TWO
The second son of Toussaint's legal marriage, Isaac Louverture, wrote two memoirs concerning his father. The first is an anecdotal account of events, most of which Isaac personally witnessed, during the invasion of Toussaint's Saint Domingue by Napoleon Bonaparte's army. The second, though less complete and more fragmentary than the other, is almost the only source available on Toussaint's ancestry and his childhood. The memoir which Toussaint himself wrote during his final imprisonment is wonderfully vague on these matters. Though it is a sort of autobiography, Toussaint's memoir was meant as a legal brief for a military trial which never took place, and so cannot safely be taken at its full and apparent face value.
What becomes obvious from his memoir, his correspondence, his proclamations and public addresses, his more casual statements that have survived in memory, and even from the way he told a tale of himself through his actions, is that Toussaint Louverture always shaped and controlled his own story—the narrative which presented him as a character—with great deliberation, care, and ingenuity. His awareness of the importance of his public image, and that it could be fashioned without a very strict regard for the truth, is one of the several peculiarly modern qualities that put him centuries ahead of his time.
Isaac Louverture had been sent to school in France in his early teens. He returned to Saint Domingue in 1802, essentially as a hostage of the army sent by Napoleon Bonaparte to subdue what Bonaparte had decided to regard as a rebellion against the authority of what was swiftly becoming his government in France. Isaac's reunion with Toussaint was brief, and it is unlikely that he had any opportunity to speak to his father again after both were arrested later that year. Though Toussaint was deported from Saint Domingue on the same ship as his wife Suzanne and his three legitimate sons, he was allowed no contact with them during the voyage and in France he was imprisoned in a province far from his family. Isaac never returned to the island of his birth, so his notes on Toussaint's life before Napoleon's invasion depend on his own childhood memories, and probably those of his mother, who finished her days in Agen, near him. Thus it is possible that elements of his story are apocryphal.
By Isaac's report, Toussaint was the grandson of an African king named Gaou-Guinou, of the Arada “warrior nation.”1 Intertribal African wars were a constant source of supply for the slave trade. Gaou-Guinou's second son (also and somewhat confusingly known as Gaou-Guinou) was captured in one of these and sold to traders who shipped him to Saint Domingue, apparently along with numerous warriors of his tribe. The colonial writer Moreau Saint-Mery describes the Aradas, who came from Africa's Gold Coast and whose reddish yellow skin tone often caused them to be mistaken for mulattoes in Saint Domingue, as well-known for both intelligence and ferocity.
The unfortunate African prince and his tribesmen ended up on Breda Plantation, near the village called Haut du Cap, just a few miles southeast of Cap Francais (and a few more miles northwest of Bois Caiman). “Far from his native land,” writes Isaac, in the flowery French style of the early nineteenth century, “the second son of Gaou-Guinou no longer heard … the fierce and terrible songs of the warriors of his nation, in which they celebrated the valor of their king and of his ancestors; but he had held on to their memory. In his captivity he met some of his own who, subjects like himself in another hemisphere, recognized him for their prince, and paid him homage, and saluted him after the fashion of their country. Humanity and good intentions soft-ened misfortune in the establishment of the comte de Noe. He [the African prince] enjoyed total liberty on the lands of his protector. He had five blacks to cultivate a portion of land which was assigned to him. The Catholic religion became his own; he married a beautiful and virtuous woman of his country. Both of them died almost at the same time, leaving five male children, of whom the youngest, who resembled his ancestor,* received the name of Gaou, and three daughters. The oldest of the five male children was Toussaint-Louverture, less illustrious for the rank his ancestors held in Africa than for himself.”2
This romantic tale strains credibility without absolutely defying it. Though it seems unlikely that a slave owner would be foolhardy enough to leave an African war chief more or less at liberty among a group of men who had quite recently been his soldiers, the history of the last days of colonial Saint Domingue is rich with examples of similarly self-destructive behavior. More recent research supports the idea that Toussaint's father was indeed the son of the junior Gaou-Guinou, who was shipped to Saint Domingue with his first wife, Affiba, and two children. The Arada prince was baptized with the name of Hyppo-lite and survived, though blind, until 1804. François Dominique Toussaint—Louverture-to-be—was the child of Hyppolite's second marriage to a woman named Pauline, which produced four daughters and three sons besides Toussaint: Jean, Paul, and Pierre, all of whom would later adopt the name of Louverture.
There is, however, one difficulty with this version of Toussaint's origins: he does not appear in the property lists of the comte de Noe, nor in those of Monsieur de Breda, the uncle from whom Noe inherited Breda Plantation in 1786 and who was the actual owner of the property during Toussaint's childhood and youth.
No written record of Toussaint's birth has ever been found either, and he contradicts himself (and others) concerning the date. His name suggests strongly that he was born on All Saints' Day, but does nothing to tell us the year. A letter he addressed to the French Directory in 1797 declares that he had “arrived at the age of 50 years when the French Revolution, which changed my destiny as it changed that of the whole world, had just begun.'3 This statement yields a birth date of 1739, yet according to Isaac Louverture, Toussaint was born in 1746, whereas a couple of other early biographers offer 1743, and in 1802 Toussaint himself, a prisoner in France, gave his age as fifty-eight, which supposes yet another birth date of 1745. In the absence of written records it is likely that he himself could only guess at the year of his birth, within this roughly seven-year spread, but it is clear enough that he was either in his late forties or early fifties when destiny changed everything for him.
He had lived much, much longer than the average slave in Saint Domingue—against expectation, for he was born a frail and sickly child and legend has it he was not expected to survive. Perhaps he owed his early nickname, Fatras-Baton (Throwaway-Stick), to this childhood frailty. But all slaves too old, unhealthy, or injured to work were marked Sisfatras (trash) on the lists of slaves on Breda Plantation. Toussaint had the care of his father (who actually outlived him) once he was old and blind, and the name Fatras-Baton might also have implied that he was in charge of all the infirm slaves at Breda.
According to Isaac's notes, Toussaint was educated by his godfather, Pierre Baptiste, who had a good knowledge of French, some knowledge of Latin, and “even some notions of geometry.”4 Baptiste, who by Isaac's description was most likely a freedman, got his own education from someone whom Isaac terms a “missionary,” and who very probably was a Jesuit priest. It seems almost certain that Toussaint learned to read and write during his childhood or early youth, though in later life he liked to say that he had taught himself these skills when already in his forties, thus very shortly before the revolution began.
