Toussaint Louverture
Page 9
In the memoir he wrote in prison at the Fort de Joux, Toussaint touches on his life as a slave in a graceful but not especially informative arabesque: “I have been a slave; I dare to say it, but I never was subjected to reproaches on the part of my masters.”18 At the top of the arc of his career—as brigadier general, lieutenant governor, and finally governor general of Saint Domingue—he would often allude in this general way to the time he had spent in slavery. He never mentioned that he had been freed from his enslavement for seventeen years before he put himself at the head of the revolting blacks whom Sonthonax's proclamation of abolition had redefined as nouveaux libres.
The surviving list of Breda's slaves is dated 1785, just six years before the insurrection on the Northern Plain put an end to the whole situation. In fact there is one Toussaint on the list, but his particulars bear no relation to those of Toussaint Louverture. The Toussaint who remained a slave in 1785 is listed as a sugar refiner (a skill that was never part of Louverture's portfolio), and is only thirty-one years of age—Louverture must have been at least ten years older by that date. However, Louverture's wife and her two sons are clearly identifiable on the list: Suzanne, a Creole, age thirty-four, and her four-year-old son Seraphin, who would later be known as Placide Louverture. Isaac, at the age of six months, is still recorded as a piece of property. His father, however, had been free for nearly ten years.
The first hard evidence of Toussaint's freedom was discovered in the 1970s: a document from the parish of Borgne attesting to the marriage of one “Jean Baptiste, negro of the Mesurade nation freed byToussaint Breda, a free negro.”19 Abbe Delaporte, cure of Borgne, added a marginal note to this description of Toussaint: “and recognized as free by Monsieurs the General and the Intendant in the year 1776.”20 This marriage certificate is enough to prove the date of Toussaint's freedom, the fact that he must have been formally and legally set free rather than informally granted liberte de savane (for otherwise the top officials of the colony would not have recognized him as a free man), and that he owned at least one slave: the one he had set free.
Toussaint Breda also figures in three other notarial acts of the pre-revolutionary period. In a document dated 1779, he appears as the leaseholder of a plantation at Petit Cormier, in the parish of Grande Riviere (the same region where the rebel blacks were to camp in the fall of 1791). The lessor was Philippe Jasmin Desir, whom subsequent documents identify as Toussaint's son-in-law, married to one of his filles naturelles, Martine. The property consisted of sixteen carreaux, or about sixty-four acres, most of it planted in coffee and staples, and for the period of the lease Toussaint became responsible for thirteen slaves who lived and worked there. That one of these slaves had the quite uncommon name of Moyse is suggestive, for Toussaint treated the Moyse who was one of his key subalterns during the revolution as an adoptive nephew. A Jean-Jacques also appears on the list of slaves included in the lease, but since this name was more common in that day there is less reason to suppose that the man in question was Jean-Jacques Dessalines, future emperor of Haiti. It is known that Dessalines was the slave of a free black master and that he was born at Petit Cormier, but if he had been under Toussaint's authority during slavery time, this circumstance would probably have been noticed later on.
An act of 1781 dissolves the lease on the basis of a mutual agreement, well before its nine-year term, with no reason given. Chances are that Toussaint, who had by then been free for five years, had found means to purchase a property elsewhere. It seems unlikely that he abandoned the lease for lack of means to maintain it, since in the same year he appears as fonde de pouvoir (authorized representative) on behalf of his son-in-law Philippe Jasmin Desir in a minor dispute with the owner of a property Jasmin had leased in Borgne.
In his prison at the Fort de Joux, Toussaint declared that at the time the revolution erupted he was master of a considerable fortune; these three real estate transactions suggest how he (and other free blacks) achieved such prosperity. Sugar production required a heavy initial investment, not only in land, mill machinery, and refining equipment, but also in the large number of slaves required for such a labor-intensive operation—an investment out of range of the typical newly freed slave who would likely have spent all his resources on the purchase of his own freedom (though it seems likely that Toussaint himself was freed for meritorious service to Bayon de Libertat). Coffee plantations, however, were less labor-intensive and less expensive to operate, while the cultivation of staples which could be sold to the large slave gangs on the sugar plantations was cheaper still. Buying, selling, and renting plantations could also be extremely profitable in the 1770s and ‘80s, when most of the obvious arable land had already been developed. But if Toussaint Breda had found an open road to riches, he did his best not to make himself noticeable as he traveled it. Though he almost certainly knew how to read and write at the time that these documents were executed, he declared himself unable to sign his name and allowed someone else to sign on his behalf.
