The following day, the group proceeded with the legal and medical business of death. Amiot placed Louverture’s personal effects into a box and sealed it while the two doctors opened Louverture’s body to conduct the autopsy. After noting some “bloody swelling in the right lung and the corresponding pleura and a mass of purulent matter in this viscus,” along with some blood in his nose and mouth, they listed the cause of death as “apoplexy” (stroke) and pneumonia. They also sawed off his skull, which they found to be “extraordinarily thick,” in order to examine his brain.2
As the doctors removed the madras handkerchief wrapped around Louverture’s head, Amiot noticed that Louverture had sewn a stack of papers into the cloth, where they had been hidden from the guards who regularly searched his cell. Among the papers was a copy of his memoir. In one final act of witnessing, he had ensured that it would not be lost to posterity.3
Amiot kept detailed records of every step of the process for fear of being accused of foul play or theft, but the mass of notarized documents did little to protect him. Within weeks, wild rumors were circulating that Amiot had deliberately left Louverture alone for days to let him starve, or that he had poisoned him by order of the first consul. “What reason could have pushed me to kill this negro after he arrived in France?” Napoléon erupted when confronted with the accusation. “What could I have gained from such a crime?”4
Louverture’s life was a matter of controversy from the moment it ended. Napoléon wanted his rival remembered (if at all) as “this negro” who had dared to challenge his will. Louverture countered with a memoir in which he described himself as a French officer who had been denied membership in the colonial elite on racial grounds. The fight over his legacy continues to the present day. Not even splitting open Louverture’s head, it seemed, could allow anyone to agree on what he truly believed.
By the time Louverture died in April 1803, the French expedition that Napoléon had sent to overthrow him had become an utter fiasco. General Leclerc had died of yellow fever, as had most of his army. Jean-Jacques Dessalines and other black generals were in open rebellion. When war with Britain resumed in the spring of 1803, Napoléon could no longer send reinforcements. The remnants of the Leclerc expedition spent months starving in Saint-Domingue’s coastal cities while being besieged by land and sea by British and rebel forces. In November, Dessalines and the French fought one last climactic battle in Vertières, very close to the plantation of Haut-du-Cap where Louverture had been born. Dessalines prevailed, the French troops evacuated Cap, and the French military presence in Saint-Domingue came to an end.
As ruler of the colony, Dessalines faced the same questions that Louverture, as his mentor, had once faced: Should he maintain ties to France? Should he seek common ground with white planters? Should he dismantle the plantations? Should he export the slave revolt? What form of government should he adopt?
In some regards, Dessalines did what Louverture had never dared to. On January 1, 1804, an event now commemorated each year as Haiti’s national holiday, he formally declared the colony independent from France. His incendiary speech offered a sharp contrast with Louverture’s equanimity: “Independence, or death . . . let these sacred words unite us. . . . Anathema to the French name, eternal hatred to france [sic]: that is our cry.” Dessalines abandoned the name of Saint-Domingue, which was too French for his taste, and renamed the country “Haiti” in memory of the Amerindians who had once peopled it—the word means “mountainous island” in the Taino language.5
Dessalines did not stop there. In the spring of 1804, he ordered most of the white population still remaining in Haiti put to death. Three to five thousand whites were killed in a matter of weeks. Only a handful of whites with special skills were spared, and they were barred from owning land. Under Dessalines’s definition of citizenship, put forth in Article 14 of his 1805 constitution, to be Haitian was to be black. His extreme racial agenda betrayed, in the eyes of many, the egalitarian ideals of the Haitian Revolution. For a century thereafter, abolitionists who wished to emphasize the ability of former slaves to rule themselves pointed to Louverture as a model. Their opponents replied with one word: Dessalines.
