased his first marriage from his recollections that few researchers knew Cécile existed until the documents surfaced. Toward the end of his life he told General Caffarelli he had fathered at least 16 children, of whom 11 had died before him. His son Isaac was born in 1784 and Saint-Jean in 1791, both remaining enslaved until the revolution.

• 5. A Self-Made Education

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  Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher who had lived as a slave, appears in the familiarity shown by Louverture's surviving letters. His public speeches showed knowledge of Machiavelli. Some point to the Enlightenment thinker Abbé Raynal, a French critic of slavery whose Histoire des deux Indes predicted a slave revolt in the West Indies, as a possible influence. Pierre-Baptiste, Louverture's godfather, gave him some of his early education on the Bréda plantation. Jesuit and Capuchin missionaries provided theological instruction through his devout Catholicism. His medical knowledge drew on the folk medicine of African plantation slaves and Creole communities, as well as techniques from hospitals founded by the Jesuits and free people of color. Legal documents signed on Louverture's behalf between 1778 and 1781 suggest he could not yet write. Throughout the revolution he dictated his letters to secretaries. A few surviving documents in his own hand from the end of his life confirm he eventually learned to write, though his French spelling was strictly phonetic and close to the Creole French he had spoken most of his life.

• 6. The Opening

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  On the 14th of August 1791, two hundred members of the black and mixed-race population gathered in secret at a plantation in Morne-Rouge to plan their revolt. Among them were Dutty François Boukman, Jean-François Papillon, Georges Biassou, Jeannot Bullet, and Toussaint. Wary of the danger after Vincent Ogé and Jean-Baptiste Chavannes had been broken on the wheel in Le Cap in February 1791, Toussaint nominated Biassou as leader and joined as a secretary and lieutenant. Louverture held back from the earliest fighting, spending weeks sending his family to safety in Santo Domingo and hiding his old overseer Bayon de Libertat in a nearby wood. He brought de Libertat food from a rebel camp and later helped his family resettle in the United States and mainland France. In 1791 he joined negotiations for the release of white prisoners in exchange for a ban on whips, an extra non-working day each week, and the freedom of imprisoned leaders. Throughout 1792 he ran the fortified post of La Tannerie and maintained the Cordon de l'Ouest, a line of posts between rebel and colonial territory. He trained his men in guerrilla tactics and the European style of war, emphasizing brotherhood and fraternity. After hard fighting he lost La Tannerie in January 1793 to French General Étienne Maynaud de Bizefranc de Laveaux, but in those battles the French first recognized him as a significant military leader. Some time in 1792-1793, Toussaint adopted the surname Louverture, from the French word for opening. He did not spell it with an apostrophe. The most common explanation is that it referred to his ability to create openings in battle, though the name is also attributed to commissioner Polverel's exclamation that the man made an opening everywhere. Some writers think it referred to a gap between his front teeth.

• 7. Changing Banners

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  On the 29th of August 1793, Louverture made his declaration at Camp Turel to the black population of St. Domingue: "Brothers and friends, I am Toussaint Louverture; perhaps my name has made itself known to you. I have undertaken vengeance. I want Liberty and Equality to reign in St. Domingue. I am working to make that happen. Unite yourselves to us, brothers and fight with us for the same cause." On the same day, the French commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax proclaimed emancipation for all slaves in French Saint-Domingue. Louverture had allied with the Spanish of neighboring Santo Domingo, having said that the blacks wanted to serve under a king and the Spanish king offered his protection. His auxiliary force captured the port town of Gonaïves in December 1793 and was responsible for half of all Spanish gains north of the Artibonite. Tensions grew as his superior Matías de Armona was replaced by Juan de Lleonart, and as he feuded with Biassou, who had been stealing his supplies and selling his men's families as slaves. On the 4th of February 1794, the French revolutionary government proclaimed the abolition of slavery. A letter from Toussaint to Laveaux confirms he was fighting officially for the French by the 18th of May 1794. He eradicated Spanish supporters from the Cordon de l'Ouest, faced British troops who had landed in September, and pooled his 4,000 men with Laveaux's forces. His officers now included his brother Paul, his nephew Hyacinthe Moïse, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe. The Treaty of Basel of July 1795 formally ended hostilities between France and Spain. When Louverture rescued the captured Governor Laveaux from the mulatto commander Jean-Louis Villatte in 1796, he opened the warehouses to the public to prove they held none of the chains residents feared. Appointed Lieutenant Governor, he replied: "After God, Laveaux."

• 8. Governor For Life

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  Almost 300,000 colonial livre per year flowed to Louverture from thirty-one properties near the end of the revolution, making him the richest person on Saint-Domingue. On the 30th of April 1798 he signed a treaty with British officer Thomas Maitland to withdraw British troops in exchange for amnesty for French counter-revolutionaries. He later sent the grand blanc diplomat Joseph Bunel to negotiate trade with the administration of John Adams, a New Englander hostile to slavery, while refusing every suggestion that he declare independence. In 1799 the rivalry between Louverture and the free man of color André Rigaud erupted into the War of the South. The campaign, delegated largely to Dessalines, lasted more than a year before Rigaud fled to Guadeloupe and then France in August 1800. Estimates of the dead range from 10,000, suggested by French general Pamphile de Lacroix, to only a few hundred, claimed by historian C. L. R. James. In January 1801, Louverture and his nephew Hyacinthe Moïse invaded the Spanish territory, taking it from the governor Don Garcia, abolishing slavery there, and bringing the whole island under his control. He promulgated his Constitution on the 7th of July 1801, naming himself governor-general for life with near absolute powers and the right to choose his successor. Article 3 declared servitude forever abolished, yet the constitution confirmed his policies of forced labor and the importation of workers, since he believed freedom could not survive without work. Article 6 made the Roman Catholic faith the only publicly professed faith. Colonel Charles Humbert Marie Vincent, who personally opposed the document, was charged with delivering it to Napoleon and was briefly exiled to Elba for his trouble. The constitution acknowledged in Article 1 that Saint-Domingue remained a single colony of the French Empire. Louverture wrote to Napoleon insisting on his loyalty but received no reply, and Napoleon prepared an expedition of 20,000 men.