The fact that Toussaint had a lot of business in Borgne suggests that he may have come with Bayon de Libertat from that parish, rather than having been born on Breda Plantation at Haut du Cap. The location of the plantation sold by Bayon when he moved to Breda has never been established; Gerard Barthelemy theorizes that Bayon may have come from Borgne. A substantial mountain separates Borgne from Haut du Cap and the Northern Plain, and it is not obvious why Toussaint would have involved himself in plantations there if he had no prior connection to the area. On the other hand, Borgne is an extremely fertile pocket in an out-of-the-way place, so it probably would have been easier for a free black to acquire land there than in the heavily cultivated region of the Northern Plain. And Toussaint's holdings were quite far-flung; Grande Riviere is also a good distance from Haut du Cap, and at the Fort de Joux Toussaint told his interrogator that he and Suzanne (who apparently had substantial means of her own, though still a slave in 1785) had purchased several properties in the canton of Ennery, a few miles northeast of Gona'ives and on the far side of the Cordon de l'Ouest from Toussaint's base at Breda.
In 1791, then, Toussaint was not a rebel slave, but a free man who for whatever reason had joined their cause, and in 1793 he was not a nou-veau but an ancien libre. Before 1791 he belonged to the class of affran-chis, freedmen, within which slaves of 100 percent African blood who had won manumission by whatever means available had no legal distinction from gens de couleur who had been freed by their white lovers or fathers. Then too there was a class of black and colored free persons, legally distinct from the affranchi group, who had been born of free parents and thus were never slaves. Chemist and houngan Max Beauvoir reports having seen a marriage certificate for Toussaint and Suzanne which attests thatToussaint himself was born free, but this document is not found in the scholarly record, and the hard evidence that does exist supports the idea that he was freed in the 1770s.
He was thus a member of a very small group: free blacks who owned slaves as well as property, and enjoyed the same legal status (and lack of status) as free gens de couleur, but who were separated from the gens de couleumot only by a socially significant racial difference but also by differences in their social connections. Though often despised and abused by the grands blancs, the free gens de couleur had close kinship ties to the most wealthy and powerful white colonists in Saint Domingue, and more often than not those ties did prove useful to the educational and economic advancement of the free colored population. Allowing for exceptions like Toussaint's unusually close relationship with Bayon de Libertat, free blacks enjoyed no such advantage.
Baron de Wimpfen, a traveler in colonial Saint Domingue, puts it plainly: “the black class is the last.* That's the one of the free property-owning negroes, who are few in number.”21 For a mulatto born into slavery, son of a white father, manumission could be expected almost as an unwritten right. A black slave had no such expectation. A large number of those who were freed were too old to do plantation work anymore—they were fat
ras, in the unsentimental term used on the slave rolls. Others won freedom for particular merit, most commonly by service in the militia or the marechaussee. Some, usually persons with a special skill like carpentry, blacksmithing, or the care and training of animals, worked on their free days to earn their recorded value and finally purchased their own freedom.
Since documents of the period don't reliably distinguish free mulat-toes from free blacks, it is difficult to estimate just how many of the latter there really were. De Wimpfen says they were “few in number”; Haitian scholar Jean Fouchard suggests, on the contrary, that they may have been as numerous as the free mulattoes, especially if blacks with the status of liberte de savane are included. But if free blacks were to be educated, they paid for it themselves, having no white fathers to send them to the colleges for colonists' children in France. Nor did free blacks have family resources to help them enter the plantation economy on a large scale. Most operated as tradesmen and craftsmen: carpenters, masons, tailors, and the like. Some, it appears, were professional criminals. According to one account, many free blacks were less materially comfortable than slaves on the more humanely run plantations—such slaves might even look down on impoverished free blacks. Free blacks living in the countryside were constantly suspected of harboring maroons, and indeed it was sometimes difficult to distinguish a runaway from a legitimate free black.
