1
The Soul of a Free Man
‘I was born a slave, but nature gave me the soul of a free man.’1 This fleeting mention, in an administrative report written in 1797, was one of the few recorded instances in which Toussaint Louverture alluded to his personal predicament as a slave before the revolution. It was typical of his utterances: it was direct, elevated in tone, and gave little away about his emotions. The statement also did not, as we shall see, tell the entire story: he was a master in the art of calculated ambiguity. But he had a gift, too, for concision; and his closeness to nature, his single-mindedness and his unrelenting quest to emancipate his spirit were among the defining features of his personality from an early age. Contrasting his enslavement with his longing for freedom, Toussaint hinted at the two main qualities which set him apart from most of his contemporaries: his yearning to free himself from external constraints, and his visionary power – the capacity to ‘see and foresee’.2
Toussaint’s early years present the most daunting challenges for his biographer. When he became Saint-Domingue’s revolutionary leader, he left a sizeable paper trail. In addition, the records of many contemporaries who dealt with him have been preserved, from his own collaborators and military subordinates to French officials and foreign dignitaries, as well as ordinary citizens in the colony. But, even though there is considerable documentation about Saint-Domingue’s plantations in French public archives, Toussaint’s pre-revolutionary existence barely features in them.3 Unlike figures such as Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass, Toussaint produced no autobiographical narrative, and none of the men and women who knew him intimately on the plantation he grew up in – his parents, his godfather, his fellow house slaves, the priests from nearby Haut-du-Cap, or the manager whose principal assistant he eventually became – left any written records about him. Apart from a handful of tantalizing documents, most of which have come to light only recently, archival sources about his slave years are sparse. What little we know comes largely from oral traditions in nineteenth-century Haiti – a valuable resource in many respects, but not one which can provide conclusive information, even about the most basic features of Toussaint’s life.
His date of birth is a case in point. In the same 1797 administrative report, Toussaint mentioned that he was ‘fifty years of age’ at the time of the revolution. This tallies with the later memoir of his son Isaac, who drew on family memory to affirm that his father was born on 1 May 1740.4 (Slaves were not issued with birth certificates.) Yet other sources – including statements by Toussaint himself – have hinted at different possibilities, so his year of birth remains uncertain. Some have suggested later dates, up to 1746, while one of the French administrators who was among his closest collaborators, and who spoke extensively with his relatives, claimed that he ruled until the age of sixty-six – which would put the year of his birth at 1736.5 Oral tradition has also been the principal source of our knowledge about his ancestry. Family sources intimated that Toussaint’s father was the second son of Gaou Guinou, a king of the warrior nation of the Alladas, a west African people living in the southern regions of the Gold Coast, in present-day Benin.6 Recent research, however, has been unable to find any trace of an Allada monarch by this name: Toussaint’s grandfather was perhaps a provincial governor, or a royal functionary with extensive regional authority.
At the same time, this invented tradition shows Toussaint’s attachment, from a very early age, to the power of imagination, and imposing his own control over his life narrative. The story also hints at the richness of African social and political cultures in Saint-Domingue during the eighteenth century, with their music, dances, games, religious beliefs, concepts of nature and supernatural tales.7 Elements of royalist ideology also flourished in the colony, surviving through rituals, preserved historical memories of wars fought in Africa, and specific cultural practices such as skin markings.8 Toussaint shared in these collective beliefs and practices by absorbing vivid fables about his noble ancestry from his parents, and passing them on to his children; it is likely that these stories helped instil in him his lifelong allergy to fatalism, together with his sense of his own exceptional destiny.
