Toussaint Louverture

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Suzanne, apparently, never traveled south of Gonai'ves. Toussaint's marital fidelity was stern in the north, but when he went south, it seemed to relax. His Port-au-Prince residence was a bachelor's paradise. An affair with Madame Desdunes, &femme de couleur of the Artibonite region, produced children whose descendants survive to this day. Another special favorite was “la Dame Fissour,” the mixed-blood wife of a wealthy blancs from Leogane, the first important town south of Port-au-Prince. Such was her intimacy with Toussaint that his bodyguards would permit her to enter his private apartments unannounced at any hour of the day or night—an extraordinary privilege for the wary general to grant to anyone.

  At the same time he seems to have enjoyed romantic liaisons with some of the most prominent white women still in the colony, judging from a box of souvenirs he kept at Port-au-Prince (where Suzanne would almost certainly never have come across it). The French general Boudet and his staff found a false bottom in the box, which revealed “locks of hair of all colors, rings, golden hearts pierced with arrows, little keys, necessaires, souvenirs, and an infinity of love letters which left no doubt of the success in love obtained by the old Toussaint Louverture! Meanwhile he was Black, and had a repulsive physique … but he had made himself the dispenser of all fortunes, and at a whim his power could change any condition.”13

  Women of the highest society now competed for Toussaints attention and favor, not only behind closed doors but also with extravagant public demonstrations. Catherine Viard, described as one of Toussaints “favorite adulteresses,”14 invited him to a special mass (a curious combination of his tastes for public piety and private dalliance). Soon after his return from the annexation of Spanish Santo Domingo, the most prominent women of Port-au-Prince (including the wife of General Age) turned out on horseback to greet him, shading his progress with palm fronds and presenting him an embroidered pennant.

  There was a strong paternal flavor to Toussaints rule—the population was beginning to call him, affectionately, “Papa Toussaint”—and he had a weakness for damsels in distress. A woman who could gain an audience with him stood a good chance of having her problem rapidly solved, whether or not he was interested in her romantic favors. One especially credulous French husband was rumored to stand watch outside the door of Toussaints private office while his wife and the black general had long, long conferences within.

  Across the board, Toussaint showed a remarkable warmth to the old grand blancs class, who had been banned as emigres by representatives of the French Revolution, but strongly encouraged to return to their properties now that no such representatives were present in Saint Domingue. As Toussaint had incorporated everything he found useful in European military strategy into his own, he now meant to incorporate everything he found valuable in European culture—then the culture of the French Enlightenment—into the new society he was building, a society which actually practiced, without regard to race, the values of liberte, egalite, fraternite. He spent the evenings following large receptions in petits cercles, which were held in an antechamber to his bedroom otherwise used as an office; these were generally attended by the “principal Whites of the country,” the priests with whom Toussaint was intimate, and distinguished foreign visitors. Toussaint knew some phrases of Church Latin, which he liked to deploy in these situations, sometimes using them to baffle poorly educated men who sought positions in his administration. He set great store by real education, both religious and secular, and education was an important topic of his petits cercles.

  A prominent figure among the returning white proprietors was Bayon de Libertat, of whose reception at Toussaint's palace a curious anecdote is told: “He [Bayon] ran there, and wanted to throw himself into the arms of the one who people everywhere said was his benefactor; but this benefactor recoiled, and cried out in a solemn voice, so that all the world could hear him well: Go easy, Monsieur Manager— today there is a greater distance between me and you than there was in the old days between you and me. Return to Habitation Breda; be firm and just; make the Blacks work well, so that the success of your small interests will add to the general prosperity of the administration of the first of the Blacks, of the General in Chief of Saint Domingue.”15

  Despite its distinctly apocryphal flavor, this tale is interesting, and maybe its most important detail is that Toussaint performed his reac-Uonfor all the world to hear. That is to say, he publicly distanced himself from Bayon de Libertat—and by implication from the whole white planter class—while at the same time describing plainly for all hearers just what the role of that class was meant to be in the new order of things. The favor Toussaint showed to the grand blancs planters had brought him under some suspicion among many of the nouveaux libres, but his response to Bayon makes it clear that the grands blancs and their interests are now subordinate to the interests not only of “the first of the Blacks” but also of his whole “administration”; that is, a new black ruling class representing the power of the nouveau libre majority. Returning whites were the white grains, integrated into inconsequence by a thorough shakeup with the dark corn in the jar. And if Toussaint's economic policies did allow the white planters to pursue their own “small” interests, that was only in service of the larger interest of restoring the colony's prosperity for the benefit of the black administration and a newly constituted black citizenry.

  The rebuilding of the colony was proceeding apace. After ten years of'war, Saint Domingue enjoyed a season of stability at the turn of the nineteenth century, and damage from the decade of conflict began to be repaired. The Jewel of the Antilles, Cap Francais, ‘was rebuilt to an even more sumptuous level than it had known under the ancien regime, featuring elegant new residences for Toussaint and his officers, eminently including the local commander, Henry Christophe. General Dessalines had accomplished something similar in Saint Marc. Many members of Toussaint's officer corps now had the opportunity to grow wealthy by operating plantations whose grand bL·nc owners had fled. This situation produced some tension ‘with the white landowners ‘who accepted Toussaint's invitation to return; their lands were supposed to be under a leaseholding arrangement whose details had become an impractical legalistic tangle since Sonthonax and Polverel first tried to manage things. In practice, the returning white planters often found it quite difficult to reassert control of their property or to extract the compensation to ‘which they were legally entitled.

