Toussaint Louverture

  The epidemic made rapid progress. That year, it proved particularly deadly. By May 8, General Leclerc wrote of “frightening ravages” in his army and put the death toll at 30 to 50 men a day. In all, of the 35,000 French soldiers and sailors who landed in Saint-Domingue in 1802, 15,000 died of yellow fever, 3,000 died of other diseases, and 6,000 were permanently incapacitated—compared to the 5,000 who died in combat. One of the epidemic’s first victims was General Hardÿ.35

  Louverture learned of the outbreak with evident relief. “Providence is finally coming to rescue me,” he joked in reference to the name of a hospital in Cap, La Providence. All he now had to do was wait for the epidemic to take its ghastly toll, and then he could resume the offensive in the fall.36

  To Leclerc, Louverture insisted that he was done with politics, but the Frenchman had doubts about his long-term intentions. Not far from Ennery, a rebel leader named Sylla refused to lay down his arms, and Louverture made no effort to break him. A French officer assigned to keep an eye on Louverture sent back disturbing reports about his conversations with the deposed governor. Louverture complained about the large number of French troops in rural areas, the officer said, and threatened to “withdraw into the woods and fight again for his liberty.” The attempted murder of a French officer was also attributed to his hidden hand.37

  Leclerc’s suspicions were confirmed when General Dessalines, now back in France’s employ, accused Louverture of playing a double game. Dessalines’s betrayal of Louverture has been largely forgotten in Haiti, where few people want to admit that one revolutionary hero played Judas to another. For Dessalines, it was a logical decision. Louverture had always used him as a “workhorse,” he complained. After living his entire life in Louverture’s shadow—first as a slave, then as an officer—Dessalines had decided that the time had come to rid himself of his overbearing presence. By playing the role of the brutish African, he was able to deceive every one of his rivals, including Louverture and later Leclerc.38

  Early in June 1802, Leclerc decided that the time had come to follow Napoléon’s orders and arrest Louverture. He delegated the difficult task to the French general Jean-Baptiste Brunet. Brunet stationed many troops on one of Louverture’s plantations, which had the intended result of causing a few scuffles. One of Louverture’s goddaughters was harassed, as were many cultivators. “My son Isaac was pushing away several soldiers who had come all the way to the door of my house to cut plantains and small bananas,” Louverture later complained. With a honeyed tone, Brunet invited him to a tête-à-tête to settle the dispute.39

  Irritated and physically ill, Louverture arrived at the meeting with a small escort. He informed Brunet that he wanted the meeting to be short. Leaving his men outside, Louverture walked into the main house to iron out the details. Brunet excused himself for a second, time enough for a squad of French soldiers to burst into the house and place Louverture under arrest. Louverture handed over his sword without a word. For the first time in his life, he had let down his guard.

  Louverture was taken to the frigate La Créole in nearby Gonaïves, where he allegedly told the captain that by capturing him, the French had struck down “the tree of black liberty,” but that it would one day spring back from its roots, “which are many and deep.” His closest relatives, including his wife, his sons, and his niece, were all arrested in short order and sent to Cap, where the family was transferred to the ship of the line Le Héros. Aside from his niece, not one of Louverture’s relatives ever set foot in Saint-Domingue again.40

  And so it was that in June 1802, Louverture found himself aboard a French warship in the middle of the Atlantic. His sons had already made the crossing twice, but for Louverture the experience was new and terrifying. He had studiously avoided ships his entire life; we only know of two cases where he had boarded one prior to this, both times within sight of shore. It is unlikely that he even knew how to swim.41

  As the Héros buckled under him, did Louverture think of his parents, who had once crossed the same ocean on their way from Africa to Saint-Domingue? Anxious about his and his family’s fate and most likely seasick, he waited for the weeks to go by while the boat plowed her way from the warm waters of the Caribbean to the windy shores of western France.