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Toussaint was born – this much, at least, is not disputed – on the Bréda sugar estate, where his parents worked as slaves, near the village of Haut-du-Cap. The property was acquired by Count Pantaléon de Bréda, a marine officer from south-west France who married a local heiress and amassed a large fortune in the colony during the early decades of the eighteenth century. He occasionally visited the Caribbean but was mainly based in France, like many wealthy landowners in Saint-Domingue.9 His estate was part of a cluster of large sugar plantations on the northern plain around Cap, and had a workforce of around 150 slaves. According to the 1685 Code Noir, the rule book which governed the treatment of slaves in French colonies, a child automatically inherited the enslaved condition of his parents.10 Nor did Toussaint have any choice about his surname: bonded labour was viewed as mere property, and so the young boy was formally known as ‘Toussaint à Bréda’ (or simply ‘Toussaint Bréda’); the name ‘Louverture’ would emerge only at the time of the revolution. His health was poor during his early years, and at times he was so seriously ill that his family feared for his life; infant mortality rates in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue were high, and especially so on the Bréda plantation, where one child in every three did not reach adulthood.11 His scrawny physiognomy was mocked, too, and it was around this time that he earned the nickname ‘Fatras-Bâton’ (literally ‘skinny stick’) – a wordplay in the local kreyol dialect which lampooned his fragility.12
First published as a royal decree in 1685, the Code Noir was the rule book which sought to regulate the treatment of slaves in French colonies. Regarded as property, slaves had no legal rights, and their masters could beat them with rods and straps.
Fatras could also mean lazy, but there was nothing indolent about this young boy. Indeed, he more than made up for his physical deficiencies by his sheer determination. According to a nineteenth-century Haitian historian who talked to surviving members of Toussaint’s family, by the age of twelve he had become the fastest runner, the most agile climber and the best swimmer of all the young slave children of the surrounding estates.13 When he was in his teens, he began to master the horse-riding techniques which would later earn him the accolade of ‘Centaur of the Savannah’; his favourite method was to attempt to tame the horses by mounting them when they were still wild. He often fell off, and on at least one occasion suffered a serious injury, breaking his thigh bone. But by the time he had reached young adulthood he had become one of the colony’s most accomplished horsemen; people came from across the northern plain to learn from his equestrian expertise.14 Even the best riders from France could not match him for speed or endurance, not to mention bravado – he once negotiated his way across a heavily swollen river by standing, fully upright, on his horse and guiding the steed to the opposite bank.15 Such adventurous journeys across Saint-Domingue became one of Toussaint’s hallmarks: they helped forge his sense of spiritual freedom, giving him, in the words of the historian Antoine Métral, ‘an intimate knowledge of the tides, the torrents, the rivers, the lakes, the height and shape of mountains, gorges, passes, and the least practicable paths, the depths of forests, the return of the winds, the rain seasons, the approaching earthquakes, and the violent storms’.16
This communion with nature was enhanced by the fact that Toussaint spent most of his teenage and early adult years as a gardien de bêtes, tending to the Bréda farm animals. This occupation nurtured in him a somewhat melancholic disposition, and an enduring fondness for solitude. But the young shepherd also developed a feisty character from an early age. Any slave who laid hands on a white person could face severe punishment: according to article 33 of the Code Noir, a slave who struck a master or any member of his family could face the death penalty,17 and in at least one instance a black freedman was hanged for a premeditated assault on a colon.18 Yet Toussaint once confronted a young man named Ferret on the nearby Linasse plantation in 1754. Why he did so is unclear: perhaps Ferret taunted him with the familiar derogatory epithet ‘Allada mangeur de chien’ (‘dog-eater’). They ended up trading blows under an orange tree, with the white boy coming off second best, even though he was two years older than Toussaint. On another occasion, the young Fatras-Bâton learned that Béagé, the manager of the Bréda plantation at the time, had tried to take possession of one of his horses. Toussaint responded by rushing to the stables and cutting the steed’s saddle, infuriating the manager, who threatened to beat him. The young slave, however, stood up to him, telling him: ‘Hit me if you dare!’ The manager backed off and the story became a family legend.19
