The free gens de couleurvrere socially and politically excluded by the whites (their parents) and at the same time given very considerable educational and economic support. The luckiest had been sent to France for their schooling (the home government, wary of trends that might lead to an independence movement in the colony, forbade the establishment of colleges for anyone in Saint Domingue) and owned plantations and slaves themselves. Others belonged to the artisan and petty merchant class. Colored women included a famous community of courtesans; mistresses to the most powerful white men of the colony, they were renowned for their grace, beauty, charm, and finely honed professional skill. Most gens de couleur, whatever their walk of life, counted relatives among both the African slaves and the European slave masters.
The gens de couleur outnumbered the whites in two of Saint Domingue's three provinces, and were an economic force to be reckoned throughout the colony, but regardless of their status within their group, they were all subject to the same vicious racial discrimination. As of 1789, the colored people had no political rights whatsoever, and were subject to numerous humiliating little rules. Their surnames, usually derived from white parentage, were required to carry the phrase le dit—a derisive “the so-called.” Colored men could not carry arms in town and were forbidden to mingle with whites in situations like church or the theater. A dress code existed for both sexes, though it was much relaxed for colored women following a strike by the notorious courtesans.
At the same time, colored men were a large majority in all branches of colonial military service. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, service in the militias and the marechaussee (a sort of police force that devoted much time to the capture of runaway slaves) was seen as onerous by the whites of Saint Domingue, who assiduously sought to evade it. But the military was embraced by the gens de couleur. For freedmen it was a way of earning respect; for others (including some slaves of undiluted African blood) it was a pathway to freedom. Though not uncommon, the freeing of slaves was frowned on by the government and discouraged by a manumission tax of between five hundred and two thousand colonial livres—a very substantial sum, payable by the slave owner. Those who served in special military missions (including support of the American Revolution at the battle of Savannah in 1779) could earn a waiver of this tax, and the marechaussee offered such waivers even in peacetime. An unintended and unexamined consequence of these practices was that much of the defense of the colony was placed in the hands of a race and class which the whites of Saint Domingue were determined to oppress.
The labor-intensive plantation system of French Saint Domingue required extraordinary growth of the slave population, mainly through importation rather than new births. As many as thirty thousand new slaves arrived from Africa every year. Some slaves were able to earn their freedom, through military service, as with the gens de couleur, or the exercise of some particular skill which might pay down their price to their masters. In the records of the time, free blacks are hard to distinguish from free gens de couleur; their legal status was the same, though their social situation was not, and often the two groups are amalgamated under the designation affranchis, or freedmen.
Conditions for Saint Domingue's slaves were unusually harsh. The colony's geography encouraged escape. At the edge of every cane field was likely to be found the first of a seemingly infinite series of mountains, covered with near-impenetrable jungle, with rain forest at the greatest heights. It was easy enough to snatch up one's cane-cutting machete and bolt, difficult to be recaptured. The colony distinguished between petit marronage, where a slave might go AWOL for just a few days to visit neighboring plantations, carry out personal business, or just enjoy a taste of freedom, and grand marronage, where escape was permanent, or intended to be. The number and size of maroon communities in the mountains have been disputed by late-twentieth-century scholarship, but certainly there were more than a few of them. Some were quite sizable, and some, like the large group at Bahoruco, southeast of the capital of Port-au-Prince, had their independence and freedom formally recognized by the colonial government. In the beginning, some maroon groups joined Hispaniolas last surviving few Arawaks, and though the Indian bloodline was soon invisibly submerged in the African, some Indian religious and cultural practices were absorbed by the maroons. Meanwhile, the demand to recapture runaway slaves, and the need for defense against bands of maroon raiders who sometimes pillaged outlying plantations, required both the maroons and the marechaussee to develop a certain expertise at jungle warfare.
The American Declaration of Independence began with the famously resonant claim of natural human rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Everyone tacitly understood, however, that these rights belonged to white men, only. Thomas Jefferson believed that the right to vote should be limited to significant property holders—the North American equivalent of Saint Domingue's class of grands blancs. Those whom the French system recognized as gens de couleur were in the North American colonies considered to be (for legal purposes at least) as black as any African, and most of them were slaves. Slavery was not an issue in the American Revolution, many of whose political and military leaders, like Jefferson and Washington, came from Virginias slave-holding planter class.
Though it almost immediately started evolving into a democratizing force which would be vastly influential all over the world, the American Revolution (never mind the liberation ideology it proclaimed) began for all practical purposes as a tax revolt. This revolution had no intention to disrupt any aspect of the existing colonial class structure. Its motive was to break free of the severe economic constraints imposed by the relationship of the North American colonies to their parent country, Great Britain.
The success of the American Revolution as a tax revolt found at least a few admiring eyes among the proprietors of French Saint Domingue. France imposed a trade monopoly (called the exclusif) on all goods produced in the colony, as well as on most goods purchased there. Saint Domingue's producers of sugar, coffee, cotton, and indigo could have traded much more advantageously in a free market that admitted Britain, the newborn United States, and all the large and small European colonies of the surrounding islands. Between 1776 and 1789, an American-style revolutionary spirit breathed among the grands blancs of Saint Domingue, but it would soon be overtaken by other and much more drastic events.