Louverture had worked hard in his time to foster good relations with his neighbors; Dessalines’s decision to eliminate Haiti’s white minority was so controversial that Haiti’s former diplomatic partners treated the new black state as a pariah. The British broke off diplomatic negotiations immediately after the 1804 massacre. Not until 1825 did France finally recognize Haiti’s independence. The United States did not follow suit until 1862, amid its own civil war. Even today, Haiti remains something of an outlier in the Caribbean due to its unique historical, linguistic, and racial profile. “This is the only Black society in Latin America,” a Venezuelan ambassador commented in 1991 to explain his reluctance to become involved in the country’s affairs. “Very foreign . . . to our own region.”6
Haiti went through many constitutions after independence—eight during the period 1805–1849 alone—but all of them echoed the constitution that Louverture had presented in July 1801. Military rule and dictatorship remained frequent features of Haitian political life until the 1990s, when a democratically elected ruler, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, successfully challenged an army coup and then disbanded the military altogether.
Dessalines emphasized how much he “differed from the ex-general Toussaint Louverture,” and yet he embraced the latter’s economic model. After taking over the plantations of the white planters he had killed, he maintained Louverture’s cultivator system and offered to buy African laborers from the British. His successor, Henry Christophe (1807–1820), maintained this course. Domestic popular resistance to plantation work was so strong, however, that subsistence agriculture eventually prevailed. By the 1820s, former slaves finally achieved their dream of individual land ownership. And yet this achievement meant that Louverture’s great fear—the breakup of the sugar plantations and the long-term economic decline of the “Pearl of the Antilles”—became reality. Coffee, which could be grown on individual estates, remained an important export crop, but the declining value of commodity prices contributed to long-term underdevelopment in Haiti, not to mention the rest of the Caribbean. The country was also burdened with the other legacies of slavery, including racial tensions and the lack of an industrial base.7
Haiti was a beacon of hope for enslaved people of African descent in the Americas, although, in an effort to placate their neighbors, Louverture and his successors generally did not encourage slave resistance overseas. In retrospect, the Haitian Revolution was a one-off event, “both unforgettable and unrepeatable.” Slavery actually expanded in other colonies, most notably Cuba, where sugar production surged in the early nineteenth century to make up for Haiti’s withdrawal from the international sugar market. Fears of a second Haiti also led to setbacks for the abolitionist movement, particularly in Britain: a 1791 bill to abolish the slave trade did not pass until 1807, largely as a result of the conservative backlash to the French and Haitian revolutions.8
As abolition spread from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century, European empires faced a problem familiar to Haitian leaders: how to satisfy their labor needs in a post-emancipation society. They often settled on a solution that Louverture would have recognized. In the British and Spanish Caribbean, formal emancipation was followed by a transition period during which freedmen were forced to remain on their plantations. In the British and French Caribbean, Indian and Chinese indentured servants were imported. Even in the United States and Brazil, where slavery was abolished outright without a transition period, and where massive European immigration alleviated labor shortages, former slaves continued to toil on their masters’ land under semi-free systems like sharecropping. The repression of Haiti’s Piquet Rebellion (1844–1848) and Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion (1865), along with the passage of the Jim Crow laws in the post–Civil War South, showed that “freed” did not necessarily mean “free.”
&nb
sp; With the passage of time, historians began to think of labor systems in terms of absolutes: on the one hand, slavery, wholly oppressive and universally detested by its hapless victims; on the other, a fully free labor system that was its sole and unadulterated alternative. Louverture’s record was smoothed over or even distorted, at least in the public imagination, and he came to be seen as abolition’s patron saint. Only recently have we come to better understand the man who tried to solve the central dilemma that slave-owning societies faced in the age of abolition: how to reconcile the ideals of universal freedom with the realities of plantation agriculture.