A legal document to which Toussaint was a party in the 1770s is signed by someone else in his stead, suggesting that Toussaint could not write his own name at that date. But this suggestion might very well have been a ruse. The white colonists of Saint Domingue frowned on literacy among their slaves, fearing the dangerous ideas that might be introduced, and there is evidence that the slaves themselves saw reading and writing as rebellious if not revolutionary acts—which it would have been most advisable to practice in secret. Another story, perhaps apocryphal, holds that Toussaint was beaten bloody by a colonist who saw him reading a book on the main street of Haut du Cap, and that Toussaint wore the bloodstained coat until, in the early days of the revolution, he found his assailant again and killed him.
Almost all of Toussaint's correspondence was dictated to secretaries. A few surviving letters written from prison in his own hand reveal that he was able to write in French, rather than the much more common Creole patois in which slaves communicated with their masters and among themselves, though his spelling was strictly phonetic. He seems to have read Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher who had himself once been a slave. In public addresses he made at the height of his power, he occasionally referred to Machiavelli, and his career indicates that he had mastered many fundamentals of The Prince, whether or not he learned them from the book.
If he had not read all of the Abbe Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes, he certainly had read the notorious passage in which the radical priest predicts a violent end to slavery: “All that the negroes lack is a leader courageous enough to carry them to vengeance and carnage. Where is he, this great man, that nature owes to its vexed, oppressed, tormented children? Where is he? He will appear, do not doubt it. He will show himself and will raise the sacred banner of liberty. This venerable leader will gather around him his comrades in misfortune. More impetuous than the torrents, they will leave everywhere ineffaceable traces of their just anger.'5
In Isaac's version, Toussaint was born on Breda Plantation. During his youth, the plantation had among its team of French managers a man named Beage. In his maturity, Toussaint would be renowned for his self-control; he distinguished himself from the other rebel leaders by a more temperate disposition and a much cooler head. Still, at the age of eighteen he lost his temper with Beage in an argument about a horse, and went so far as to strike him. Such events were almost unheard-of: any slave who forgot himself so far as to hit a white man was liable to punishment by death, and more than likely a very slow and painful death. Apparently in this rare case the unusually humanitarian program which Isaac credits the comte de Noe with installing at Breda was respected by the manager. If Toussaint's rash action had any consequences, they were not permanent or fatal.
From an early age, Toussaint had been put in charge of much of Breda's livestock. It was a logical assignment for a slave too small and frail to be of much service in the cane fields; moreover, Toussaint seems to have had an inborn talent for working with animals, which his masters encouraged him to develop. With something like a natural jockey's build, Toussaint would become famous as a horseman—even Frenchmen who sneered at his style admitted there was no horse he could not handle. He also became an expert horse trainer and had considerable skill as a vet. When Bayon de Libertat took over the management of Breda in 1772, Toussaint emerged as the new steward's coachman and probably his most trusted black subordinate. “Having fathomed the character of Toussaint,” the manager recalled in 1799, “I entrusted to him the principal branch of my management, and the care of the livestock. Never was my confidence in him disappointed.”6
It was difficult for slaves to marry in colonial Saint Domingue, as the Code Noir made it illegal for a married couple and their children to be separated by a sale. Perhaps for that reason, Toussaint married rather late in life, when he was over forty. However, his life before his marriage did not lack for romance. Though he was never a handsome man, Toussaints unusual skills, intelligence, and status as a commandeur and trusted personal servant of Breda's manager seem to have made him attractive enough to women that he was able to father eight enfants naturels outside the confines of wedlock: four sons (Jean-Pierre, Didine Gustave, Benjamin, and Rainville) and four daughters (Martine, Marie-Noel, Rose, and Zizine).
Toussaints wife, Suzanne Simon Baptiste, was mother to a ten-month-old son named Placide at the time of their marriage in 1782. By some accounts, this infant's father was a mulatto named Seraphin Clere. Placide was light-skinned, and once identified himself in a legal document as a griffe (one of sixty-four officially recognized permutations of combined European and African blood). However, Toussaint acknowledged paternity of Placide when he married Suzanne, at which point his capacity to father children out of wedlock had already been thoroughly proved. Placide's skin tone might well have been accounted for by Toussaint's Arada heritage. And Toussaint's relationship to Placide was markedly closer than what he had with the two younger children of his marriage, Isaac and Saint-Jean; in 1802 Placide joined Toussaint's army in resisting the Napoleonic invasion, while Isaac declared himself incapable of taking up arms against the French. Later on, during their exile in France, the issue of paternity soured the relationship between the two (half?) brothers, and Isaac tried legal means to prevent Placide from using the Louverture name. Portraits of Isaac and Placide (almost certainly drawn from life) show a marked resemblance between Isaac and the most credible portraits of Toussaint Louverture, while the Placide-Toussaint resemblance is slight to nonexistent. On the other hand, when Toussaint enumerated all of his eleven children to the interrogator Caffarelli in the prison of the Fort de Joux, he pointedly included Placide among his three legitimate sons.
The four dots enclosed by the last extravagant loop of the signature which Toussaint deployed for the first time in his proclamation from Camp Turel indicate that he was a Freemason, and of a very high degree; all his subsequent signatures also include this symbol. Toussaint's name is not to be found in the membership list of any Masonic lodge; yet those lists do include the names of many of his proteges—men who were officers in his army and would figure prominently in future governments of Haiti, not only his brother Paul Louverture and his nephew Charles Belair but also many white men who were close to him. The implication is that the ever-secretive Toussaint occluded his own name from the membership rolls while discreetly using the Masonic temple structure to reinforce the position of his closest associates—whose presence there strongly suggests that Toussaints sponsorship was very influential.
Freemasonry has preserved its essential secrets from its origins up until the present day. During the eighteenth century it was established in Saint Domingue by French colonists, but even in the colonial period the Masonic lodges included (surprisingly) some free blacks and gens de couleur as well as whites. Toussaint's membership in the organization would have furnished him a relationship—on exceptionally equal terms—with some of the most powerful white men in the colony. Via this network, he and other leaders of the first insurrection are supposed to have been in contact with significant figures among the grands blancs before the great rising of the slaves in August 1791.
