Many biographies of Louverture have appeared in the past two centuries, although most of them recycled oral traditions or previous secondary works. The first full-length biography, which attacked Louverture as a pro-independence traitor to France, was Louis Dubroca, La vie de Toussaint Louverture, chef des noirs insurgés de Saint-Domingue (Paris: Dubroca, 1802). Even early Haitian authors were ambivalent owing to Louverture’s harshness toward black cultivators and mixed-race rivals; see Joseph Saint-Rémy, Vie de Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Moquet, 1850).
Subsequent nineteenth-century works rehabilitated his name, often to serve an abolitionist agenda (Beard, Schoelcher) or to celebrate the family traditions preserved by Isaac Louverture (Gragnon-Lacoste): see John R. Beard, The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture: The Negro Patriot of Hayti (London: Ingram Cooke, 1853); Thomas Prosper Gragnon-Lacoste, Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Durand, 1877); Victor Schoelcher, Vie de Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Ollendorf, 1889). Subsequent Haitian and French scholarship verged on hagiography. The best works in this school were H. Pauléus Sannon’s Histoire de Toussaint Louverture, 3 vols. (Port-au-Prince: Héraux, 1920–1933), and Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: La révolution française et le problème colonial (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1981). At the other extreme stood Pierre Pluchon’s Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Fayard, 1989), which depicted Louverture as a petty and self-interested planter wannabe. More recently, Jean-Louis Donnadieu, Toussaint Louverture: Le Napoléon noir (Paris: Belin, 2014), presented important new documents on the prerevolutionary era.
In English, the most seminal work, though factually outdated today, was Cyril Lionel Robert James’s The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1989), a Marxist analysis that introduced Louverture as a tragically flawed leader to an English-speaking audience. The most widely used English-language biography today, written engagingly but based on limited primary research, is Madison Smartt Bell’s Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007).
For general background on the French slave trade and the kingdom of Allada (chap. 1), see Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), and David Geggus, “The French Slave Trade: An Overview,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1 (Jan. 2001): 119–138. On Louverture’s family background (chaps. 2 and 5), see Philippe Girard and Jean-Louis Donnadieu, “Toussaint Before Louverture: New Archival Findings on the Early Life of Toussaint Louverture,” William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 1 (Jan. 2013): 41–78.
On the Haut-du-Cap plantation (chaps. 3 and 8), see David Geggus, “Toussaint Louverture and the Slaves of the Bréda Plantation,” Journal of Caribbean History, no. 20 (1986): 30–48; Jean-Louis Donnadieu, Un grand seigneur et ses esclaves: Le comte de Noé entre Antilles et Gascogne, 1728–1816 (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2009); Jean-Louis Donnadieu and Philippe Girard, “Nouveaux documents sur la vie de Toussaint Louverture,” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe 166–167 (Sept. 2013–Apr. 2014): 117–139.
The first article to document Louverture’s emancipation and slave ownership (chaps. 6 and 7) was Gabriel Debien, Jean Fouchard, and Marie-Antoinette Menier, “Toussaint Louverture avant 1789: Légendes et réalités,” Conjonction, no. 134 (1977). The two best published works on free people of color and race on the eve of the Revolution are Stewart King’s Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint-Domingue (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), and John D. Garrigus’s Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave, 2006). On white political infighting before the Haitian Revolution (chap. 9), see Charles Frostin’s Les révoltes blanches à Saint-Domingue aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Haïti avant 1789) (Paris: L’Ecole, 1975), and Malick Ghachem’s The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
On Louverture’s role during the 1791 uprising (chap. 10), see David Geggus, “Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution,” in R. William Weisberger, ed., Profiles of Revolutionaries in Atlantic History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 115–135. The best book on the 1793–1794 abolition of slavery (chap. 12) is Jeremy Popkin’s You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On Louverture’s 1794 switch from the Spanish to the French Army, see David Geggus, “The ‘Volte-face’ of Toussaint Louverture,” in Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Blacks in the Diaspora) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 119–136.
Geggus is also the author of the definitive work on the British invasion of Saint-Domingue (chaps. 13–14), Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint-Domingue, 1793–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). On the Spanish invasion, see Fernando Carrera Montero, Las complejas relaciones de España con La Española: El Caribe hispano frente a Santo Domingo y Saint Domingue, 1789–1803 (Santo Domingo: Fundación García Arévalo, 2004).
The best overview on US diplomacy with Louverture (chap. 15) is Gordon S. Brown, Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005). On Louverture and the British, see also Philippe Girard, “Black Talleyrand: Toussaint Louverture’s Secret Diplomacy with England and the United States,” William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 1 (Jan. 2009): 87–124.
