by Andrew Marr
Toussaint’s world was part of the Atlantic slave trade, which lasted for nearly four centuries until it ended in the late nineteenth century. It is estimated that 12.4 million people were captured in Africa, loaded onto slave ships and taken to the Caribbean, South America and North America, nearly two million of them dying on the crossing, even before they reached the plantations.32 Add to that the huge death rate caused by the African wars, after Ashanti, Dahomey, Kongo and other kings, realizing how lucrative captives could be, slaughtered both old and young, then took the healthy adults to the coast in death marches. Then add the mortality rate in the holding-pens for slaves on the coast and the number who died in the first year or two of plantation ‘seasoning’, and the total death rate was probably higher than the number of slaves crossing the Atlantic – some sixteen million.33
The systematic capture of African slaves to work in the labour-intensive open-air factories of the sugar plantations had been pioneered by Arab Muslims, who had faced slave rebellions themselves in Mesopotamia. But this was pushed to its logical extreme by the combination of Atlantic navigation, the conquest of fertile new lands, and by Europe’s insatiable desire for cheaper sugar, tobacco and cotton. It was the Portuguese who began the business on their early acquisitions, the Cape Verde islands and Madeira, in the late 1400s. Their large colony in Brazil explains why Portuguese slavers would eventually account for 40 per cent of the trade; but soon most other European seafaring nations were involved too, from the Spanish and French to the Dutch and the Danes. In the eighteenth century, however, it was the British who had become dominant.
There are few darker (or better-known) stories in history than that of the ‘Middle Passage’, the stage in the triangular trade in which crammed slave-ships took the human muscle from Africa to the Americas. The sugar and other raw materials their labour produced were then imported back to Europe, European manufactured goods having been sent to the colonies in the first stage of this traffic. In effect, before the full flood of the industrial revolution, the more advanced European economies were using foreign human labour as the machines to drive their own prosperity. Today, the stories of the anti-slavery movement of outraged Christian reformers are particularly celebrated. But brave men and women though they were, they do not wipe away the two centuries of trade.
All this is simple, and not so remote. The sweet taste of sugared tea in the mouth – the satisfying smack of rum on the lips – the soft feeling of a fresh cotton shirt – the calming exhalation of good tobacco smoke – these were the intense physical pleasures that allowed generations of Europeans to avert their eyes from the slave economy on which they depended. Even with television and the other modern communication media, it remains very easy to enjoy a slickly designed computer tablet, a line of cocaine or bright throwaway clothing without thinking too hard about how they come to be so cheaply available. From the 1600s on, huge fortunes were made from Glasgow to Lisbon, fine terraces erected in Bristol and Nantes, powerful politicians funded in London, Paris and Amsterdam, by the slave trade. The cruelty of the trade, from the brandings and whippings on the plantations to the feeding of slaves to sharks and the use of cannibalism as a punishment, was so nauseating that it makes a mockery of much of the style and intellectual swagger of Enlightenment Europe. The slave ships, packed with shackled men and women, stank so badly that their arrival could be smelt when they were well offshore. Sharks followed them across the Atlantic for the bodies regularly tossed overboard.
Saint-Domingue was one of the hungriest markets for slaves during the heyday of British and French slave-shipping because the disease-ridden tropical climate and the rigours of cutting and boiling sugar-cane killed them off so quickly that the landowners always wanted more. In the century running up to the French Revolution around 850,000 slaves had been brought there; but far from the black population increasing, as one might have expected, by the time the revolution broke out there were only 435,000 blacks in the colony. There was nothing specifically French about this. The figures for British-run Jamaica were similar. It is a loss of life so huge that it goes a long way towards explaining what happened when those slaves finally did rise up.