The French Revolution, which erupted in the heart of the homeland rather than in some distant colony, was from the start a genuine class revolution. The lower echelons of French society—what became known as the Third Estate—were determined to reverse or annihilate the old orders of precedence, privilege, and power that emanated from the throne, the aristocracy, and the clergy, and within the first two years of their movement they went a very long way toward doing just that. The French Revolution proclaimed “Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood” as natural human rights, and while it was generally, tacitly understood that only white men were invited to enjoy them, this assumption was openly challenged, at the seat of the French home government, by representatives of Saint Domingue's gens de couleur.
In the colony of Saint Domingue, response to the outbreak of the French Revolution split predictably along class lines. The grands blancs were apt to be royalist and reactionary, while the petits blancs embraced the revolution and were quick to form Jacobin political clubs in the style of those popular in Paris. Some in the grand blancpaity fantasized about making the colony a protectorate of royalist Britain, or even making it an independent redoubt of the ancien regime and a refuge for emigre noblemen fleeing revolutionary France. The quarrel between these two tiny white factions grew so intense that they forgot all about the slumbering forces in the much larger population that surrounded them on every side.
In the first phases of the French Revolution there was absolutely no thought of letting the colony go or of changing anything significant about the way it operated. At this time Saint Domingue was the single richest European colony in the whole Western H
emisphere. Port-au-Prince, the capital and seat of government, was a relatively modest settlement, but Cap Francais, the cultural capital on the north coast, was the size of eighteenth-century Boston, with a beauty and grandeur that made it known as the “Jewel of the Antilles.” The sugar and coffee of Saint Domingue had not only enriched the colony's own planters, but vastly increased the prosperity of the French nation as a whole. Moreover, as revolutionary France saw its home economy disrupted and as it found itself at war with practically all the surrounding European powers, Saint Domingue was almost the only element in the whole national economy that still produced income and generally functioned as it was supposed to. Therefore the slave system in the colony, along with its systematic discrimination against colored and black freedmen, was considered to be a necessary, if evil, exception to the libertarian and egalitarian ideology which drove the revolution at home.
The French capital, meanwhile, had taken measures to discourage an independence movement. Children of colonists were required to seek their higher education in France, so that their ties to the homeland would be tightened during their formative years. The administration of Saint Domingue was divided between a military governor and a civilian intendant, placed in a situation of natural rivalry where each would serve as a check on the other; both reported, independently, to Paris. Intended to hamper colonial revolt, this deliberately engineered con-flict between the civilian and the military authority actually did a great deal to destabilize the colony during the last ten years of the eighteenth century.
Conservative representatives of the colonies in Paris negotiated for Saint Domingue and the other colonial slaveholding regimes to be governed by exceptional laws that excluded the leveling terms of documents like the new French Constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. At the same time, however, representatives of the free gens de couleurvrere lobbying for the right to vote in Saint Domingue, with the support of liberals in the home government, like the Abbe Gregoire. In 1790, what became known as the “decree of March 8” actually did extend the vote to free colored men, but in sufficiently ambiguous terms that the white government in Saint Domingue felt comfortable ignoring it.
In October 1790, an homme de couleumamed Vincent Oge returned from France to Saint Domingue and raised an armed rebellion in Dondon, a town in the mountains east of Cap Francais. With his second in command, Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, and a couple of hundred other supporters, he captured the nearby town of Grande Riviere and from there sent an ultimatum to Cap Francais, demanding that the provisions of the decree of March 8 be honored for all free men of color. Other such risings sprang up here and there across the country, but after some skirmishing the rebellion was crushed. Oge and Chavannes were tortured to death in a public square in Le Cap: broken on the wheel, dismembered, their severed heads mounted on pikes as a warning. A season of equally ugly reprisals against the mulatto population followed.
To the last, Oge insisted that he had nothing against slavery and had never had any intention to incite the slaves of Saint Domingue to join his rebellion—though some of his co-conspirators felt differently about the latter point. Certainly the Oge revolt would have had a much better chance of success with even a fraction of the great mass of black slaves behind it, but Oge was probably sincere in renouncing that idea; most free gens de couleurvrere as thoroughly invested in the slave system as the whites. The failure to enlist the slaves in the mulatto rebellion of 1790 was certainly a strategic mistake, though not so severe as the mis-take made by the whites. What was ultimately fatal to the whites of Saint Domingue was their obstinate refusal to make common cause with the free gens de couleur, whom they themselves had engendered.
In the midst of all these disruptive events, the slave population of Saint Domingue was growing by leaps and bounds, though not because of reproductive success—far from it. For various reasons, abuse of the slaves on the French sugar plantations was extraordinarily severe— much more so than in the African diaspora as whole. The production of sugar requires the milling and refining as well as the cultivation and harvesting of cane, creating a temptation to work slave crews both day and night. The Code Noir of 1685, issued in the name of the king of France, set minimum standards for the treatment of slaves, but was more often honored in the breach than in the observance. The prevalence of absentee ownership exacerbated abuse, for the on-site managers were wont to overwork the slaves to extract an extra profit for themselves and to embezzle funds and provisions meant for the slaves' support. Observers in both the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries agree that more than a third of newly imported slaves died within the first few years of their arrival in Saint Domingue.