To put Louverture’s labor policies (chap. 16) in their context, see Robert K. Lacerte, “The Evolution of Land and Labor in the Haitian Revolution, 1791–1820,” Americas 34, no. 4 (Apr. 1978): 449–459. Also notable for their emphasis on the divide between Creole leaders like Louverture and the black rank and file are Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), and Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
On Louverture’s apex and downfall (chaps. 17–19), see Philippe Girard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoléon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011). On his captivity and legacy (chaps. 19 and 20), see Alfred Nemours, Histoire de la captivité et de la mort de Toussaint Louverture: Notre pélerinage au Fort de Joux (Paris: Berger Levrault, 1929). On Louverture as an author, see Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011); Philippe Girard, “Quelle langue parlait Toussaint Louverture? Le mémoire du Fort de Joux et les origines du kreyòl haïtien,” Annales 68, no. 1 (Jan. 2013): 109–132.
INDEX
abolition
economic consequence of, 191–192
end of Saint-Domingue’s slave trade, 134–139
French National Assembly’s power over, 104
French ratification of Saint-Domingue’s, 144–145
in France, 109–111
labor shortage resulting from, 256–257
Louverture’s constitution, 211–213
in Santo Domingo, 149–150, 203–205, 207–208
Louverture’s shifting ideologies and goals, 154–156, 180
planters’ response to the French ordinance, 95–96
Saint-Domingue embracing French ideals, 153–154
Saint-Domingue’s divisions over, 102
abortion, 45
absolute monarchy, 93
Adams, John, 178–179
Agassou (warrior king), 20
Agé, Pierre, 205
Allada (African Kingdom), 8–9, 13, 15–16, 49
American Civil War, 261
amnesty, 118–119, 173–175
d’Argout, Robert, 28
Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 256
arrest, Louverture’s, 243–244
assassination attempt, 183
asset seizure, 194–195
d’Auberteuil, Michel Hilliard, 86
awakening of s
laves, 25–26
Baptiste, Pierre (Louverture’s surrogate father), 49–50, 143
Barbé-Marbois, François, 94–95, 99
Basel, Peace of (1795), 149
Bastille Day, 154
Bayon de Libertat, François, 58, 75
amnesty, 173–174
colonial powers and, 94–95
fathering Louverture’s grandchild, 47
Louverture’s friendship with, 82–83
Louverture’s manumission, 54–55
Louverture’s protection during the Bréda uprising, 114–115
massacre of the white colonists, 143
mismanagement of the plantations, 39–41, 87–89, 105
on growing resistance to colonial administration, 97
racial controversy, 67–70
return from exile, 167–168
slave revolt of 1791, 109–110
Bélair, Charles, 52, 164
Belley, Jean-Baptiste, 71, 144, 160, 258
Benin, 7–8, 23–24
Biassou, Georges
allegiance to Louis XVI, 126–127
attitude toward violence, 115
cultivator system, 196
leadership infighting, 141–143
leadership of the revolution, 111
Louverture’s early acquaintance with, 58
Louverture’s service to the French Army, 149–150
negotiated peace, 118–120, 129–130
rebels’ support from the Church, 121–124
refusing universal liberty, 135–137
Spanish invasion of Saint-Domingue, 133–134, 139–141
“big blacks,” 193
“big whites,” 74, 94–95, 97, 155–156, 168
birth, Louverture’s, 17–18
Black Code (1685)
France’s attempted slavery reforms, 95–96
labor abuse, 91–92
protecting slave families, 45
protecting slaves from planter misconduct, 40
punishing maroonage, 38
racial discrimination despite, 68–69
raising blacks’ awareness of their rights, 135
regulating colonial slavery, 28–30
slaves’ resistance despite, 35
“black whites,” 193
Blanchelande, Louis de, 100, 102, 104, 110, 112–114, 118, 130–131
Bois-Caïman ceremony, 112
Bonaparte, Jérôme, 232
Bonaparte, Joséphine, 160–161
Bonaparte, Napoléon. See Napoléon I
Bonaparte, Pauline, 232
bossales (newly imported slaves), 68
Boukman, Dutty, 111–112, 114–115, 118–119
Bourbon Reforms, 94
Boyer, Jean-Pierre, 208, 259–260
Bréda, Blaise, 62
Bréda, Elizabeth (daughter), 26
Bréda, Elizabeth Bodin, 14–15, 25
Bréda, Marie-Anne (daughter), 27
Bréda, Pantaléon de, 13–14, 35
Bréda, Pantaléon Jr., 27, 30, 40, 47–48, 55, 85
Bréda plantations
absentee ownership, 27–28
Bayon’s mismanagement, 82–84, 87–88
cattle epidemic, 39–40
colonial interests in the French assembly, 98
freedmen from, 62
Louverture escaping punishment, 33–34
Louverture’s attempts to revive, 202
Louverture’s birth, 17–18
Louverture’s escape from, 54–55
Louverture’s return as a freedman, 75
Louverture’s second wife and family, 83–85
maroonage, 38–41
mixed-race children, 46–47, 53–54
mortality and increasing discontent among the slaves, 106–108