Some free blacks made an argument that they ought to be seen as superior to the mulatto group: “The Negro comes from pure blood; the Mulatto, on the contrary, comes from mixed blood; it's a mixture of the Black and the White, it is a bastard species … According to this truth, it is plain enough that the Negro is above the Mulatto, just as pure gold is above mixtures of gold.”22 But this scrap of rhetoric had no effect on the social reality of Saint Domingue, where even mulatto slaves felt superior to free blacks. Intermarriage between gens de couleur and free blacks was rare, and frowned upon by the former. Saint Domingue used an elaborate algebra to define sixty-four different variations of European-African mixture, and in this situation many mulattoes took an interest in lightening their children's skin through breeding.
Toussaint Breda, then, was exceptional even within the small class of free blacks, for very few of them owned land and slaves on the scale that he did. And even if the free blacks really did amount to half of the affranchis, the group was simply too small to give him an adequate power base. He had perceived, earlier than most, that even the gens de couleur all together, though numerous and determined enough to put up a good fight, would be in the end too small and weak to win the ultimate battles. The wellspring of real power was within the huge majority of half a million African slaves, and therefore Toussaint Louverture did everything he possibly could to identify himself with them.
Between 1776, when he was freed, and 1791, when the rebellion began, Toussaint Breda had a surprising number of common interests with members of the white planter class, despite the profound racial gap between him and them, and especially with the one white planter who had been his master and had willingly set him free. Some ten years older than Toussaint, Bayon de Libertat (like Napoleon Bonaparte) had roots in the Corsican petty nobility. One of his ancestors, known as Le Borgne (One-Eye), had won a certain celebrity in the service of King Henry IV of France. In France the family was based in Comminges, not far from an area called the Isle de Noe, so it is likely that de Libertat already had some connection to Louis Panteleon, comte de Noe, as well as his uncle Panteleon II de Breda, when Bayon first came among flocks of impoverished noblemen and younger sons to seek his fortune in Saint Domingue. One Lespinaist, another manager who hoped to sup-plant de Libertat on one of the plantations he was in charge of, wrote bitterly that de Libertat owed all his fortune to the comte de Noe.
The count was a Creole, born in the colony, where his family had been established for nearly a century, and he was heir to several important plantations at Haut du Cap, Plaine du Nord, and Port Margot, in the mountains between Haut du Cap and Borgne. Breda Plantation came to him through the marriage of his father, Louis, to Marie-Anne-Elisabeth de Breda. Louis Panteleon was born in 1728, two years after the marriage; when he was two his father was killed in a duel at Cap Francais. The toddler count was thus left fatherless but very, very rich. In 1786, Louis Panteleon de Noe was nearly sixty when he inherited Breda Plantation from his childless uncle in France.
Bayon de Libertat was a smaller operator; in the middle of the eighteenth century he was just setting a foot on the bottom rung of the ladder which the Noe family had already ascended. While managing the vast holdings of the comte de Noe, de Libertat bought and sold smaller properties of his own, including undeveloped tracts and two one-eighth shares of existing plantations. The jealous Lespinaist estimated him to be worth “150 mille livres de procurations.”23
Freed in 1776, Toussaint Breda put a toe on the bottom of the ladder to prosperity and began to follow Bayon de Libertat, who by then had climbed about halfway to the top. Though he owned several properties by 1791, Toussaint went on living at Breda Plantation, close to his former master. It is possible that Toussaint may have managed some of the Noe properties in de Libertat's stead, for Lespinaist's letter accuses Bayon of absenting himself to one of his own plantations and neglecting the lands he was supposed to be supervising.