This self-confidence was no doubt in part a family heritage, but it was also shaped by Toussaint’s Catholic beliefs. A daily public prayer was held for all the Bréda plantation slaves, and the young boy was exposed to the Christian religion from a very early age. The Catholic Church in northern Saint-Domingue was controlled by the Jesuit order; its headquarters were located in Cap, and some priests resided in the village of Haut-du-Cap and were well known to Toussaint. Oral tradition has it that they taught him to read and write; by the mid nineteenth century, as reported by a French schoolteacher who travelled across Haiti, the young Toussaint was widely believed to have been formally trained as a priest.20 Jesuits certainly had a robust conception of their role as missionaries: they sponsored a special ‘black Mass’ at Cap, at which African elders led the congregation in song and prayer. They also appointed a ‘priest of black people’ to help disseminate the faith among the slaves. Unlike the rest of clergy in Saint-Domingue, these missionaries were respected by the slaves, who saw them as their protectors.21
Toussaint enthusiastically involved himself in the Jesuits’ proselytizing activities, becoming one of their active surrogates in his neighbourhood. He may well have been one of the black slaves denounced in an official report for ‘often and frequently spreading the gospel in the homes of the black population of the north’.22 The order’s efforts to provide spiritual comfort to the slave population were frowned upon by the colonial authorities. Planters complained that the Jesuits were undermining their material power and moral authority, notably by encouraging their slaves to marry; wedded couples were harder to sell than individuals. Some accused the missionaries of pushing their slaves to revolt against their masters, and to embrace reprehensible ideas of ‘independence’ and even ‘equality’.23 The Jesuits were duly expelled from Saint-Domingue in 1763, and the imposing building they occupied in Cap was taken over by the colonial administration. Toussaint, however, retained a close relationship with their successors, the Capuchins; and there is evidence that he was employed in the two Jesuit-founded hospitals which continued to operate in the Cap region.24 By this point, his faith was fully entrenched and grounded in the values celebrated by the Catholic elders around him: harmony, compassion, sobriety and, above all, brotherhood. This Catholicism treated black slaves as integral members of the community, and Toussaint’s religiosity was tinged with a specifically creole egalitarianism which challenged the colony’s existing racial hierarchy.
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Alongside his energetic physical activities, his spiritual bond with nature and his Catholic faith, the young Toussaint’s personality was shaped by his African heritage. The extent of this influence remains a matter of dispute, and in fact Toussaint’s relationship to his African roots has often been dismissed. Many historians have attempted to distinguish the minority of native ‘creoles’ such as Toussaint, born in Saint-Domingue, from African-born bossales, who constituted around 60 per cent of the adult population in the colony by 1790;25 these slaves mostly came from the Kongolese-Angolan region.26 It is typically suggested that creoles spurned their African past, which they associated with backwardness and humiliation, turning instead to their Caribbean roots, as well as to Roman Catholicism and Enlightenment thinking. In Toussaint’s specific case, it has been claimed that his African past had ‘remarkably little impact’ on his public and private persona, that he tried to ‘distance himself’ from his father, and that his relationship to his African heritage was one of ‘wilful denial’.27
Such assertions fail to convince, not least because they overstate the dissimilarities between creoles and bossales in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue. There were undeniably material differences between the two groups: creoles tended to lead less precarious lives, often occupying established positions in the plantations, such as domestic servants, artisan craftsmen, coachmen and slave-drivers. There were also cultural contrasts: bossales were often more active in preserving their social rituals, languages and religious practices. Yet there were also numerous bridges between the two communities. As has rightly been pointed out, bossales ‘became creolized in many ways’, notably through baptism, the cultivation of their individual plots of land and the assimilation of the kreyol language, while creoles like Toussaint were only ‘a generation away from Africa’.28 This connection appears very clearly in Toussaint’s upbringing: he learned and spoke kreyol, the vernacular of Saint-Domingue, but was also immersed in Allada culture from a very young age by his parents. Forcibly separated from his wife Affiba at the time of their capture and enslavement in the late 1730s, his father Hippolyte remarried once he reached Saint-Domingue, and he chose as his wife a young woman named Pauline, like him of Allada origin; Toussaint was the first of five children she bore him.