Toussaint's presence is implied between the lines of the Masonic records, and also in those of two hospitals originally founded by the Fathers of Charity, a Jesuit order, in the region of Cap Francais. One of these, sometimes called the Providence Hospital, was located on the high ground of Le Cap, near the military barracks and the Champ de Mars: the other was on the heights outside of town, above the road which leads to Haut du Cap. The sympathy of the Jesuit priests with the slaves and free blacks was alarming enough to the colonial authorities that the order was formally forbidden to operate in Saint Domingue by an edict of 1763; the Jesuits' landholdings and other property, including slaves, were confiscated. These hospitals continued to operate after 1763 (thirty years later, Biassou raided one of them to rescue his mother), though they were no longer officially connected to the Jesuits.
Both before and after the expulsion of the Jesuits from Saint Domingue, these hospitals were much frequented by free blacks, including Toussaint Breda (and probably also his godfather Baptiste). Haitian historian Pere Cabon asserts that Toussaint was a slave at “the Hospital of the Fathers in Le Cap.” In a 1779 letter to the Abbe Gregoire in France, Pere Constantin of Luxembourg claims to have known Toussaint before his rise to fame and power: “a negro, slave at the hospital of the Fathers of Charity, where he served me at table when I went there to dine.”7
It is possible, though not very likely, that Toussaint Louverture was a slave of the Jesuits before he turned up on Breda Plantation, to which he conceivably could have been sold when the Jesuits were expelled in 1763, or even at a later date. Not all the Jesuits actually left the colony that year; one of them, the Abbe Leclerc, hung on in quasi hiding on a plantation formerly owned by the Fathers of Charity in the region of Haut du Cap. An early biographer reports that Toussaint was a slave on this plantation, which burned in 1772—the very year Bayon de Libertat took over the management of Breda.
Whether or not he was ever actually owned by the Jesuits, it seems very likely that Toussaint was in a position to imbibe their influence during his youth (he was somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four at the time of their expulsion) and that they had a hand in his education. (One cynic commented that Toussaint spent enough time with the Jesuits to absorb the duplicity and hypocrisy of which the order was often accused, along with their erudition.) The Jesuits were diligent in religious instruction not only for their own slaves but also for those on nearby plantations, including Breda, and that is the likely source for the Catholic devotion which Toussaint so constantly displayed as he rose to power. And it seems certain that Toussaint was sometimes employed at either or both of the Jesuit-founded hospitals, which used some slaves and free blacks as nurses, with between ten and twenty-five patients in their care; some blacks also assisted in surgery. Toussaint very likely served in such a role, as well as waiting on visiting clerics at meals. This situation was propitious for augmenting his considerable knowledge of African-based herbal medicine with European medical lore of the period. Toussaint's ability in both styles of treatment goes a long way to explain why “Medecin General” became his first title among the rebel slaves in 1791. Georges Biassou's family belonged to the Jesuit hospital system, so it's there that his acquaintance with Toussaint most likely began.
As in the Masonic lodge and the Jesuit hospitals, Toussaint's invisible presence is felt in the extensive correspondence between the manager Bayon de Libertat and the absentee proprietor of Breda Plantation, Monsieur de Breda. In these letters, Bayon frequently mentions his preference for Arada slaves, whom he believed to be unusually capable and trustworthy, and recommends that the owner purchase more members of this tribe. Here again, Toussaint, though unnamed, is suggested by Bayon's descriptions. These letters, combined with the anomalous fact that Toussaint cannot be identified on the rolls of slaves belonging to Breda Plantation, suggest an alternative to the story of his origin recounted by Isaac Louverture.
Isaac's description of Gaou-Guinou/Hyppolite's status at Breda is consistent with a condition called liberte de savane, according to which a slave would be freed for all practical purposes, but without an official manumission document and thus without the owner's being obliged to pay the prohibitive manumission tax. If his father had been freed in this manner, then Toussaint would never have been listed on the rolls of slaves at Breda. General François Marie Perichou de Kerverseau, a French officer who wrote a hostile but incisive study of the black leader at the height of his power, claimed (somewhat spitefully) that Toussaint had never known slavery in anything but name.
And yet, in 1878, Bayon de Libertat's widow wrote to Placide Louverture's daughter Rose: “You must have heard your parents speak about the family of Bayon, in which Monsieur your father was born. Monsieur Bayon, recognizing the intellectual qualities of Monsieur votre pere, had him raised like his own son.”8
In the early 1770s, Bayon de Libertat sold a plantation with eighty-six slaves in order to make the move to Haut du Cap, but he kept a few of his slaves from the place he gave up and brought them with him to Breda. In a letter to Bredas owner, who had offered him the services of one of his coachmen, de Libertat wrote, “I have no need of his help, I have coachmen of my own.'9
The previous manager of Breda Plantation, a Monsieur Gilly, died at his post in 1772, and in his last testament he recommended to the owner in Paris that his godson, Bayon de Libertat, take over the management of this property and another plantation owned by Monsieur de Breda a few miles off near the town of Plaine du Nord. It was a valuable concession: not only were the two plantations rich in sugarcane, but the one at Haut du Cap included a pottery works which produced tiles, bricks, and vessels sought after by planters all over the region, for the clay used in the manufacture was of a nonporous type that did not react with sugar, but “favored the cares of the refiner and even seemed to embellish his work.”10 More than one jealous observer had an eye on the job which Gilly had vacated and Bayon had assumed.
Bayon's first year at Breda was difficult. A severe drought brought on illness among the livestock; many animals were lost. In February 1773, a windstorm damaged many of the plantation's buildings. And although Bayon seems to have been a good friend of the late M. Gilly, he found a good deal of fault with his predecessor's management. According to Bayon's first letters back to France, Gilly had done little more than barely keep things going. Bayon himself was for growth and development; he wanted to increase the slave labor force (in part through more births on the plantation), to plant more staples for the slaves to live on, and to make other substantial improvements. Monsieur de Breda (whose own letters are lost) must have complained about the expense entailed, for on August 6,1773, Bayon wrote to complain of a “lack of Confidence”; moreover, the owner's remarks had wounded Bayon's “delicacy.” Abruptly, Bayon turned over Breda Plantation to a Sieur Delribal, writing tartly to Monsieur de Breda: “It's up to you to give your Confidence to whoever seems good to you; you have made a beautiful choice. It remains to be Known just how your plantations will be managed.”11
Delribal's tenure at Breda was catastrophic. Livestock there continued to die, most likely of drought-related disease which was widespread in the region, but the new manager suspected poisoning. Fear of poisoning was a kind of neurosis among the planter class, nurtured by the fact that every so often a poison plot really did exist, like the one organized by Macandal, a notorious maroon leader, in 1757. This conspiracy, which had the destruction of the whole white population as its goal, was foiled just before it was launched, and Macandal was captured and burned at the stake. Its specter, however, remained vividly present to the minds of men like Delribal.