  TWENTY

  PRISONER

  1802–1803

  WHEN LOUVERTURE AND HIS FAMILY reached the French military port of Brest in July 1802, the weather was likely overcast, cool, and drizzly, as it often is in the maritime climate of Brittany. For one month he had been trapped inside a floating prison as it sailed from Saint-Domingue; for another month he waited in Brest for the boat to clear quarantine.

  The trail of letters, which the Atlantic crossing had interrupted, resumed as soon as the Héros reached port. Louverture’s first concern was for his family. “A fifty-three-year-old housewife deserves the indulgence and goodwill of a liberal and generous nation,” he wrote in reference to his wife Suzanne. “I alone must be responsible for my conduct.” (“Women, as you know, don’t involve themselves in the business of men,” she echoed.) She should be allowed to rejoin “the large family we have in Saint-Domingue, most of whom are girls. Left on their own, without guides, what will become of these unfortunate persons?”1

  Louverture’s efforts to shield his loved ones achieved little. His son Placide, who had fought by his side during the spring campaign, was transferred to a brig and then sent on to some unknown destination. “I may never see you again,” he wrote his parents. “Please be courageous and think of me every once in a while.” Louverture would spend the next months of his life fearing the worst for him. He himself was torn from the rest of his family when he and his servant were peremptorily sent ashore at dawn on August 13, 1802.2

  Napoléon had initially considered court-martialing Louverture, but he had then concluded that the public trial of such a famous figure would create unneeded controversy. Instead, he chose to jail Louverture without trial, and to do so as far as possible from the Atlantic coast, so as to make escape nearly impossible. Louverture traded one set of wooden walls for another, leaving Brest in an enclosed carriage under heavy guard. He crossed the breadth and length of France from west to east, stopping only briefly in provincial cities, where local notables strained their necks to see the man whose fame extended across Europe. In Tours, where his carriage halted in the dead of night to change horses, Louverture confided to the local military commander that he was eager to finally meet Napoléon in Paris and defend his record. The general preferred not to inform the “poor devil” about his true destination. “Thankfully, you won’t suffer long,” he thought to himself after noticing that Louverture wore three jackets despite the stifling heat.3

  Bypassing Paris, Louverture’s carriage headed for the Fort de Joux, a medieval castle repurposed as a prison, located deep within the Jura Mountains above the town of Pontarlier, at the edge of the Swiss border. It was a forbidding place, bitterly cold in the winter months.

  The Fort de Joux, where Louverture spent his last months. Photo by the author.

  The carriage passed through the first layer of fortifications, a tunnel dug directly into the rock. A moat and a drawbridge followed, after which the carriage halted in the medieval castle’s main courtyard. Louverture was led up a flight of stairs, through a gate, another courtyard, another gate, another courtyard, and more gates still. His journey finally ended deep in the fort’s innards. His cell was narrow, low, and dark. “I thought I was entering an underground tunnel,” his servant noted with horror. They only had two openings to the outside world. The first was the cell’s door, whose three bolts only the prison director could unlock. The second was the cell’s window, which was obstructed by iron bars, bricks, and storm shutters to prevent an escape. It was almost pitch-dark, even in daytime. Not even as a slave had Louverture’s freedom been so restricted. “Isn’t it like burying a man alive?” he wondered.4

  After the initial shock of his incarceration, Louverture quickly regained his spirit.
He befriended the prison director, a humane figure named Baille, with whom he had daily conversations about Saint-Domingue politics. He also secured the assistance of a local secretary and began work on a formal petition to Napoléon. His goal was to convince the first consul to award him a public trial where he could defend himself from accusations that he had been plotting a new uprising. There was hope still.