It was mostly through his offspring that Louverture lived on in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Even then, war and politics thinned out much of his sprawling family tree in Haiti. His brother Pierre had died in 1793 at the hands of Georges Biassou’s agents; his other brother, Paul, died fighting a rival rebel group in 1803. Louverture had executed his nephew Moïse in 1801; the French executed another nephew, Charles Bélair, in 1802 at Dessalines’s insistence. Yet another nephew, Bernard Chancy, died in 1806 in the prison cell where Dessalines had put him. Louverture’s sister Marie-Jeanne was the only member of his immediate family to survive the revolutionary era in Haiti. Because Louverture had illegitimate children, many Haitians today claim him as their ancestor on the basis of family traditions, but these claims are difficult to substantiate: by Louverture’s own accounting, only two of his sixteen children were still alive in Saint-Domingue when he was deported to France.9
Information about the relatives of Louverture who were exiled is more plentiful because the French government kept them under police surveillance for decades. Shortly after reaching Brest, his son Placide was sent to a prison on Belle-Isle off the southern coast of Brittany, where he shared a cell with Jean-Baptiste Belley, the free black from Cap who had served as the first black deputy in the French National Assembly. The rest of Louverture’s family—including his wife Suzanne, her servant, their sons Isaac and Saint-Jean, Louverture’s niece Louise Chancy, and Placide’s fiancée, Victoire Thusac—was sent to Bayonne, and eventually to Agen in southwestern France, where Placide reunited with them in 1804.10
The Louvertures were treated humanely, for the most part. Placed under house arrest rather than imprisoned, they lived on a governmental pension for the rest of their lives, as did their spouses and offspring. But they were not informed of their patriarch’s whereabouts, and only learned of his death after several months’ delay. The untimely death of the young Saint-Jean in 1804 was another blow. Heartbroken, Suzanne Louverture spent the remainder of her life praying in the church of Agen. Although she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1806, she did not pass away until 1816.
By that time, Napoléon had abdicated, and a brother of Louis XVI had ascended to the throne. Isaac and Placide, who held Napoléon responsible for their father’s death and had inherited his royalist sympathies, welcomed the return of the Bourbon monarchy. Their support for the new king prompted an easing of the conditions of their exile, including their release from house arrest.
The two brothers agreed on little else. Isaac and Placide spent their exile squabbling over the governmental pension, women, even the family servant. Mostly, they argued over Louverture’s heritage, both symbolic and financial. They moved into separate houses while in Agen, and in 1817 Isaac moved to Bordeaux with his cousin (and now wife) Louise Chancy. Bordeaux, a cosmopolitan port city, offered them the chance to socialize with other Caribbean exiles. Meanwhile, Placide married a French noblewoman named Joséphine de Lacaze and moved with her to the Dordogne region in central France. The two brothers never saw each other again.
Although the French government was willing to let the Louvertures return to Haiti after Napoléon’s fall, Isaac and Placide stayed in France. They had spent most of their lives there, and it was where they felt most at home culturally. Since Dessalines and Christophe had harassed or killed many of their male relatives in Haiti, they also had reason to fear for their safety. Isaac believed he would be “hanged immediately upon his arrival” if he ever went back. Not until the start of Jean-Pierre Boyer’s presidency (1818–1843) did a return become truly feasible.11
Isaac moved decisively after learning that Placide was planning to visit Haiti and collect his inheritance. Denouncing him as merely the adopted son of Louverture, he sued his brother to deny him the right to a portion of Louverture’s estate or even to use his last name. Louverture had always treated Placide as his son; Placide had served his adoptive father loyally in return. Nevertheless, Isaac won the lawsuit, and for the rest of his life Placide could not legally use the last name that Louverture had bequeathed to him. Crippled by rheumatism, Placide canceled his visit to Haiti and spent the rest of his life in France, where he died in 1841.