origins of, 13–15
partition plan, 85–86
plan for the sale of, 105–106
pro-natal policies, 45–46
regulation and punishment of slaves, 28–30
religious life, 22
revolutionaries targeting, 112–116
Saint-Domingue’s agro-industrial revolution, 77–82
seeds of unrest and resistance, 34–35
slaves’ identities, 51–52
white harassment of black neighbors, 69
Britain
abolitionism, 95, 256–257
amity treaty with Saint-Domingue, 181–183
Anglo-French plan to restore slavery in the colonies, 233–235
colonial planters’ flight, 167
engaging French Republican forces, 152–154
exiled black soldiers, 150
invasion of Saint-Domingue, 131–134, 141
Louverture’s popularity, 260–262
Napoléon’s attack on Saint-Domingue, 242
Saint-Domingue’s labor shortage, 200
Seven Years’ War, 35–36
US War of Independence, 69–71, 73–74
War of the South, 186
withdrawal from Saint-Domingue, 172–176
Brown, John, 261
Brunet, Jean-Baptiste, 243–244
Bullet, Jeannot, 34, 111, 115
Bunel, Joseph, 62, 177–179, 200, 233
Caffarelli, Marie-François, 248
calendar, Republican, 154, 189
Camp Turel proclamation, 137
capitalism in Saint-Domingue, 78–82
Catholic Church
Louverture’s crisis of faith, 239
Louverture’s formal marriage, 45
Louverture’s love of, 22–24, 50–51
revolutionaries’ ties to, 122–123
secularization of the French Revolution, 154–155
cattle epidemic, 39–40
censorship, French, 108
Chancy, Bernard, 240
Chancy, Louise, 187, 258–259
Chanlatte, Antoine, 230
Chapuizet, Pierre, 30, 67–68, 82
Chasseurs, 71, 73
Chavanne, Jean-Baptiste, 71, 102–103
Chazotte, Pierre, 194
childhood, Louverture’s
adapting to Saint-Domingue, 18–20
awakening to slavery, 25–26
effect of white elites on, 27–28
mixed experience of slavery, 32
retracing, 17–18
violence against slaves, 29–30
children
Bréda plantation’s pro-natal policies, 45–46
buying and freeing, 57
Louverture’s first wife and family, 44, 46
Louverture’s second wife and family, 83–85
mixed-race children, 46–48, 53–54, 69
obstacles to motherhood for slaves, 45–46
of the Bréda family, 26–28
racial discrimination against mixed-race children, 69
respect for elders, 19–20
revolutionaries’ abductions of, 114
sale of Louverture’s ancestors, 10
slaves’ self-awakening, 25–26
Christophe, Henry, 59–60, 71, 232, 235–236, 240–241, 256, 258–260
citizenship
Dessalines defining, 255
French ratification of Saint-Domingue’s abolitionism, 144–145
rights under the French Directory, 158–159
civil war: War of the South, 183, 185–188, 190, 196, 204, 234
Clarkson, Thomas, 101–102
Clerc, Séraphin, 84
coffee production, 71–75, 256
Columbian Exchange, 48, 75
Condorcet, Marquis of, 95
conspiracy theories, 106
constitutional monarchy, 93
constitutions
Biassou’s construction of, 127
French Directory, 158–159
Haiti’s, 255–256
Louverture’s, 209–215
Saint-Domingue’s white assembly, 99–100
Consulate (France), 205–206
cosmopolitanism, Louverture’s, 81–82
counterrevolutio
nary coup, threat of, 170–172
coup attempt, 163–164
creole slaves, 32
criminal behavior, penalties for, 28–30
Cuba
exiled black soldiers, 150
response to the slave revolt, 116–117
cultivator system
comparison to Spanish slavery, 203–204
economic status of, 200–202
Louverture-Hédouville rift, 175
Louverture’s constitution, 211–212
Louverture’s seizure of Santo Domingo, 207–208
Napoléon’s attack on Louverture, 232, 236–242
origins and development of, 196–198
rebellion against labor practices, 198–199
Datty, Etienne, 189–190
de Gaulle, Charles, 263
de Grasse, François, 75
death
as punishment for slaves, 31
Bayon’s treatment of Bréda slaves, 87–88
burial of the dead, 43–44
by imported diseases, 48
by Vodou, 36–38
Louverture’s, 251, 253–254, 262–263
of Hippolyte’s wife, 13
of Louverture’s parents, 49–50
of Saint-Jean, 258
of slaves under Louverture, 74
on coffee plantations, 72
Saint-Domingue’s death rate, 12
shifting male-female ratios among slaves, 44–45
slaves’ deaths through labor abuse, 91–92
slaves poisoning their owners, 36
US War of Independence, 75
Declaration of Independence, US, 70
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 98, 108, 138, 144, 180, 209
Delahaye, Jacques, 123, 127, 164
Delribal, Jean, 31, 39–40, 61
Désir, Philippe Jasmin, 63, 65, 71–72, 76
Dessalines, Janvier, 71, 76, 164
Dessalines, Jean-Jacques
betrayal of Louverture, 243
economic model, 256
European deaths from disease, 151
execution of Louverture’s family, 257–259
Hédouville’s ouster, 175
Leclerc expedition, 248–249, 254–256
love of battle, 124
Napoléon’s attack on Saint-Domingue, 239–241
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