Bayon thought his rival's suspicions absurd, writing to the owner on August 18, “There is no one but the Sieur Delribal, alone, who pretends that it's poison … He has said he is Convinced of it by the testimony of the herdsmen, whom he has put to torture; finally Louis, a creole, the only one of your negroes who understands the bandaging of animals, was put in a dungeon of the prison in Le Cap; Despair moved him to Cut His Throat with a broken bottle; this unfortunate did not die on the spot, though we doubt that he will survive; another of your negroes was brought to the same extremity on your plantation; finally whatever reasonable negroes are there have been reduced to the greatest despair.”12
The Toussaint who would become Louverture is suggested in these lines—by his absence. By all accounts, he had acquired a famous skill in veterinary medicine by 1773. But apparently he was not one of Monsieur de Breda's Negroes; more likely he had left Breda Plantation with his master, Bayon, with whom he would later return.
The “reasonable” Negroes at Breda carried a complaint about Delribal's conduct to Monsieur de Breda's nephews, the brothers Noe, who owned other plantations in the area of Plaine du Nord, but got no immediate relief. Delribal (as Bayon went on reporting to the absent owner throughout the fall of 1773) continued to pursue the poison plot. Bayon notes acidly that the one material improvement Delribal had accomplished at Breda was the construction of a large torture chamber. At the sight of that, most of the adult male slaves on the plantation fled into the mountains, where they lived in marronage for nearly two months.
Delribal's own lengthy report to the owner fits neatly with Bayon's accusations: “I promised him* that if he was Guilty of having made the Animals die I would pardon him if he wanted to tell me the truth, But that I wanted to Know also, In Case he was not Guilty, who were the Negroes who made them Die? With what? And from Whom did they buy the Drugs? That if he declared to me everything that I asked for, I promised him further that I would ask you to give him Liberty, but if on the Contrary he did not want to confess I would make him Suffer, and that I would leave him for the Rest of his Days in the Dungeon.”13
Under torture, Delribal's several victims did indeed declare to him everything that he asked for—and as he had done a good job of suggesting to them what he wanted to hear, the poison plot which he “discovered” came straight from his own morbid fantasies. “I will not Hide from you,” he wrote to the owner, “that from the Acquaintance I have had during twenty-three years I have been in Saint Domingue Of the Malice of which the Negroes are Capable, to cause to perish from poison, Whites, negroes and Animals, as they have done in the past … I Am of the persuasion that In this Malady there is something supernatural.”14 Bayon, whose account agrees closely with Delribal's on the events (though not at all on their interpretation), confirmed in his own letters that Delribal believed that he himself was the ultimate intended victim of the poison plot—and that Delribal himself used witchcraft in his “investigation.” “He had the simplicity to make a Magic Wand turn, which he said would let him know who were the poisoners on your plantation,” Bayon wrote, soon after Monsieur de Breda had decided to fire Delribal and restore Bayon. “It is a sad character of whom you have rid yourself.”15
Sad indeed, but also typical. More masters resembled Delribal than Bayon—fearful and suspicious to the point of paranoia and at least as superstitious as the Africans they affected to despise for that weakness. Delribal's report of his own conduct reveals how the masters could imprison themselves in the endless vicious circles of the slave system. Bayon, for his part, was an exceptional case, as progressive as a slave master could possibly be. One need not call his attitude altruistic, but he was determined to create conditions in which the slaves of Breda would multiply. Creole slaves, born in the colony, were considered infinitely more useful and manageable than those imported from Africa, but under masters and managers of Delribal's stripe, abortion and infanticide—notorious among the slaves of Saint Domingue— destroyed all hope of increasing them. In a system where Delribal represented the norm, Bayon's commonsensical approach was enough to make him respected and liked by slaves in his charge, perhaps even beloved by some of them.
“I hope,” he wrote to the owner soon after his return to Breda, “that henceforward there will be no such disorder. Your negroes seem to be very Happy that I command them, They Know how determined I am that no one will do them Injustice, that they will have provisions to live on in their place, that they will be Cared For When they are ill, but also that they will work for Their master.”16
Substitute the word “liberty” for “master,” and you have something almost identical to the policy that Toussaint Louverture would institute in 1801, as military governor of Saint Domingue.
The same day that Bayon de Libertat resumed his post at Breda, most of the runaway slaves also returned to the plantation—some intermediary must have been able to find them and let them know that the regime was about to change. Against expectation, the slave Louis recovered from the self-inflicted wound on his throat, though Bayon reported that he now wheezed like an asthmatic and had a hard time making his speech understood. As the work gangs returned to their normal routines, the epidemic among the horses and cattle also subsided.
Apparently one of de Libertat's personal retainers, a man with a knowledge of veterinary medicine and a knack for diplomacy with discontented slaves, assisted considerably with restoring order at Breda— assistance which may have been enough to justify his manumission. Toussaint was in his thirties at this time, still only approaching the prime of his powers, and it was a very unusual thing for a valuable male slave to be freed at that relatively young age. With the several skills he was known to possess, Toussaint a Breda might have earned and saved the money to purchase his own freedom, or he might have had his liberty as a gift, in recognition of some extraordinary service such as playing an indispensable role in restoring the plantation from chaos to good order. In a letter to the French Directory in 1797, Toussaint himself credits Bayon de Libertat (not the comte de Noe) with having set him free: “Twenty years ago the heavy burden of slavery was lifted from me by one of those men who think more of their duties to fulfill toward oppressed humanity than the product of work of an unfortunate being. Here I speak of my former master, the virtuous Bayon.”17
In the memoir he wrote in prison at the Fort de Joux, Toussaint touches on his life as a slave in a graceful but not especially informative arabesque: “I have been a slave; I dare to say it, but I never was subjected to reproaches on the part of my masters.”18 At the top of the arc of his career—as brigadier general, lieutenant governor, and finally governor general of Saint Domingue—he would often allude in this general way to the time he had spent in slavery. He never mentioned that he had been freed from his enslavement for seventeen years before he put himself at the head of the revolting blacks whom Sonthonax's proclamation of abolition had redefined as nouveaux libres.