  Toussaint ordered all earnings from the properties of absentee owners to be paid into public treasuries, both to finance his extremely large army and to pay a corps of civil servants ‘which was often accused of the most flagrant corruption. Income from the rental of absentee-owned plantations and town houses was surprisingly large—one observer estimated it at over four million livres in the Western Department alone. Much of this money was spent on arms, and a great deal simply leaked away. The fact that many civil service posts were unpaid encouraged embezzlement, and at the same time Toussaint was assigning more and more civil service tasks to the military, especially collection of import-export duties. White civilians in Toussaint's inner circle, like Bunel, Idlinger, and Allier (the secretary'who did most of Toussaint's correspondence ‘with the home government), were rumored to have both hands in the till. The French general d'Hebecourt, whom Toussaint trusted for negotiations ‘with the English and other surrounding powers, had to be bribed before a returning planter could regain control of his land. In the end, however, the turnover of all sequestered properties required Toussaint's own signature. When Toussaint learned that debts were being sold for collection to the military, he put a stop to it.

  In the very brief period of peace Toussaints administration enjoyed in 1800 and 1801, restoration of the plantation economy was a limited success. Saint Domingue had had several cash crops under the ancien regime; in order of importance they were white sugar, brown sugar, coffee, cotton, and indigo. During the ten years of war, production of all these goods had dropped to less than half their former levels. Toussaint's administra
tion could do little to increase production of white sugar, a labor-intensive process requiring considerable technical skill. Indigo was for all practical purposes abandoned. Disenchanted colonists were heard to complain that too many plantations were buried “in grass and vines.”16 However, exports of cotton and brown sugar increased by several percentage points between 1799 and 1801, while the export of coffee, significantly, nearly doubled during the same period.

  If the damage to and deterioration of the plantations during the war years was problematic, the stability of the workforce was still more so. The majority of the newly freed slaves had been born in Africa, and once they were relieved of their grand blanc masters their natural inclination was to revert to practices of African village life, which was based on subsistence agriculture, not plantation labor. Toussaint Louverture was perturbed by this trend and by the tendency of many nouveaux libres (especially those who had come of age since 1791 and so never experienced slave labor) to adopt a wandering manner of life which Toussaint saw as an abuse of freedom and formally denounced as vagabondage.

  Toussaint had objected that the labor policy Hedouville pursued was tantamount to slavery, but he himself was as determined to “make the Blacks work well” as he exhorted Bayon de Libertat to be. In October 1800, he decreed a labor policy still more stern than that proposed by Hedouville; it was based on the military model and enforced by the army. This decree was reiterated and reinforced by the constitution Toussaint created for the colony in 1801, which defined the plantation as a “family, whose father is necessarily the owner of the land or his representative.”17 Here was paternalism of the strictest sort: the “father” had unlimited authority to discipline his “family.” Cultivators were to all intents and purposes confined to their plantations and subject to severe penalties if they wandered away or slacked in their work— though now they were to be paid for their labors.

  “I have never thought liberty to be license,” Toussaint pronounced in an 1801 address, “or that men become free can deliver themselves without consequence to sloth and disorder; my most formal intention is that cultivators remain attached to their respective plantations; that they enjoy a quarter of the income; that no one can be unjust to them without consequences; but at the same time I want them to work still more than in the old days; that they should be submissive, that they exactly fulfill their duties; [I am] well resolved to punish severely whomever avoids them.”18 To many so brusquely subjected to it, this regime looked all too much like slavery.

  Most of the black army officers (even those who, like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, were hostile to the return of the white planters) embraced the labor policy, which was designed, among other things, to help them enrich themselves. Dessalines, given broad authority to enforce the labor rules in the west and the south, soon made himself notorious as a more rigorous taskmaster than the grands blancs ofthe bad old days. He put his opinion very simply: “Blacks don't know how to work if you don't force them.”19

  The whip, as such, had been abolished, but Dessalines substituted canes. Often he administered the punishment with his own hand: a beating on the buttocks so severe that the victim could not move for several days afterward. Dessalines caned recalcitrant workers without prejudice, and sometimes unproductive overseers were also beaten. White proprietors on underproducing plantations might be flogged as well—to prove that Dessalines had no favoritism for them. When abuse of the cane became widespread, Toussaint issued orders against it. Dessalines switched to a leathery shrub common all over the Artibonite plain: “I beat with bayahondel” he cried. “Oh yes, I beat.”20 He was just as energetic in repressing rebellions against the work policy here and there in the colony, marching into areas of unrest and killing whomever he happened to meet till the trouble stopped. When he learned that the cultivators were distressed at his appointment to command the new Canton Louverture, he said tersely, “That's their business—I've got a bayonet.”21

  Dessalines's enthusiasm for enforcing labor policies was an extreme case, but many members of the black officer corps probably agreed with Toussaint's larger thinking: it was necessary to restore productivity in order to stabilize trade relationships with neighbors like Jamaica and the United States and, still more important, to raise money for the purchase of arms and the maintenance of a large army for the defense of general liberty—the universal goal. But there was at least one officer who did not agree.