As a boy and young man, Toussaint would have heard himself described as an ‘African’: the term was loosely employed in colonial Saint-Domingue, typically as a racially pejorative description of the black population. Slaves were widely equated with domestic animals: one planter kept a notebook in which he listed the ‘different remedies to be used for treating the ailments of negroes, horses, and mules’.29 Local settlers complained about the difficulties of controlling their workforce (‘malheureux qui a des nègres, plus malheureux qui n’en a pas’),30 and there was a widespread view of black people as ‘dangerous, superstitious and fanatical’.31 As Frantz Fanon later observed, such portrayals were a key technique of colonial domination, reinforcing settler supremacy by depicting local populations as not only inferior but also menacing, ‘the quintessence of evil’.32 Encouraging ethnic division on a ‘scientific’ basis was another essential tool of white power, and French writers devoted much effort to attributing particular characteristics to groups of slaves on the basis of their African geographical origins. In the view of the colonial lawyer Moreau de Saint-Méry, one of the most widely cited apologists of the planter cause, members of the Allada nation were generally seen as ‘well built and intelligent’; however, they were also thought to be ‘deceiving, artificial, dissembling, lazy, and roguish’.33 Many of these traits would continue to be pinned on Toussaint by his enemies in his later years.
Yet, despite the best efforts of the colonial order to dehumanize the ‘African’ population of Saint-Domingue, positive tropes also survived and in fact flourished. Alladas were the second largest group of African slaves in Saint-Domingue, for whom successive plantation managers at Bréda had a particular fondness, believing them to possess extensive agricultural skills.34 Alladas were also highly rated as among the most effective African ‘warrior races’.35 Toussaint would have experienced this prestige as he was growing up: his father was recognized as a figure of authority by African-born slaves on his plantation and in the vicinity, and treated with deference by them – and even, it would appear, by plantation manager Béagé; this would cast further light on the latter’s reluctance to confront young Toussaint in the incident mentioned earlier.36 And although he could neither read nor write, Hippolyte passed on to his eldest son the practical knowledge of herbal medicine he had acquired from his African elders: this savoir-faire was also widely associated with Allada culture in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue.37
It has been suggested that Toussaint fully embraced the emerging vodou religion, widely practised among black communities of Allada origin in Saint-Domingue’s plantations at this time. Originating in West Africa, and drawing also on indigenous Taino Indian religious practices,38 vodou was a cult which centred around the worship of spirits (known as loa), who were believed to preside over different aspects of earthly existence and communicate with humans during religious rituals.39 Toussaint’s embrace of vodouism has become an article of faith among many contemporary Haitians: one modern historian observes that he was ‘thought to be a bòkò ’ (vodou priest).40 Interestingly, there was a powerful link between herbal science and vodou in the loa known as Loko, who was the patron of healers; this spirit was passed on to the first marron communities of Saint-Domingue by the Taino Indians.41 Toussaint undoubtedly made this connection, and drew upon the magical recipes of sorcerers in his practice of natural medicine;42 this was one of the sources of his reputation as a healer who possessed supernatural powers, with many bossales hailing him as a priest who could communicate with the ‘good spirits’.43
Toussaint not only treasured this traditional herbalist science, which earned him the officious title of docteur feuilles, but built upon it through his extensive journeys across the colony. Like his highly prized fellow-slave healers across Saint-Domingue, he eventually combined African, Caribbean and European forms of medical knowledge. His plant-based remedies helped nurse injuries sustained in the plantations and the sugar mills, combat illnesses such as malaria and yellow fever, and contain outbreaks of scurvy, one of the most common ailments to afflict newly arrived slaves.44 Hippolyte also taught his eldest son the Fon language spoken by the Alladas, and we are told that the young boy frequently conversed in this African dialect with community elders on the plantation and in nearby Haut-du-Cap; the manager of the Bréda plantation confirmed that the slaves spoke ‘in their own languages’.45 Far from turning his back on this cultural heritage during the revolutionary era, Toussaint embraced it. His son Isaac later recalled an instance in which a group of African-born combatants came to visit Toussaint at his military headquarters: realizing that many of them were his Allada countrymen, he started haranguing them in the Fon language, to their immense delight.46
Perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the enduring importance of Toussaint’s African roots was his reaction to the loss of his parents. Hippolyte and Pauline both died of chest infections within a few months of each other in early 1774, suddenly thrusting Toussaint – now in his early thirties – into the position of family elder. He became responsible for his two brothers and two sisters, together with a number of children of his own, as we shall see. He handled the crisis by seeking out the assistance of an African-born woman called Pélagie, who effectively became the adoptive mother of the clan. Significantly, Pélagie was from the Aguia (Aja) nation, which originated from the same region as the Alladas. She was in all likelihood a close acquaintance of his mother, and her presence in the family setting was a crucial source of cultural continuity with Toussaint’s African heritage, all the way up to the revolutionary era. Far from looking down on her, or trying to conceal her from public view, Toussaint protected and honoured his adoptive mother. He bought her out of human bondage in 1789, at a time when his own resources were still modest and the immediate members of his own family were still enslaved; he also found new lodgings for her in Haut-du-Cap. Later, when he became one of the leaders of the revolution, he invited Pélagie to come and live near him in Ennery, and sent a carriage to take her to Mass every Sunday.47
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In one of his later pamphlets, Toussaint summed up the inhumanity of slavery in its systematic tendency ‘to tear away the son from his mother, the brother from his sister, the father from his son’.48 The impersonal turn of phrase served to disguise the extent to which he was speaking from personal experience. As a slave his entire existence was governed by the provisions of the Code Noir: he had no legal personality, could not marry without the permission of his master, was banned from carrying weapons, and could be physically punished by being chained and beaten with whips or rods.49 Although Toussaint was not personally treated with this kind of savagery, he would have known of countless examples of inhuman violence inflicted on his fellow slaves across the colony. These atrocities were widely documented in late-colonial Saint-Domingue and horrified even those who defended the institution of slavery: they included throwing slaves into furnaces, burying them alive, blowing up their bodies with gunpowder and cutting off their limbs; various forms of torture, including castration and genital mutilation, were also widely practised, although they were technically banned by the Code Noir.50
Even though such gruesome horrors were not inflicted, as far as is known, on the Bréda plantation workers, Toussaint saw the ordinary violence of slavery on a daily basis, with its grim complement of disease, misery and death. It has been calculated that life expectancy on his estate was a mere thirty-seven years, and that the mortality rate of African-born plantation workers was among the highest in the region: by the time he reached his early forties, Toussaint would have seen around half his contemporaries at Bréda die.51 He observed the crushing effects of slavery on his own family from a very young age. As noted earlier, his father Hippolyte had been separated from his wife Affiba at the time of their enslavement, and he believed that he had left her and their two children behind in their Allada homeland. However, unbeknown to him, Affiba and her offspring were also captured and transported to Saint-Domingue, and sold to a slave-owner in the colony. The young African woman was baptized and given the name Catherine, and her two children were called Augustin and Geneviève. By the time Affiba realized that she and her husband had ended up on the same island and was able to locate his whereabouts, Hippolyte was already remarried to Pauline and had started his second family; the news completely broke her and she died of sorrow shortly afterwards.52 Toussaint spent time with his half-brother and sister, consoling them for the loss of their mother, and forging a particularly strong bond with Geneviève. She was, however, soon sold off to a colon named Fontaine, and he lost sight of her for several decades. But she continued to haunt his mind, and it is not unlikely that he was thinking of her in 1797 when he wrote of sisters being ‘torn off’ from their brothers. In the final years of his life, his perseverance would be rewarded when he was reunited with her in the southern town of Les Cayes.53
Another pivotal figure in Toussaint’s extended family circle was Pierre-Baptiste, an Allada freedman who worked as gatekeeper at the Haut-du-Cap plantation. Educated by the Jesuits, Pierre-Baptiste was a tall, imposing man who spoke in parables and was recognized as one of the wise men of the locality; he was among the worthies who led the black congregation in prayer at Cap.54 He adopted Toussaint as his surrogate son after the death of Hippolyte, and gave him lessons in history, geography and algebra (he also manifestly influenced Toussaint’s own love of allegories). As with his adoptive mother Pélagie, Toussaint kept in close touch with his godparent throughout the later years of his life, and invariably stopped by Haut-du-Cap to pay his respects when he was passing through his area; even when he became famous, he described Pierre-Baptiste as the only man he obeyed unconditionally.55
Copyright © 2020 by Sudhir Hazareesingh