After disowning Placide, Isaac sent his wife, Louise, to Haiti in 1822, where she spent several years recovering the family inheritance. The couple’s acquisitiveness allowed them to fulfill the dream of the nineteenth-century provincial bourgeoisie: they lived off their portfolio for the rest of their lives. In the Bordeaux region of France, they had “three female servants, along with male ones, and . . . regularly host[ed] parties and galas,” complained a local official, who noted that they were still collecting their pension from the French government. Isaac also spent years collecting anecdotes about his father. Isaac’s papers, which are now kept at the French National Library in Paris, did much to keep the memory of Louverture alive.12
Isaac died childless in 1854. His brother Saint-Jean had died as a child, as had two of Placide’s sons. Therefore, Louverture’s only grandchild from his second family was Placide’s lone surviving daughter. Placide had named her Rose after a young girl his father had adopted during the Revolution. Rose and her offspring preserved and cherished the memory of their famous forefather for generations. “I share the blood of my Haitian ancestors,” Rose’s daughter Gabrielle wrote more than a century after Louverture’s death, “and I am proud to say that I resemble them.” Gabrielle’s son Jérôme (Louverture’s great-great-grandson) died wearing a French uniform in the trenches of World War I. Fittingly, the descendants of a character as complex as Louverture are now to be found in both Haiti and France.13
In 1843, toward the end of Jean-Pierre Boyer’s presidency in Haiti, a group of political opponents drew up a manifesto calling for his overthrow. After lamenting Haiti’s political and economic decline, they listed the “illustrious founders of our liberty and independence” who should serve as models for the “regeneration” of the country. Conspicuously missing from the list was the name of the Haitian Revolution’s central figure. “And Toussaint Louverture!” his son Isaac angrily scribbled in the margin when he obtained a copy of the manifesto.14
The omission was typical of the extent to which early Haitians willfully forgot Louverture, a gifted but stern leader who had made many enemies during his rule. Visiting the country shortly after independence, an American merchant noted with surprise that he was “seldom mentioned, but in terms of reproach.” Henry Christophe himself told the merchant that Louverture was “a fool.” Christophe’s court historian was slightly less severe, but he still faulted Louverture for being “filled with the prejudices of the Old Regime” and unable to conceive that Haitians could be “free and independent.”15
In the eyes of many early Haitians, Louverture was a transitional figure. The national anthem of Haiti was named after Dessalines. The national flag was based on a design created by Dessalines or the mixed-race officer Alexandre Pétion (accounts vary). The main national holidays of Haiti, from Independence Day on January 1 to Flag Day on May 18 and Vertières Day on November 18, all commemorated events that took place after Louverture’s downfall. Black nationalists cherished the memory of Dessalines, while the mixed-race minority celebrated Pétion and Boyer. Accused of being a white man in a black skin, Louverture had few supporters.
Paradoxically, it was outside of Haiti that Louverture first developed a
following. He was popular with white abolitionists in France, Britain, and the United States, who viewed him as proof that freedmen possessed the wisdom and the intelligence to rule themselves. Victor Schoelcher, who spearheaded France’s second abolition of slavery in 1848, wrote a biography of Louverture that described him as a “man of genius.” The British abolitionist William Wilberforce admired his ability to maintain “due subordination on the plantations, without invading the liberty of individuals.” He was “an African, whose virtues . . . will exhibit him as a Christian and genuine friend of us possessing a different complexion,” a Philadelphian admirer explained. Even proslavery authors in the United States often praised him for his willingness to pardon his former oppressors and for his policies that forced freedmen back to the fields: “The black general Toussaint, (the only truly great man yet known of the negro race), compelled the former slaves to return to the plantations, and to labor, under military coercion,” noted one of them. Depending on their stance on race and independence, white authors alternately lauded Louverture for his benevolence or his sternness; with such a conflicted record to pick from, they all found what they were looking for.16
By the time of the Civil War, Louverture had become a common reference point in the debates on slavery that were tearing the United States apart. In keeping with earlier abolitionist tropes, the Boston Brahmin Wendell Phillips emphasized Louverture’s moderation and intelligence as a means of buttressing his argument “that the Negro race, instead of being that object of pity or contempt which we usually consider it, is entitled . . . to a place close by the side of the Saxon.” But an alternate image of Louverture as a man willing to fight for his ideas had begun to take hold among more militant abolitionists. John Brown studied Louverture’s military tactics when preparing his raid at Harpers Ferry, and the black abolitionist James Holly urged his countrymen to imitate Louverture and the Haitians, who he said had preferred to be “DEAD FREEDMEN . . . than LIVING SLAVES.”17
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