  Toussaint had an unusually close and personal relationship with General Moyse, whom he had adopted as a nephew during slavery time. Moyse commanded at Fort Liberte and had been instrumental in Hedouville's expulsion. In Moyse's company, Toussaint was less guarded than usual; in October 1800 he declared: “Does Hedouville believe he can scare me? I have been making war for a long time, and if I have to keep on with it, I am ready. I have had business with three nations and I have beaten all three. Also I am calm in the knowledge that my soldiers will always be firm in the defense of their liberty. If France has more people, let her keep them to fight the English—she won't have too many. She has already lost twenty-two thousand men in our country, and if she sends any more they may very well meet the same fate. I don't want to go to war with France. I have saved this country for her up to now, but if she comes to attack me, I will defend myself.”22 It is an exceptionally frank and quite accurate statement of Toussaint's attitude at this time: his preference was to keep the colony under French rule, so long as general liberty for all and his personal position were not threatened—but he was prepared to fight to the bitter end if these conditions were not met.

  Moyse, who hated whites even more bitterly than Dessalines, had a still more intransigent attitude. “The French are no good in this country, and there is no one but them who trouble us, but I will do so much to them that I will oblige them all to leave and abandon their properties. If it was in my power, I would soon be rid of them. That would be one less job to do; what one has begun, one must finish. Let France send her forces here, what will they do? Nothing. I wish she would send three, four, or five hundred thousand men; that would be so many more guns and ammunition for our brothers who are not armed. When we first began to fight for our liberty, we had only one gun, then two, three, and we finished by having all the guns of the French who came here.”23

  In the fall of 1801, Moyse became the focal point of a gathering discontent with Toussaint's draconian labor policy and gathering suspicion of his friendliness with the white planter class. As usual, there was tremendous instinctive resistance among the African-born majority of the former slaves to cooperating with the laborious requirements of the French-model society Toussaint and the other Creole black leaders were trying to create. The natural preference of the Africans was to revert to subsistence farming, which was not very demanding in Saint Domingue (one observer calculated that in this fertile zone three months of work would produce the necessities for twelve), and to the manners and mores of African village life—a tendency which would persist in Haiti for the next two hundred years. In 1801 there was plenty of land available for such use, especially on the thinly populated Spanish side. To prevent unauthorized migration into that area, Toussaint had forbidden sales of formerly Spanish land in lots smaller than fifty carreaux (roughly two hundred acres), but this policy was difficult to enforce. The more the military had to force the former slaves to do plantation labor, the more unpopular the army became.

  Toussaint had made Moyse commander of all the Northern Department—previously and potentially the most productive region of the colony—but Moyse was not willing to take the extreme and violent measures Dessalines had used to make the south and the west produce. Contrary to Toussaint's program for reestablishing the plantation economy, Moyse was inclined to allow the plantations of the north to be parceled out into small holdings. The new Canton Louverture cut a slice out of Moyse's territory in the north, and Moyse suspected that Toussaint would give this command to Dessalines, rather than to him. Moreover, Moyse felt that the constitution which Toussaint had
devised for the colony contained dangerous infringements on general liberty. Julien Raimond's son-in-law Pascal, who had become one of Toussaint's aides after the collapse of the Third Commission, warned his general in chief that Moyse seemed implausibly unconscious of trouble brewing all over the north.

  On the night of October 29, a revolt broke out on the Northern Plain in the style of the first rising of 1791—whites were massacred from Fort Liberte to the gates of Cap Francais. The new insurrection swept all over the Northern Department within two days, carrying the towns of Dondon, Acul, Plaisance, Port Margot, and Limbe. The war cry of the rebels was “General Moyse is with us—death to all the whites!” Joseph Flaville, the ever-insubordinate commandant of Limbe, slaughtered the last refugees on the waterfront there as they were trying to find boats to escape. Bayon de Libertat, Toussaint's former master and old friend, was counted among the dead. Moyse might have made a point of that. “Whatever my old uncle does,” he had said, “I cannot resign myself to be the executioner of my race; he is always chewing me out for the interests of the metropole; but those are the interests of the Whites, and I won't love the Whites until they give me back the eye they made me lose in battle.”24

  The revolt was well and carefully timed, and caught much of the black military leadership off guard, or almost. Dessalines was celebrating his marriage to Marie Claire Heureuse, &femme de couleur he had met during the siege of Jacmel, when she persuaded him to allow her to bring medical supplies through his lines to nurse the sick and wounded in the surrounded town. The wedding festivities, which cost 100,000 livres and went on for three days, took place at Petite Riviere, in the Artibonite region. Toussaint joined the celebration, though he had to tear himself away from La Dame Fissour to do so. Moyse, who had other plans, did not attend.