  At 16,000 words, the text was by far the longest he had ever authored. This was a monumental task for a man who had never been formally schooled and for whom French was a third language after West African Fon and Haitian Kreyòl. His handwriting was barely legible and his grammar atrocious, but the result was the only full account of the Revolution written by its most important character. Though it is usually described as Louverture’s “memoirs,” as if it were an autobiography, Louverture used the singular form “memoir” in the title to indicate that the text was a petition. His main objective was to outline and justify his official career for his superiors, not to give a full account of his personal journey. He glossed over his entire prerevolutionary life in a single sentence, choosing instead to focus on his time as an officer and a colonial official of the French Republic. The forefather of modern-day Haiti, in this document at least, introduced himself as French.5

  Informed by the prison director of Louverture’s eagerness to talk, Napoléon ordered his aide-de-camp, Marie-François Caffarelli, to travel to the Fort de Joux. He was instructed to learn more about Louverture’s diplomacy with Britain and the location of the “treasures” he had stashed in Saint-Domingue’s mountains. Louverture seemed “calm, tranquil, and resigned,” Caffarelli noted when he first entered his cell, though “he suffer[ed] a lot from the cold,” even in September. Louverture immediately asked for news of his family, “especially his son Placide.” Caffarelli did not respond.6

  Napoléon’s man spent six days in the Fort de Joux. He had thought that Louverture would seize this opportunity to acknowledge his sins and beg for forgiveness, but the prisoner was as combative as ever and deftly refuted every one of Caffarelli’s accusations. Only one incident seemed to faze him. One day, the prison director brought civilian clothes while Caffarelli and Louverture were talking in his cell; France’s war minister had insisted that Louverture should not wear a uniform now that he had been officially discharged from the French Army. “He was disconcerted when he saw that they were not a uniform, and spent a moment without talking, took them, then placed them on his bed and renewed the conversation. But he only thought of this matter and I could not distract him.” Caffarelli had to leave the cell. The following day, Louverture was still troubled by the affront. It insulted his personal honor, the value most cherished by nineteenth-century French officers.

  Unable to obtain a full confession, Caffarelli left for Paris with a copy of Louverture’s memoir. Louverture was hopeful that the document would earn him a public trial. He was wrong. Nearly a decade after France had welcomed black freedmen into its embrace, Napoléon was in the process of revoking his predecessors’ progressive reforms. Slavery was restored in French Guiana and Guadeloupe in incremental steps starting in May 1802; many assumed that Saint-Domingue would be next. France’s black officers were being discharged, imprisoned, killed, or even sold as slaves. Napoléon specifically blamed Louverture for the destruction of Leclerc’s expedition, calling it “one of his greatest follies.” The spring campaign had been a Pyrrhic victory for the French: field hands had renewed the rebellion upon receiving word that slavery was in the process of being restored in Guadeloupe. Dessalines and other plantation-owning black generals at first helped Leclerc fight the rebels—that is to say their employees—only to defect in October after the bulk of the French expeditionary army succumbed to yellow fever, just as Louverture had predicted.7

  In the end, Napoléon revealed himself to be petty and short-sighted in his treatment of Louverture. There was no historic meeting between the two, no epistolary debate on abolition and colonialism. Napoléon did not bother to read Louverture’s memoir because the minister of the navy informed him that “no important confession results from . . . the memoir made by Toussaint to justify himself.” He did not even honor Louverture with his hatred; he buried him under his indifference. Only much later, after Napoléon was deposed and deported to the island of St. Helena, did he speak again of Louverture, acknowledging that he “was not a man without merit . . . astute and clever.” Perhaps by that time he had finally realized the agony of being exiled, imprisoned, and torn from one’s second wife and son.8

  While waiting anxiously for Napoléon’s response, Louverture’s thoughts drifted to his family. “You know my love for my family and my attachment to my wife, whom I cherish, why did you not send me any news?” he reproached Suzanne. The family members left behind in Saint-Domingue were suffering. In October 1802, after most of his black generals defected to the rebels, a despondent Leclerc ordered thousands of black troops and civilians summarily drowned. Louverture’s sister-in-law and nephew (Paul’s family) were among the victims, as were, apparently, Louverture’s mixed-race grandson, Toussaint, and his godfather, aged 105, who had played such an important role in his life. Leclerc died of yellow fever in the midst of these mass executions, one day after the Catholic holiday of Toussaint (All Saints’ Day), the day of the dead.9