The colony, ruled by Louis XIV’s 1685 Slave Code, had developed a complex and volatile population. There were the rich white planters, often the second, or the disgraced, sons of French aristocrats. There was a larger class of poorer whites – shopkeepers, artisans, plantation overseers and some farmers. Then there was a yet larger class of part-white, part-black people, the abundant fruit of a century or more of white men taking black women. These ‘mulattos’ were in turn divided into a hierarchy, depending on how black or white their parentage was. Some had become relatively rich themselves and were deeply resented by the poorer whites, though they had no political rights. Finally, in the huge majority, came the blacks – mostly, but not all, slaves. Groups of escaped blacks had found refuge in Saint-Domingue’s highlands, where they practised voodoo cults and occasionally plotted to attack the plantations.
Into this explosive mix, arriving like a firecracker, came news of the French Revolution. The rich whites were, unsurprisingly, mostly royalists, as were the local officials and army officers. But many of the other whites were enthusiastic republicans, as were many mulattos. Then, hovering across the border and hoping to take advantage of the chaos were the Spanish in their colony, which was the other half of the island, Santo Domingo; and not far across the sea, the British, with their colony of Jamaica and their awesome navy.
The story of the Haitian Revolution was therefore bound to be a complicated one. Rebel slaves sometimes joined with the Spanish against the French revolutionaries; the French fought on each side; the mulattos might take the royalists’ side, or even that of the invading British. Everyone was struggling for position, while the news from Paris kept changing. In the early part of the revolution, middle-class Parisian democrats, many of whom had made good money from the sugar trade, were keen to preserve slavery. Anti-slavery campaigners, including Englishmen, hoped the revolution would be a turning-point, but in this they were frustrated. Debates in the Convention about Saint-Domingue were conducted in mumbled, embarrassed code, avoiding the very word ‘slave’.
Later, as the revolution became more democratic, black rights were proclaimed. In January 1794 a former slave, Jean-Baptiste Belley, speaking in the Convention, demanded the abolition of slavery and was acclaimed with great emotion. The twentieth-century Marxist historian C.L.R. James, who wrote the pioneering account of the Haiti uprising, said: ‘It was fitting that a Negro and an ex-slave should make the speech which introduced one of the most important legislative acts ever passed by any political assembly.’34 Yet all too soon, as the anti-Jacobin reaction set in, the mood in Paris swung violently against the slaves and in favour of the old order.
The man trying to hold a course that would lead to the complete freeing of all the blacks of Saint-Domingue was Toussaint L’Ouverture. To start, with the French Revolution brought conflict between the rival royalist and republican French, and between the poor whites and the mulattos, who wanted their rights too. There were uprisings by slaves on other French islands, Martinique and Guadeloupe, too.
Toussaint, a Catholic and a herbal physician, began as a cautious and moderate leader of the rebel slaves, looking for compromises and ready to do deals for an amnesty for the leaders – which, treacherously, would have left most of the rebels returned to slavery. For a time he fought with the Spanish royalists against the revolution, so suspicious was he of the poorer white radicals. But as he became a more experienced and successful military leader – he had carefully studied Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars and seems to have had as much natural aptitude for war as Napoleon himself – Toussaint adopted the all-or-nothing Rights of Man approach of the Jacobin leaders in Paris. He turned a ragtag mob of angry slaves into a disciplined, clever and determined army that won victory after victory.
Their greatest was against the British, who tried to take over the col
ony, pretending to side with the blacks and mulattos and the cause of liberty but really intent on exploiting France’s weakness. British ministers were all too aware that slaves on their island, Jamaica, had revolted in 1760. Toussaint toyed with British offers, but was becoming ever more enthusiastic about the ideals of the French Revolution, if not about the agents sent by France to keep him in check. He inflicted on the British army one of the most embarrassing defeats in its history. This has been quietly ignored by patriotic historians, but it cost so many British casualties that it rivalled the toll in the Peninsular War against Napoleon.
Toussaint was a complicated leader. He genuinely seems to have revered France but decided that, in practice, this colony had better be run almost independently by himself, just to make sure no attempt was made to bring back slavery. As the revolution stumbled and more conservative leaders took power in Paris, he warned them that if they were to try it, they would be attempting the impossible: ‘We have known how to face dangers to obtain our liberty – we shall know how to brave death to maintain it.’35 By this time, for all the bloodshed and suspicion, the slave revolt had radically changed racial attitudes on the island. When a mulatto rival of Toussaint’s called Rigaud was accused of refusing to obey him because his leader was a full-blown negro, he erupted: ‘Is it a tint of colour, more or less dark, which instills principles of philosophy or gives merit to an individual?’ He went on: ‘I am too much a believer in the Rights of Man to think that there is one colour in nature superior to another. I know a man only as a man.’