Many planters thought it best to keep their slaves intimidated by punishments of extraordinary cruelty. Flogging was universal. Amputation of an arm or a leg was a common punishment for attempted escape; thieves might have their hands cut off. A slave who ate fruit or sugarcane in the field would be forced to work with his or her head locked in a tin cage. Some slaves were thrown alive into ovens, others buried neck-deep in the ground and left to be tormented by mosquitoes and biting ants. Still others had their anuses packed with gunpowder and exploded—a sport called “making a nigger jump.”
With life such a misery, suicide, abortion, and infanticide were shockingly common among the slaves, though these too were severely punished—even the bodies of suicides were mutilated so that they would be disfigured in the afterlife, for the whites had an inkling of the blacks' belief that death was a route to a metaphysical Africa. Even for slaves who made no attempt on their own lives, life expectancy was extremely short, thanks to overwork, malnutrition, and general abuse. Women's resistance to bringing children into the world of slavery was widespread.
Thus a huge annual importation of slaves from Africa was required to maintain a stable workforce in the colony. Between 1784 and 1790 a total of 220,000 slaves were brought in. One unintended consequence of this situation was that two-thirds of the more than half a million slaves in the colony had been born free in Africa—and nearly half of the whole slave population had been deprived of freedom within the past ten years. Therefore the atmosphere in Saint Domingue was infinitely more volatile than in other slave regimes like the United States, where by the end of the eighteenth century the majority of slaves had been born into servitude. Moreover, the example of marronagevras ever present to the slaves of Saint Domingue. While the maroon groups were not large enough to threaten the stability of the colony on their own, the idea of them was revolutionary in the slave communities—all the more so if exaggerated—and the idea was constantly refreshed by petits marrons who came and went from their plantations, sometimes, it seemed, almost at will.
From 1789 on, the whites of Saint Domingue were so caught up in their own class conflict that they were careless of what they said in earshot of their slaves. Even if they had been more circumspect, it would have been very difficult to keep news of the Oge rebellion and of the revolutionary ideology sweeping over France from the slave population. Though literacy among slaves was severely discouraged, some slaves could and certainly did read the newspapers. The fevered political discussions of the whites were bound to be overhead by mistresses, household slaves, and the black overseers and managers called comman-deurs. And indeed, the whites were at least sometimes aware of their risk. They knew they were sitting on a powder keg, and that there were open flames nearby, but none of them seemed to know what to do to prevent the increasingly inevitable explosion.
Though the written record does not say much about it, it's safe to assume that this whole situation was being quietly and carefully observed by a man then known as Toussaint Breda, his surname taken from Breda Plantation, out on the fertile Northern Plain not far from Cap Francais, where he had spent much of his life as a slave and as a manager of slaves. Toussaint claimed to be over fifty in 1789—a remarkable age for a black in Saint Domingue, where thanks to exhaustion, overwork, and abuse, most slaves died much younger. He had not only
survived, but conserved all his faculties; events of the next few years would prove his health, intelligence, and vigor to be absolutely extraordinary.
ONE
Opening the Gate
On August 29, 1793, a curious proclamation emerged from Camp Turel, one of numerous small fortified positions in the mountain range that runs from Gonai'ves on Saint Domingue's west coast eastward to the Central Plateau and the Spanish frontier, and which had been occupied, since 1791, mostly by groups of revolting slaves, but sometimes by French soldiers and militiamen who were trying to suppress the revolt. The proclamation was a brief one:
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 Saint Domingue. I am working to make that happen. Unite yourselves to us, brothers, and fight with us for the same cause.
Your very humble and obedient servant,
(Signed)
Toussaint Louverture.
General of the armies of the king, for the public good.1
Probably this proclamation was not the first time that the man formerly known as Toussaint Breda had used the new surname Louverture, since it assumes that the name may already be known to his audience—but if it is not the very first time he entered this new identity into the written record, it is the first time he deliberately announced it to the general public.
Not by coincidence, August 29 was also the date that Leger Felicite Sonthonax, commissioner and chief representative of the French government then in Saint Domingue, proclaimed the abolition of slavery in the colony. The newly minted Toussaint Louverture was then officially part of the Spanish army; Spain was at war with France, and the colonists of Spanish Santo Domingo had adopted the rebel slaves of the French colony as auxiliaries to their own military. Thus, in the close of his proclamation, Toussaint was probably referring to the king of Spain, though his clustering of the words “liberty,” “equality,” and “brothers” is an intentional echo of the most familiar phrase of the French Revolution, “liberte, egalite, fraternite. “ Moreover, and somewhat con-fusingly the rebel slaves of Saint Domingue had been claiming loyalty to the king of France almost from the moment of their first rising.
Toussaint Louverture Page 2