  “Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men!” William Wordsworth exclaimed in a sonnet written during Louverture’s captivity. Louverture’s servant could initially provide some moral support, but he was ordered to leave after a few weeks, and Louverture spent the rest of his captivity alone. The magical nights of his boyhood, which he had spent staring at “children of the Moon,” were long gone. “He was sad and somber,” noted a guard. “He spent the bulk of his days by his small window, his head resting on his hand, against the iron grating, absorbed by a dark melancholy. . . . The poor man thought of his country, his children! He was very chagrined. . . . He was a proud man, but sweet as a lamb.”10

  After his memoir to Napoléon went unanswered, Louverture sent him a plaintive reminder “in the name of God and humanity.” The first consul remained silent. Meanwhile, Louverture’s life was becoming ever more miserable. In October 1802, a mysterious defrocked priest managed to find his way into Louverture’s cell by passing himself off as a doctor. Perhaps he had known Louverture prior to the Revolution, when the Capuchin order of the Franche-Comté region was charged with supplying priests for the Catholic mission in northern Saint-Domingue. Louverture then lost his visitation privileges. The only people allowed inside his cell thereafter were the prison director; his guards, who were forbidden to talk to him; and a dentist, who came by regularly to pull out throbbing teeth.11

  Initially dictated by security concerns, the rules concerning Louverture’s imprisonment became purely punitive with time. His money and his watch were confiscated so that he could not bribe his guards; his cell was searched thoroughly; he was even threatened with an ignominious body search. Such treatment bit deep when he had ached for respect all his life. “When a man is already unhappy, one should not seek to humiliate and vex him,” he complained to the prison director, Baille. It finally dawned on him that he might never leave his cell alive. “The day I am executed, send all my belongings to my wife and children,” he told Baille sullenly. For two weeks thereafter, he refused to leave his bed.12

  “Allow me to request again your justice and kindness,” he begged Napoléon one last time in late October. The first consul’s response was to have Baille confiscate his letters and writing material in an effort to silence him. Louverture never wrote anything else. The end of his life, just like its beginning, must be reconstructed through third-party accounts.13

  Fall turned into winter and Louverture found himself battling for his life. Wrapped in the light cotton jacket that had been issued to him in lieu of a uniform, he vainly tried to shield himself from the cold. Sorrow was even harder to ward off. Baille, the last friendly figure in his life, was replaced in January 1803 by a you
nger and more aggressive prison commander named Amiot, who regularly woke Louverture up at all times of day and night to search his cell while the old man stood and shivered.

  A native of the tropics, Louverture found himself in the coldest region in France. He always felt bone-cold despite keeping a raging fire going in his cell; then his wood allowance was cut down in the middle of winter to save a few francs. He complained of headaches and stomach-aches, and coughed constantly. Worst of all, he did not seem to care anymore. In March 1803, Louverture vomited and felt sharp pains in his left arm for several days, reported Amiot, who also noticed that his voice had changed. But “he never asked me for a doctor.”14

  Louverture’s captivity is well documented in the official French records archived in Besançon and Vincennes, but most of these sources merely record petty fights over receipts. There is no way to reconstruct Louverture’s last inner battles. Maybe his thoughts wandered back to a comment he had made in his memoir: if he found no justice “in this world,” he had written, he would find some “in the next.”15

  “On [Germinal] 17 at 11:30 a.m., while bringing him his food, I found him on his chair by the fire,” wrote the prison director on April 7, 1803. Louverture was silent and perfectly still, his head leaning against the mantle. He did not respond when Amiot spoke to him.16

  TWENTY-ONE

  ICON

  1803–Present

  AT 2 P.M., JUST HOURS after Toussaint Louverture passed away in his cell on April 7, 1803, a justice of the peace, a medical doctor, and a surgeon came to the Fort de Joux from the nearby town of Pontarlier. The prison director, Amiot, unlocked the three deadbolts on the door and let them inside the cell. Louverture was still slumped on his chair by the fireplace. They took his body and lay it on the bed to examine him, then signed the document that officially declared his life to be over. The day was too far gone to do much more, so the four men agreed to reconvene in the morning.1