  General Charles Emmanuel Leclerc, Napoleon's brother-in-law, led the expedition with secret orders to deport all black officers. Christophe wrote to him: "you will only enter the city of Cap, after having watched it reduced to ashes. And even upon these ashes, I will fight you." Christophe burned Cap-Français and retreated, while Paul Louverture was tricked by a false letter into letting the French occupy Santo Domingo. Louverture's plan was to burn the coastal cities, retreat into the inaccessible mountains, and wait for yellow fever to decimate the French. Internal communication proved the greatest obstacle. After Christophe and then Dessalines switched sides, Louverture rode into Cap-Français on the 6th of May 1802, negotiated an amnesty, and was placed under house arrest at Ennery. Dessalines bore at least partial responsibility for the arrest, as Louverture's son Isaac asserted. On the 22nd of May 1802, after learning Louverture had failed to order a rebel leader to lay down arms, Dessalines wrote to Leclerc denouncing his conduct as extraordinary, and he and his wife received gifts from Jean Baptiste Brunet. Brunet, ordered to make the arrest after Dessalines declined, lured Louverture with a letter calling himself a sincere friend, then absented himself out of embarrassment. On the 7th of June 1802, Louverture and about a hundred of his inner circle were captured and deported. Boarding the frigate Créole, he warned his captors: "In overthrowing me you have cut down in Saint Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty; it will spring up again from the roots, for they are numerous and they are deep." The ships reached France on the 2nd of July 1802, and on the 25th of August he was imprisoned at Fort-de-Joux in Doubs.

  Constant fevers, severe stomach aches, loss of appetite, vomiting, and inflammation of his entire body described Louverture's state in January 1803, in the words of the second guard assigned to him. Both guards and French medical staff refused him proper care and basic amenities such as firewood, believing he was faking his symptoms. The first guard admitted to Navy Minister Denis Decrès that he had refused medical care because Louverture was black. In a memoir clandestinely delivered to an interrogator sent by Napoleon, Louverture wrote that without a doubt he owed this treatment to his color. He died in prison on the 7th of April 1803 at the age of 59. Suggested causes include exhaustion, malnutrition, apoplexy, pneumonia, and possibly tuberculosis. Louverture died before the final and most violent stage of the revolution. Under his lieutenant Dessalines, Haitian forces, with the French army ravaged by yellow fever, won the final major battle at Vertières on the 18th of November 1803. Saint-Domingue declared independence on the 1st of January 1804 as Haiti, named after the indigenous Taíno word Ayiti for the western mountainous side of the island. Haiti became the first independent black republic in the Americas and the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere, after the United States. France recognized Haitian sovereignty in 1825, twenty one years after independence, only after forcing the nation to pay an indemnity of 150 million gold francs. The roots Louverture spoke of had spread far enough that President Abraham Lincoln officially recognized Haiti in 1862, during the American Civil War.

  Every day when possible, Louverture attended Mass, served as godfather at slave baptisms, and quizzed others on the catechism. He was one of the few slaves on the Bréda plantation labeled devout. When the Jesuits were expelled in 1763 for spreading Catholicism among the slaves, he grew closer to the Capuchin Order that succeeded them in 1768, especially because they did not own plantations. Vodou, common among slaves of Allada origin, marked Louverture's early life through its link between spirits and herbs used for medicine. Historian Sudhir Hazareesingh writes that Toussaint undoubtedly made this connection and drew upon the magical recipes of sorcerers in his practice of natural medicine. His reputation as a doctor helped him gather a following in his earlier adult years. As ruler, however, he discouraged Vodou and eventually persecuted its followers. The absolute dedication Louverture demanded of his soldiers he embodied himself. Hazareesingh, author of Black Spartacus, calls him the epitome of the charismatic military leader: a model of sobriety who slept only a few hours each night, drank no alcohol, and whose physical endurance exceeded that of the hardiest men. Historians have confirmed the Masonic membership of several free blacks and white men close to him, and a Masonic symbol appears in his own signature.

  John Brown claimed Louverture's influence in his plans to invade Harpers Ferry, and during the 19th century African Americans cited him as an example of how to reach freedom. The Haitian revolution he helped lead remains the only successful slave rebellion in world history to establish an independent nation. Alongside Dessalines, he is now known as one of the Fathers of Haiti. On the 29th of August 1954, the Haitian ambassador to France, Léon Thébaud, inaugurated a stone cross memorial for Louverture at the foot of Fort de Joux. The French government later presented a shovelful of soil from the fort to the Haitian government as a symbolic transfer of his remains. An inscription in his memory was installed in 1998 on the wall of the Panthéon in Paris. The Duvalier dictatorship turned Louverture into a national hero to promote Haitian identity and unity, building its ethnonationalism on the legacy of the revolution. Historical criticism has focused on his desire for personal power, the expulsion of Sonthonax, and his rehabilitation of the white planters. His youngest child with Suzanne, Saint-Jean Toussaint, was affected by his father's death and died in 1804 in Agen. Suzanne was tortured by French soldiers, deported to Jamaica, and died there on the 19th of May 1816 in the arms of her surviving sons Placide and Isaac. In 1831 Placide married Joséphine de Lacaze, heiress to the Château du Parc near Agen, and of their three children only Rose, who lived from 1823 to 1900, reached adulthood. The experimental rock band Swans referenced him in a track on their 2014 double album To Be Kind.