The surviving list of Breda's slaves is dated 1785, just six years before the insurrection on the Northern Plain put an end to the whole situation. In fact there is one Toussaint on the list, but his particulars bear no relation to those of Toussaint Louverture. The Toussaint who remained a slave in 1785 is listed as a sugar refiner (a skill that was never part of Louverture's portfolio), and is only thirty-one years of age—Louverture must have been at least ten years older by that date. However, Louverture's wife and her two sons are clearly identifiable on the list: Suzanne, a Creole, age thirty-four, and her four-year-old son Seraphin, who would later be known as Placide Louverture. Isaac, at the age of six months, is still recorded as a piece of property. His father, however, had been free for nearly ten years.
The first hard evidence of Toussaint's freedom was discovered in the 1970s: a document from the parish of Borgne attesting to the marriage of one “Jean Baptiste, negro of the Mesurade nation freed byToussaint Breda, a free negro.”19 Abbe Delaporte, cure of Borgne, added a marginal note to this description of Toussaint: “and recognized as free by Monsieurs the General and the Intendant in the year 1776.”20 This marriage certificate is enough to prove the date of Toussaint's freedom, the fact that he must have been formally and legally set free rather than informally granted liberte de savane (for otherwise the top officials of the colony would not have recognized him as a free man), and that he owned at least one slave: the one he had set free.
Toussaint Breda also figures in three other notarial acts of the pre-revolutionary period. In a document dated 1779, he appears as the leaseholder of a plantation at Petit Cormier, in the parish of Grande Riviere (the same region where the rebel blacks were to camp in the fall of 1791). The lessor was Philippe Jasmin Desir, whom subsequent documents identify as Toussaint's son-in-law, married to one of his filles naturelles, Martine. The property consisted of sixteen carreaux, or about sixty-four acres, most of it planted in coffee and staples, and for the period of the lease Toussaint became responsible for thirteen slaves who lived and worked there. That one of these slaves had the quite uncommon name of Moyse is suggestive, for Toussaint treated the Moyse who was one of his key subalterns during the revolution as an adoptive nephew. A Jean-Jacques also appears on the list of slaves included in the lease, but since this name was more common in that day there is less reason to suppose that the man in question was Jean-Jacques Dessalines, future emperor of Haiti. It is known that Dessalines was the slave of a free black master and that he was born at Petit Cormier, but if he had been under Toussaint's authority during slavery time, this circumstance would probably have been noticed later on.
An act of 1781 dissolves the lease on the basis of a mutual agreement, well before its nine-year term, with no reason given. Chances are that Toussaint, who had by then been free for five years, had found means to purchase a property elsewhere. It seems unlikely that he abandoned the lease for lack of means to maintain it, since in the same year he appears as fonde de pouvoir (authorized representative) on behalf of his son-in-law Philippe Jasmin Desir in a minor dispute with the owner of a property Jasmin had leased in Borgne.
In his prison at the Fort de Joux, Toussaint declared that at the time the revolution erupted he was master of a considerable fortune; these three real estate transactions suggest how he (and other free blacks) achieved such prosperity. Sugar production required a heavy initial investment, not only in land, mill machinery, and refining equipment, but also in the large number of slaves required for such a labor-intensive operation—an investment out of range of the typical newly freed slave who would likely have spent all his resources on the purchase of his own freedom (though it seems likely that Toussaint himself was freed for meritorious service to Bayon de Libertat). Coffee plantations, however, were less labor-intensive and less expensive to operate, while the cultivation of staples which could be sold to the large slave gangs on the sugar plantations was cheaper still. Buying, selling, and renting plantations could also be extremely profitable in the 1770s and ‘80s, when most of the obvious arable land had already been developed. But if Toussaint Breda had found an open road to riches, he did his best not to make himself noticeable as he traveled it. Though he almost certainly knew how to read and write at the time that these documents were executed, he declared himself unable to sign his name and allowed someone else to sign on his behalf.
The fact that Toussaint had a lot of business in Borgne suggests that he may have come with Bayon de Libertat from that parish, rather than having been born on Breda Plantation at Haut du Cap. The location of the plantation sold by Bayon when he moved to Breda has never been established; Gerard Barthelemy theorizes that Bayon may have come from Borgne. A substantial mountain separates Borgne from Haut du Cap and the Northern Plain, and it is not obvious why Toussaint would have involved himself in plantations there if he had no prior connection to the area. On the other hand, Borgne is an extremely fertile pocket in an out-of-the-way place, so it probably would have been easier for a free black to acquire land there than in the heavily cultivated region of the Northern Plain. And Toussaint's holdings were quite far-flung; Grande Riviere is also a good distance from Haut du Cap, and at the Fort de Joux Toussaint told his interrogator that he and Suzanne (who apparently had substantial means of her own, though still a slave in 1785) had purchased several properties in the canton of Ennery, a few miles northeast of Gona'ives and on the far side of the Cordon de l'Ouest from Toussaint's base at Breda.
In 1791, then, Toussaint was not a rebel slave, but a free man who for whatever reason had joined their cause, and in 1793 he was not a nou-veau but an ancien libre. Before 1791 he belonged to the class of affran-chis, freedmen, within which slaves of 100 percent African blood who had won manumission by whatever means available had no legal distinction from gens de couleur who had been freed by their white lovers or fathers. Then too there was a class of black and colored free persons, legally distinct from the affranchigroup, who had been born of free parents and thus were never slaves. Chemist and houngan Max Beauvoir reports having seen a marriage certificate for Toussaint and Suzanne which attests thatToussaint himself was born free, but this document is not found in the scholarly record, and the hard evidence that does exist supports the idea that he was freed in the 1770s.
