Toussaint Louverture

by Madison Smartt Bell

  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 hos
tility 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.

  THREE

  Turning the Tide

  With the proclamation of Camp Turel, Toussaint came out from behind the curtain which had hidden his movements in 1791 and 1792, and placed himself squarely on the stage of the military and political theater of Saint Domingue. Still, his political motives remained somewhat obscure in the summer and fall of 1793. In the August 29 proclamation, he declared himself the partisan of liberty. That, however, did not necessarily mean that he intended to fall in with the French Revolution as it was being expressed in the colony by Commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel. Indeed, Toussaint was still at war with the Jacobin commissioners, still fighting, as the proclamation put it, for the king.

  The declared royalism of the rebel slaves in the early 1790s has always looked peculiar. Macaya's equation of the kings of Congo, France, and Spain with the three wise men who followed the star seems, at first glance, a piece of perfect nonsense. However, a little better than half of the slaves who had risen in arms had been born in Africa and so had some direct experience of the African style of kingship. What they knew of European kings was conjectural—none had ever visited the Western Hemisphere. The kings of France and of Spain were almost as remote to these New World revolutionaries as the star that had shone on the birth of Christ so many centuries before. On the other hand, the French king had put his signature on the Code Noir, which ordered a more lenient regime for Saint Domingue's slaves than the one which the colonists actually maintained. According to the legend of Bois Caiman, Louis XVI had in some sense been invoked there as the guarantor of the rights that the slaves were rising to claim: three days of liberty per week and abolition of the whip. From African wars and the sale of prisoners, Saint Domingue's slaves knew something about captured and imprisoned kings. By analogy, they could form an idea of Louis's increasingly fragile position as hostage of the Jacobins in France.

  If his son Isaac's memoir is to be credited, Toussaint Louverture was the grandson of an African king, and something of that royal atmosphere was even preserved during his childhood, but Toussaint had been born on Hispaniola and never traveled off the island until the very end of his life. What he knew of Africa was legend. He knew as much about France as we do about the moon—yet we know quite a lot about the moon, even if we've never been there.

  Just a couple of weeks before the proclamation of Camp Turel, Antoine Chanlatte, an homme de couleur who commanded for General Laveaux and the French at Plaisance, reported the failure of an attempt to win the rebels of that area to the side of the commissioners and the French Revolutionary government. The rebels in question were led by “Toussaint a Breda,” who had a headquarters at Marmelade, a key post in the all-important Cordon de l'Ouest. A movement of some rebel slaves to switch sides was scotched by Toussaint, who declared (in Chanlatte's paraphrase) “that they wanted a king, and that they would not lay down their arms until he was recognized.”1

  But Louis XVI had been dead since January, and Toussaint certainly knew it. Even if his communications with his grand blanc allies in the milieu of Bayon de Libertat had been completely severed by the slave rebellion (which is by no means certain), he had plenty of contact with the Spanish colonial military—of which he was now formally a part. The French Revolutionary government was now at war with the other nations of Europe, and also busy smashing down a Catholic-royalist revolt in the Vendee. Robespierre had become the single most powerful man in France, thanks to his chairmanship of the much-feared Committee of Public Safety, the body empowered to carry out the Terror on all enemies of revolutionary government, be they foreign or French. The guillotines began to run nonstop. Toussaint had some awareness of these developments, and in the summer of 1793 he was still maintaining his royalist bent.

  On August 27, just two days before the proclamation of Camp Turel, Toussaint wrote a furious letter to Chanlatte, addressing the colored officer as “the scoundrel, perfidious deceiver.”

  “We know very well there is no more King, since you Republican traitors have had his throat cut on an unworthy scaffold,” Toussaint fumed, “but you are not yet where you want to be, and who is to say that, at the moment when you speak, there is not another king? How poorly informed you are, for an agent of the commissioners. One easily sees that your doors are well guarded, and that you do not often receive news from France; you receive still less from New England.”2 Here Toussaint clearly meant to let Chanlatte know that his own sources of information were much better, both in Europe and in the newborn United States.

  “It is not possible that you Fight for the rights of man, after all the cruelties which you daily Exercise; no, you are only fighting for your own interests and to satisfy your ambition, along with your treacherous Criminal projects, and I beg you to believe that I am not unaware of your heinous crimes … It is among us that the true rights of man and justice Reign!—we receive everyone with humanity, and brotherhood, even our most Cruel enemies, and we pardon them wholeheartedly, and with gentleness we coax them back from their errors.”3 The language of this conclusion is a rehearsal for the proclamation from Camp Turel two days later, and Toussaint even signed the letter to Chanlatte with the name “Louverture,” though it was not a public communication. He would never answer to “Toussaint a Breda” again.

  It was extremely rare for Toussaint to express himself with such unbridled passion, and perhaps with a degree of disorientation. The royalist project had run on the shoals, both in France and in Saint Domingue. Louis XVI had died on the guillotine; so had Governor Blanchelande. Bayon de Libertat and most of the rest of Saint Domingue's royalist party had fled from the blazing Cap Francais with Galbaud's fleet. Having landed at Baltimore, they were now doing their desperate best to regroup in the United States (while perhaps furnishing Toussaint Louverture with scraps of information from that country). A year or so earlier, Toussaint had lent his support to a settlement plan that would have put the majority of rebel slaves back to work on the plantations, in exchange for amnesty and manumissions for a handful of the leaders (meaningless to Toussaint himself, who was alrea
dy free) and an amelioration of the basic conditions of slavery; the latter condition was consistent with the deal supposedly hatched in the original royalist plot for a “controlled” slave insurrection. By August 1793, any possibility of such a settlement had completely disintegrated. For the mass of nouveaux libres it was now liberty or death, and Toussaint Louverture would be the man to lead them to one or the other.

  What, in the beginning, had he been fighting for? Prior to 1791 he had been a very successful participant in the economy of the colonial ancien regime. His economic interests made him a natural partner of the grands blancs, as did a number of his personal ties and his involvement in Freemasonry. But Toussaint was ever a proud man, though skilled in camouflaging his pride. He would have been as galled by the virulent racism of colonial society as Vincent Oge and his kind, though far less likely to let his resentment show. By studying history he had trained his foresight; he may have expected from the very beginning that the first insurrection on the Northern Plain would inevitably lead to the abolition of slavery and an absolute reversal of the social hierarchies that had been based on slavery. Or he may have been radicalized by the course of events from 1791 to 1793, as many around him were.