Since free blacks were apt to be viewed with suspicion, especially if they lived in comparatively remote areas like Grande Riviere or Borgne, Toussaint's position was much more secure at Breda, under the wing of his white protector. Working as a commandeur there would have given Toussaint a salary which he could invest in the properties he was acquiring. As a coachman he was apt to be charged with messages by his employers, and it is likely that he played some supervisory role at Noe properties other than Breda, like Hericourt Plantation, near the town of Plaine du Nord, which he would later adopt as a headquarters. Traveling on behalf of de Noe and de Libertat would allow him to learn about tracts of land in which he himself might be interested; for example, if he called at de Noes coffee plantation at Port Margot, he didn't have much further to go to reach a small holding of his own at Borgne. Of course, Toussaint could never become a blanc, but up until 1791 his economic interests, at least, were closer to those of the grands blancs of Saint Domingue than to the great mute body of their slaves.
All evidence suggests that the relationship between Bayon de Libertat and Toussaint Breda was one of friendship, as much as or more than that of master and slave. It's often noted that Toussaint accompanied and assisted Bayon in various escapades and slightly off-color adventures. Some of these were probably amorous; Madame de Libertat went on a long journey to France in 1775, to take the waters at Bagneres, and Toussaint's own youthful prowess with the ladies was proved by the number of his extramarital children. But in 1791, Madame de Libertat was in residence at Breda, Bayon de Libertat was sixty-four years old, and both husband and wife had been sobered and saddened by the death of the younger of their two daughters at her school in France in 1784. “It is most Dolorous for a father and mother who love their children so,” Bayon wrote to Monsieur de Breda that year. “God has struck us in a sensitive spot.”24 He brought his sole surviving child back to Saint Domingue and swore he would not be parted from her except by death.
Toussaint, by his own reckoning, was over fifty in 1791. Both men had presumably outgrown the excesses of their youth, and settled down into a quieter, calmer level of companionship.
Colonel Cambefort, commander of the Regiment du Cap, was Bayon de Libertat's brother-in-law, and the regiment's second in command, Lieutenant Colonel Louis-Anne de Tousard, was Bayon's close friend and associate. Toussaint must have known both men well; aside from the family connection it is likely that all four were members of the same Masonic lodge; if Toussaint really was a Mason he could have had no more probable sponsor than Bayon de Libertat, who is known to have been a member of the lodge at Le Cap.
According to tenacious legend, a delegation of chafing royalists vis-ited B
reda Plantation sometime in the summer of 1791, with the approval of Governor Blanchelande. The petit blancs faction, commonly called Pompons Rouges for the red cockades they wore in support of the French Revolution, now two years under way, had taken over the Colonial Assembly at Le Cap. The grands blancs, of a generally royalist disposition and wearing white cockades to show their loyalty to the king, were looking for a strategy to put the petit bL·nc canaille back in its place. Their notion, wild though it seems, was that a manufactured and secretly controlled uprising of the slaves on the Northern Plain could frighten the petit blancs faction back into submission to the Pompons Blancs, according to the old sociopolitical rules of the ancien regime.
It seems likely that the delegation to Breda included either Cambefort or Tousard, if not both of them. Since both men were very familiar with Toussaint, it is not so incredible that one of them should have, in the words of Haitian historian Celigny Ardouin, “let slip a few words regarding that project for a rising of the slaves; too perspicacious not to recognize right away the opportunity for the future of his class in a general insurrection, Toussaint hazarded a few words in favor of the project; and added that the promise of three free days per week and the abolition of the punishment of the whip would suffice to raise the work gangs; but also, he demanded freedom for the slaves principally in charge of moving the others to action, as the price of their submission to the benevolent will of those who would deign to look after their well-being.”25
Celigny Ardouin goes on to describe Toussaint as being the chief, though hidden, instigator and organizer of the meeting at Bois Caiman, to which he invited “his most intimate friends, Jean-François Papillon, Georges Biassou, Boukman Dutty and Jeannot Billet,” all of whom were, like Toussaint, commandeurs on their respective plantations. Since Toussaint was already well known and well traveled all over the Northern Department, this mission would have been easy for him and would have attracted no unusual attention, though Blanchelande supposedly furnished him a special safe-conduct for these very special errands. “The conspirators met and distributed roles. Slyer than the others, Jean-François obtained the highest rank, Biassou the second; Boukman and Jeannot, being more audacious, charged themselves with directing the first movements. Toussaint reserved for himself the role of intermediary among the conspirators and secret movers of the insurrection: in any case he did not want to declare himself until he could be sure of the success of the enterprise.”26