He was thus a member of a very small group: free blacks who owned slaves as well as property, and enjoyed the same legal status (and lack of status) as free gens de couleur, but who were separated from the gens de couleumot only by a socially significant racial difference but also by differences in their social connections. Though often despised and abused by the grands blancs, the free gens de couleur had close kinship ties to the most wealthy and powerful white colonists in Saint Domingue, and more often than not those ties did prove useful to the educational and economic advancement of the free colored population. Allowing for exceptions like Toussaint's unusually close relationship with Bayon de Libertat, free blacks enjoyed no such advantage.
Baron de Wimpfen, a traveler in colonial Saint Domingue, puts it plainly: “the black class is the last.* That's the one of the free property-owning negroes, who are few in number.”21 For a mulatto born into slavery, son of a white father, manumission could be expected almost as an unwritten right. A black slave had no such expectation. A large number of those who were freed were too old to do plantation work anymore—they were fatras, in the unsentimental term used on the slave rolls. Others won freedom for particular merit, most commonly by service in the militia or the marechaussee. Some, usually persons with a special skill like carpentry, blacksmithing, or the care and training of animals, worked on their free days to earn their recorded value and finally purchased their own freedom.
Since documents of the period don't reliably distinguish free mulat-toes from free blacks, it is difficult to estimate just how many of the latter there really were. De Wimpfen says they were “few in number”; Haitian scholar Jean Fouchard suggests, on the contrary, that they may have been as numerous as the free mulattoes, especially if blacks with the status of liberte de savane are included. But if free blacks were to be educated, they paid for it themselves, having no white fathers to send them to the colleges for colonists' children in France. Nor did free blacks have family resources to help them enter the plantation economy on a large scale. Most operated as tradesmen and craftsmen: carpenters, masons, tailors, and the like. Some, it appears, were professional criminals. According to one account, many free blacks were less materially comfortable than slaves on the more humanely run plantations—such slaves might even look down on impoverished free blacks. Free blacks living in the countryside were constantly suspected of harboring maroons, and indeed it was sometimes difficult to distinguish a runaway from a legitimate free black.
Some free blacks made an argument that they ought to be seen as superior to the mulatto group: “The Negro comes from pure blood; the Mulatto, on the contrary, comes from mixed blood; it's a mixture of the Black and the White, it is a bastard species … According to this truth, it is plain enough that the Negro is above the Mulatto, just as pure gold is above mixtures of gold.”22 But this scrap of rhetoric had no effect on the social reality of Saint Domingue, where even mulatto slaves felt superior to free blacks. Intermarriage between gens de couleur and free blacks was rare, and frowned upon by the former. Saint Domingue used an elaborate algebra to define sixty-four different variations of European-African mixture, and in this situation many mulattoes took an interest in lightening their children's skin through breeding.
Toussaint Breda, then, was exceptional even within the small class of free blacks, for very few of them owned land and slaves on the scale that he did. And even if the free blacks really did amount to half of the affranchis, the group was simply too small to give him an adequate power base. He had perceived, earlier than most, that even the gens de couleur all together, though numerous and determined enough to put up a good fight, would be in the end too small and weak to win the ultimate battles. The wellspring of real power was within the huge majority of half a million African slaves, and therefore Toussaint Louverture did everything he possibly could to identify himself with them.
Between 1776, when he was freed, and 1791, when the rebellion began, Toussaint Breda had a surprising number of common interests with members of the white planter class, despite the profound racial gap between him and them, and especially with the one white planter who had been his master and had willingly set him free. Some ten years older than Toussaint, Bayon de Libertat (like Napoleon Bonaparte) had roots in the Corsican petty nobility. One of his ancestors, known as Le Borgne (One-Eye), had won a certain celebrity in the service of King Henry IV of France. In France the family was based in Comminges, not far from an area called the Isle de Noe, so it is likely that de Libertat already had some connection to Louis Panteleon, comte de Noe, as well as his uncle Panteleon II de Breda, when Bayon first came among flocks of impoverished noblemen and younger sons to seek his fortune in Saint Domingue. One Lespinaist, another manager who hoped to sup-plant de Libertat on one of the plantations he was in charge of, wrote bitterly that de Libertat owed all his fortune to the comte de Noe.
The count was a Creole, born in the colony, where his family had been established for nearly a century, and he was heir to several important plantations at Haut du Cap, Plaine du Nord, and Port Margot, in the mountains between Haut du Cap and Borgne. Breda Plantation came to him through the marriage of his father, Louis, to Marie-Anne-Elisabeth de Breda. Louis Panteleon was born in 1728, two years after the marriage; when he was two his father was killed in a duel at Cap Francais. The toddler count was thus left fatherless but very, very rich. In 1786, Louis Panteleon de Noe was nearly sixty when he inherited Breda Plantation from his childless uncle in France.
Bayon de Libertat was a smaller operator; in the middle of the eighteenth century he was just setting a foot on the bottom rung of the ladder which the Noe family had already ascended. While managing the vast holdings of the comte de Noe, de Libertat bought and sold smaller properties of his own, including undeveloped tracts and two one-eighth shares of existing plantations. The jealous Lespinaist estimated him to be worth “150 mille livres de procurations.”23
Freed in 1776, Toussaint Breda put a toe on the bottom of the ladder to prosperity and began to follow Bayon de Libertat, who by then had climbed about halfway to the top. Though he owned several properties by 1791, Toussaint went on living at Breda Plantation, close to his former master. It is possible that Toussaint may have managed some of the Noe properties in de Libertat's stead, for Lespinaist's letter accuses Bayon of absenting himself to one of his own plantations and neglecting the lands he was supposed to be supervising.
Since free blacks were apt to be viewed with suspicion, especially if they lived in comparatively remote areas like Grande Riviere or Borgne, Toussaint's position was much more secure at Breda, under the wing of his white protector. Working as acommandeurthere would have given Toussaint a salary which he could invest in the properties he was acquiring. As a coachman he was apt to be charged with messages by his employers, and it is likely that he played some supervisory role at Noe properties other than Breda, like Hericourt Plantation, near the town of Plaine du Nord, which he would later adopt as a headquarters. Traveling on behalf of de Noe and de Libertat would allow him to learn about tracts of land in which he himself might be interested; for example, if he called at de Noes coffee plantation at Port Margot, he didn't have much further to go to reach a small holding of his own at Borgne. Of course, Toussaint could never become a blanc, but up until 1791 his economic interests, at least, were closer to those of the grands blancsof Saint Domingue than to the great mute body of their slaves.