After expelling the British and taking over Santo Domingo, Toussaint became for several years the virtual dictator of the colony. He seems to have done an extraordinary job in restoring a land devastated by war, making the workers go back to the plantations to prevent famine, beginning to establish schools and a system of local government, creating lawcourts, building a fine hotel, introducing simple taxes and tackling smugglers. Surrounded by other former slaves and liberal whites, he held open soirées where he could be petitioned, and criss-crossed the island on horseback to check every administrative detail. He introduced a printed constitution, with a general assembly subordinate to himself as governor. Gleaming there in the Caribbean was the chance of a genuinely multiracial commonwealth ruled by blacks.
It was gleaming far too brightly, however, for the liking of that other self-appointed ruler, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had no time for blacks and fully understood that the permanent loss of Saint-Domingue, which had once accounted for two-thirds of France’s overseas wealth, would be a terrible blow. He played cat-and-mouse with Toussaint, until a brief interlude of peace with Britain and his other enemies allowed Napoleon to send twenty thousand troops – the largest army that had ever left France by ship – to crush the black revolution.
Toussaint had by now fallen out with some of his ablest lieutenants and more radical black supporters, who thought he was too lenient to the whites and too hard on his own people. He dithered about whether he wanted a complete break with France, and about how radical his new free island should be. But when Napoleon’s generals landed, they found him almost as difficult to defeat as the British had. A savage new war broke out, and the black regiments, singing their revolutionary songs back at the French, came close to winning. Had a few of Toussaint’s senior commanders not switched sides, he could have held on until the season of rain and disease arrived to finish off the invaders. As it was, he parleyed for an armistice, was betrayed, arrested and packed off to France, where Napoleon had him confined in an icy prison until he died.
This was not the end of the story, however. Toussaint’s capture did not crush the spirit of the freed slaves. The French commanders began a brutal attempt to exterminate the mulattos and to kill so many blacks that they would be cowed back into slavery. But the mass drownings, burnings and attacks with specially trained dogs had the opposite effect, and a new guerrilla war began. For the first time, it became something close to a full race war, the black forces now led by a whip-mark-scarred former slave called Jean-Jacques Dessalines. He had been a brilliant general under Toussaint, but possessed none of his moderation or modesty. Terrible atrocities were committed by both sides. As local revolts erupted all around them, French willpower gave out and the remnants of Napoleon’s grand invasion force fled from the island, to be captured by waiting British naval ships.
Dessalines, in another echo of Napoleon, had himself crowned emperor in 1804, parading into town wearing an American crown, and transported in a British-made ceremonial carriage. The following year, perhaps egged on by the traditional enemies of France who wanted the colony finished off once and for all, Dessalines ordered a massacre of the whites left on what was now called ‘Haiti’. Two years later the British Parliament at last outlawed the Atlantic slave trade, and the Royal Navy began seizing slavers’ ships and freeing around 150,000 slaves. The plantation system was starting to collapse. That, plus the devastation of Haiti caused by years of war and the international isolation created by Dessalines’s massacre of whites, condemned the island to pariah status.
Its natural wealth had been greatly augmented by the colonists’ planting of sugar-cane, coffee, tobacco and the other goods that sucked it into the centre of an international trading system. But all this depended on systematized brutality. So far, people had managed to look the other way, but by the late eighteenth century Britain, at least, was able to prosper mightily at home, with her steam-based industries, and had no need of the disgusting business. Yet had it not been for the slaves of Saint-Domingue taking the promises of the French Revolution at face value and showing the world that blacks could fight as well (or better) than their supposed masters, then the abolitionists might have had a harder time. The saddest thing of all, though, is that had Toussaint survived and built his little republic, a more substantial legacy might have been left behind; and Haiti today might have avoided its fate as a land of dictators and poverty.
Cowpox
In Boston in the 1720s, there lived a witch-hunting reverend called Cotton Mather, who did his best to find the hand of God in the appalling toll of children he and his wife had lost to the great scourge of the age, smallpox. ‘A dead child,’ he reflected, ‘is a sign no more surprising than a broken pitcher or a blasted flower.’ But Mather noticed a strange thing about his slave Onesimus, who had been born in far-off Libya. Onesimus, who did not catch the disease, had scratches on his arms which he had been given as a child in Africa. Like other African slaves, he had been inoculated according to tribal customs. Mather was intrigued. He began to wonder. He was not intrigued enough to spare his slave when he committed some minor misdemeanour and so had to be sold, but the germ – of an idea, for once – had been planted.36
On the other side of the Atlantic at the same time, a brilliant and well connected lady was on the same track. Mary Wortley Montagu had contracted a bad dose of smallpox in 1715, which destroyed her facial beauty and nearly killed her. When she went with her husband as ambassador to Turkey, she learned about the Ottoman habit of inoculation, or ‘variolation’ as it was called – a small nick in the skin, a little diseased matter inserted, and just a very mild dose resulted. The Turks used the trick to protect the beauty of women on their way to the harem. Lady Mary used it to protect her six-year-old son. Back in England a couple of years later, she did the same to her daughter and then persuaded her friend Princess Caroline to try it on the royal children.
In England as in America, a great argument then erupted. Smallpox was a hideous and deadly disease. It had been known in ancient China, India and Africa and may have reached Greece and Rome in classical times. It certainly affected the Crusaders, who brought it home to Europe in the 1100s, where it became endemic. It produced rashes and then horrible seeping pustules across the face and body, dreadful cramps, blindness and often death. Survivors were generally scarred, often mutilated and blinded. Children were especially affected, and smallpox spread most effectively in the crowded conditions of European villages a
nd towns. It has been estimated that by the eighteenth century one in ten of the deaths in England was from smallpox. In Glasgow between 1783 and 1802 it accounted for a third of child deaths. The situation was at least as bad in Russia, and across the century in Europe alone it may well have accounted for sixty million deaths.37
When we see recreations of the villages of Jane Austen’s England, or Enlightenment Edinburgh, or the American towns of the Revolutionary era, the film-makers will generally have left out one thing that would have stood out a mile – the crowds of pustule- and scar-covered people, their eyes squeezed shut by the mutilations of smallpox, wretched beyond description. One study concluded that ‘in terms of sheer numbers of people killed, blinded, crippled, pitted and scarred by smallpox over two thousand years of written and oral history, this disease was probably the worst pestilence ever to afflict mankind’.38
Yet people had known from ancient times that giving someone a small dose of smallpox could bring on a mild attack, which would stop them getting the full-blown disease later. Ancient Chinese doctors had gathered the scabs of smallpox sufferers, dried them, ground them up, and then blown them up the noses of patients, using special bone tubes. They also deliberately placed the pus in children’s clothing. In India and parts of Africa, people had it pushed into their veins with thorns, or they swallowed it, or smeared it into open wounds. This was the tradition that Rev Mather came across amongst Boston slaves and that Lady Mary had met with in the wooden houses of Constantinople. It was no secret.
But it was not really an answer, either. European doctors tended to shun the practice, and not for ridiculous reasons. A person infected with a small dose could still go on to develop a full attack, and die or find themselves maimed. A death rate of around 3–5 per cent was expected, which made ‘variolation’ a real risk. Others were scarred or blinded. In London one of Lady Mary’s distinguished friends, the Earl of Sutherland, lost his son after inoculating him. In crowded conditions, introducing ‘variolation’ could actually spread the disease faster than it would naturally do. Finally, the dirty knives used by European apothecaries often spread other infections. English doctors, eagerly followed by cartoonists, had mocked Lady Mary and even suggested that inoculation was part of a foreign plot to kill off English babies.