All evidence suggests that the relationship between Bayon de Libertat and Toussaint Breda was one of friendship, as much as or more than that of master and slave. It's often noted that Toussaint accompanied and assisted Bayon in various escapades and slightly off-color adventures. Some of these were probably amorous; Madame de Libertat went on a long journey to France in 1775, to take the waters at Bagneres, and Toussaint's own youthful prowess with the ladies was proved by the number of his extramarital children. But in 1791, Madame de Libertat was in residence at Breda, Bayon de Libertat was sixty-four years old, and both husband and wife had been sobered and saddened by the death of the younger of their two daughters at her school in France in 1784. “It is most Dolorous for a father and mother who love their children so,” Bayon wrote to Monsieur de Breda that year. “God has struck us in a sensitive spot.”24 He brought his sole surviving child back to Saint Domingue and swore he would not be parted from her except by death.
Toussaint, by his own reckoning, was over fifty in 1791. Both men had presumably outgrown the excesses of their youth, and settled down into a quieter, calmer level of companionship.
Colonel Cambefort, commander of the Regiment du Cap, was Bayon de Libertat's brother-in-law, and the regiment's second in command, Lieutenant Colonel Louis-Anne de Tousard, was Bayon's close friend and associate. Toussaint must have known both men well; aside from the family connection it is likely that all four were members of the same Masonic lodge; if Toussaint really was a Mason he could have had no more probable sponsor than Bayon de Libertat, who is known to have been a member of the lodge at Le Cap.
According to tenacious legend, a delegation of chafing royalists vis-ited Breda Plantation sometime in the summer of 1791, with the approval of Governor Blanchelande. The petit blancs faction, commonly called Pompons Rouges for the red cockades they wore in support of the French Revolution, now two years under way, had taken over the Colonial Assembly at Le Cap. The grands blancs, of a generally royalist disposition and wearing white cockades to show their loyalty to the king, were looking for a strategy to put the petit bL·nc canaille back in its place. Their notion, wild though it seems, was that a manufactured and secretly controlled uprising of the slaves on the Northern Plain could frighten the petit blancs faction back into submission to the Pompons Blancs, according to the old sociopolitical rules of the ancien regime.
It seems likely that the delegation to Breda included either Cambefort or Tousard, if not both of them. Since both men were very familiar with Toussaint, it is not so incredible that one of them should have, in the words of Haitian historian Celigny Ardouin, “let slip a few words regarding that project for a rising of the slaves; too perspicacious not to recognize right away the opportunity for the future of his class in a general insurrection, Toussaint hazarded a few words in favor of the project; and added that the promise of three free days per week and the abolition of the punishment of the whip would suffice to raise the work gangs; but also, he demanded freedom for the slaves principally in charge of moving the others to action, as the price of their submission to the benevolent will of those who would deign to look after their well-being.”25
Celigny Ardouin goes on to describe Toussaint as being the chief, though hidden, instigator and organizer of the meeting at Bois Caiman, to which he invited “his most intimate friends, Jean-François Papillon, Georges Biassou, Boukman Dutty and Jeannot Billet,” all of whom were, like Toussaint, commandeurs on their respective plantations. Since Toussaint was already well known and well traveled all over the Northern Department, this mission would have been easy for him and would have attracted no unusual attention, though Blanchelande supposedly furnished him a special safe-conduct for these very special errands. “The conspirators met and distributed roles. Slyer than the others, Jean-François obtained the highest rank, Biassou the second; Boukman and Jeannot, being more audacious, charged themselves with directing the first movements. Toussaint reserved for himself the role of intermediary among the conspirators and secret movers of the insurrection: in any case he did not want to declare himself until he could be sure of the success of the enterprise.”26
Though all the historians close to the events adopt it, the theory that the great slave uprising of 1791 had its origin in a white royalist plot has been dismissed and discredited by scholars of the late twentieth century, in part because it seems to belittle the achievement of Saint Domingue's revolutionary slaves in winning their own freedom and founding their own nation. However, if the grands blancs actually did light the fuse to the bomb that blew up their whole society, that is simply one of history's most magnificent ironies—it takes nothing at all away from the achievement of the black revolutionaries and their leaders, who almost immediately wrested control of the scheme away from the original plotters and took it over for themselves. Toussaint, especially, was always adept at redirecting the energy of others to serve his own ends.
Meanwhile, the strongest argument against the royalist conspiracy theory is its sheer preposterousness. The grands blancs had been in terror of a massive slave insurrection for at least a generation. What consequences could they possibly have expected if they started one themselves? What possible advantage could they have seen in the devastation of the plantations of the Northern Plain and the massacre of so many white inhabitants: men, women, and children, all members of their own class? How could they possibly have imagined that they could keep a general insurrection under control once it had begun?
If there are any answers, they lie in the state of extreme desperation among Saint Domingue's grands blancs at this time. Most of the upper strata of the colonial military and government consisted of French aristocracy. The world of the ancien regime was swiftly disintegrating in France, whence the nobles were racing into exile. Blanchelande and his cohort envisioned that the colony might become a refuge for the ancien regime—a notion compatible with the fledgling independence move-ment that existed among Saint Domingue's planter and mercantile classes, as well as with the idea of accepting an English protectorate there. But if any of these schemes were to come to fruition, the expansion of the French Revolution into the colony would absolutely have to be stopped.
From this point of view, the idea of instigating an essentially bogus slave insurrection could be made to resemble an acceptable risk. The conspiracy, if it did exist, was taking its cues from events in France of the previous two years, where what had become known as “the Paris mob” was launched at various royalist targets—the Bastille, Versailles, and so on—by a few manipulating hands well hidden behind the scenes. The royalist conspirators of Saint Domingue knew or supposed that these popular manifestations in Paris were not nearly so spontaneous as they were meant to appear.
So perhaps they really did believe that they could let the genie of mass slave revolt out of the bottle and then, when they chose to, put it back in. If so, they learned within twenty-four hours just how wrong they had been. Tousard, setting out at the head of his regiment to defend Limbe, was obliged to rush back to stop Jeannot from sacking Cap Francais. Clouds of smoke from the burning cane fields on the plain had darkened the sky over the Jewel of the Antilles; before long the bedraggled survivors from the plantations began to drift in. If the black leaders of the slave revolt had ever been taking orders from royalist whites, on August 22, 1791, they definitively stopped doing so.
However, during the weeks and months that followed, vestiges of the royalist conspiracy did persist. Even in October 1791 the insurgent blacks seemed to cling to the idea that a deal was to be struck with their masters involving three free days a week and abolition of the whip. The otherwise mystifying royalist bent of so many of the rebel bands can also be explained in these terms.
Whether it really existed or not, the idea of a royalist conspiracy was adopted by Governor Blanchelande's political enemies—most notably by Leger Felicite Sonthonax, who ordered Blanchelande's deportation on these grounds. Later on, when it had become clear that the increasingly bitter conflict between Toussaint Louverture and Sonthonax would leave only one man standing, Sonthonax leveled the same accusation at Toussaint: “By the impulsion of the same emigres* who surround him today, he organized in 1791 the revolt of the Blacks and the massacre of the White proprietors.”27
Former governor Blanchelande was shipped to France under suspicion of “having wanted to operate the counter-revolution”28 —the centerpiece of the desired operation was the slave insurrection of 1791. The same writer, the Marquis de Rouvray, saw Blanchelande as an “imbecile,” the puppet of an “assembly of fools and intriguers.”29 Blanchelande's accusers could always reiterate the evidence derived from the eyewitnesses who survived the camps around Grande Riviere: “that these rebels had nothing but white flags, white cockades; that their device was Vive Louis XVI, Roi de France et de Navarre; that their war crywas Men of the King; that they told themselves they were under arms to reestablish the king on his throne, the nobility and the clergy in their privileges.”30
Blanchelande was convicted of treason, and sent to the guillotine on April 11, 1793. A few years later, the French general Kerverseau renewed the accusation against Toussaint Louverture: “Shaped by long slavery to the merry-go-round of flattery and dissimulation, he knew how to mask his feelings and disguise his steps and for that he was only a more terrible tool in the hands of the disorganizers. It was he who presided over the assembly where he had proclaimed as chiefs of the insurrection Jean François, Biassou, and some others whose size, strength and other physical advantages seemed to point toward command. For himself, weak and frail, known to his comrades by the name Fatras-Baton, he found himself too honored by the position of secretary to Biassou. It's from this obscure post, where he had placed himself, that hidden behind the curtain he pulled all the strings of intrigue, organized the revolt and prepared the explosion.”31
A role as a deeply secret co-conspirator would help to explain how Toussaint was able to remain quietly and calmly unmolested at Breda during the first several weeks of the insurrection, when all the sur-rounding plantations had been burned to ash; the several pell-mell rebel assaults on Cap Francais that occurred during these weeks had to pass directly in front of Breda's gates. Soon after the first outbreak of hostilities, Bayon de Libertat went to join the militia in the besieged Jewel of the Antilles, but he left his wife at Breda, in Toussaint's charge, apparently with perfect confidence that she would be safe there. Later on that fall, Toussaint seems to have had no serious difficulty bringing her to join de Libertat at Le Cap, and he had no more trouble sending Suzanne and their three sons through the war zone of the Northern Plain and the surrounding mountains to a safe haven across the Spanish frontier on the Central Plateau.
Within the supposed royalist conspiracy, as in so many other arenas of the colonial period, Toussaint is a potent but invisible presence. From his own words later in his career, and even more from his actions and inactions, we know that he never, ever liked to show his hand. Though perfectly capable of signing his name to legal documents, he would not reveal his ability to do so. Apparently he suppressed his own name from the rolls of the Masonic lodge of which he was a member. If he used his fourteen-year-old nephew Charles Belair as a proxy to sign that early letter to the colonial authorities, it is by no means unbelievable that he could have used Boukman, Jeannot, Jean-François, and Biassou as proxies in the early phase of the revolt. It's believable, too, that he knew from the start that the revolt could be transformed into a revolution.
What was his state of mind on that legendary afternoon when Cambefort, Tousard, and Bayon de Libertat “let slip” in his presence the gist of their plot for a rebellion? Toussaint was perfectly capable of reading the newspapers and probably was as well-informed as his grand blane companions about the course of events in France. He would certainly have absorbed the revolutionary rhetoric of liberte, egalite, frater-nite and recognized its implications for his race and his class. His link to the circle of the Providence Hospital in Le Cap and his frequent travels all over the Northern Department made him privy to whatever information passed byword of mouth.
The petits blancs had a bitter hostility to prosperous affranchis, which meant that Toussaint would have been likely to side against them—yet his loyalty to the other white faction would not have been complete. As a landowner and owner of slaves, Toussaint was to a certain extent in with the grand blancs proprietors, but because of his race he would never be of them. Even the leveling tendencies of Freemasonry and the Catholic Church were not enough to dissolve the racial barrier. French Revolutionary ideology, however, might very well break down the racial wall, if someone had the resources and determination to carry that ideology all the way to its logical and ultimate conclusion. Toussaint had already read the Abbe Raynal's prediction that a leader would materialize among the African slaves of the New World to lead them all to freedom. Mixed with French Revolutionary rhetoric, it made an interesting cocktail.
Toussaint had a large material investment in the colonial status quo which the royalist conspiracywas meant to restore and preserve. But the rest of his story shows that he also had an ability to see beyond that immediate practical interest; he was endowed with a greater foresight than Blanchelande, Cambefort, Tousard, Bayon de Libertat, and their kind. In a flash, he would have seen the whole future that they had failed to see. What a sweet irony it must have seemed to him, that the rulers of the colonial world should actually invite and encourage him to launch the series of actions that would, in ten years' time, replace French Saint Domingue with an independent black nation. And if he were careful, secretive, and discreet (as long practice had taught him always to be), Toussaint Breda might emerge at the end as Toussaint Louverture, the nearly omnipotent master of his universe.
*Apparently Gaou-Guinou is the ancestor intended.
*The unlucky Louis referred to above.
*Meaning they were at the bottom of the social order of free persons.
*Aristocratic fugitives from the French Revolution were classed as emigres and subject to various sanctions if they returned to French territory.