Toussaint Louverture: A Free Man

by Laurent
Dubois

This article was originally published in The Nation.

"You might
imagine that Louverture would have a proper tomb."

Toussaintboukman
Toussaint Louverture was born a slave in the thriving French
colony of Saint-Domingue. In the early 1790s, he took part in a massive
uprising that demolished slavery in the colony. He became the revolution's
greatest military and political leader, consolidating the freedom it had won
and laying the foundation for the creation of Haiti in 1804. Given this, you
might imagine that Louverture would have a proper tomb. Or that we know what he
looked like, and can agree on how to spell his name.

But after dying in a cold prison in the Jura Mountains in 1803,
he was thrown into a nearby unmarked grave. No one knows where his bones are.
Although there are a few images of him probably drawn from life, many others
are the pure product of imagination. While he signed his name "Louverture," it is typically spelled
"L'Ouverture." Many writers refer to him as "Toussaint."
This makes sense, given that he took on the name "Louverture" only
late in life. But even though his nemesis, Napoleon, gets the same treatment,
it's still a bit jarring - imagine historians of the American Revolution writing about George and Thomas.

Louverture does have his monuments. An urn with dirt from
the graveyard where he was buried sits in the Muse du Panthon in
Port-au-Prince, and there is a statue of him across from the National Palace.
In 2001 President Jean-Bertrand Aristide built a monument commemorating Louverture's 1801 Constitution. After being expelled from
the country in 2004 Aristide quoted the famous statement Louverture made when
he was deported two centuries earlier: "In overthrowing me, they have
uprooted the trunk of the liberty of the blacks; it will grow back because its
roots are many and deep."

Aristide then rephrased the quote to cast himself as a
descendant of Louverture: "I declare in overthrowing me they have uprooted
the trunk of the tree of peace, but it will grow back because the roots are
Louverturian."

Haitian leaders are not the only ones who have claimed
Louverture as a founder. When, in 1998, the French government commemorated the
(final) abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1848, Louverture's name
was inscribed in a wall in the Panthon, the temple of French national heroes.
The gesture, urged by Caribbean activists in France, was an attempt to
repudiate the actions of Bonaparte, who had Louverture imprisoned, and to argue
that in his struggle against France Louverture embodied the Republic's true
values. But can Louverture be a hero for France and Haiti at the same time?

In his acclaimed trilogy of novels about the Haitian
Revolution - All Souls' Rising, Master of the Crossroads and The Stone That
the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell presented a riveting portrait of
Louverture. The novels are deeply grounded in the historical sources of the
period, no small feat given how extensive and often contradictory they are. But
still hungry for the history of the Haitian Revolution - it has a way of
grabbing you and holding on - Bell has now produced an excellent biography of Toussaint Louverture. For fans of the
novels eager to read more, or for those daunted by the 2,000 pages of the
trilogy, Toussaint Louverture provides a readable and engaging narrative, one
likely to become the standard biography in English about this remarkable
figure. (Full disclosure: I am thanked in the book's acknowledgments.)

Who was Louverture? For nearly two centuries, most writers
portrayed him as a former slave who was freed by the Haitian Revolution itself.
Then, in 1977, a group of historians published an article in Haiti showing that
he was freed during the 1770s, managed a coffee plantation and briefly owned a
slave. As a revolutionary leader, Louverture rarely evoked this chapter in his
life, preferring to emphasize his connection to the former slaves who made up
the majority in the colony. Indeed, he was a master at presenting himself as he
wished to be seen, to the point that, as Bell writes, "during the first
fifty years of his life, Toussaint walked so very softly that he left next to
no visible tracks at all."

"A former slave but also a former slave owner, Toussaint
was revered as a leader of the black masses."

Bell, however, has tracked down a number of new sources
located in private collections, and provides a very detailed account of
Louverture's life before and after the revolution. It makes clear there is no way
to fit Louverture easily into one social category. A former slave but also a
former slave owner, he was revered as a leader of the black masses in Haiti but
also as a trusted collaborator of former slave owners. He used force to win
freedom but also to contain it. He managed the colony, writes Bell, "so as
to prove to the whole European world that slavery was not necessary to the
success of the plantation economy," and that "sugar and coffee
production could be revived" but "with free labor." He rebuilt the
plantation economy, but at a cost: He created a coercive labor regime with
aspects of "raw authoritarianism," in which the former slaves who led the army threatened other former slaves into
continuing to work on the plantations. ToussaintNapoleon

To sustain his regime, he skillfully navigated the political
currents of the broader Atlantic. Within France, many were eager to reverse
emancipation, but for a time they were kept at bay by its defenders, who
celebrated Louverture for winning battles and maintaining order. But
Louverture's independence alarmed many French officials. He negotiated trade
deals with Britain and the United States, insuring that the colony had markets
for its sugar and coffee and that his army had plenty of guns and ammunition.
Congress kept trade open with Louverture even when the United States boycotted
France, and John Adams deployed the Navy to support Louverture against his
internal enemy, Andr Rigaud, in the nation's first military intervention in the
Caribbean. The support was short- lived: Thomas Jefferson, elected in 1800, was
very hostile to Louverture, seeing the revolution mainly as a dangerous example
for slaves in the United States.

The Haitian Revolution was the first American experiment in
large-scale emancipation, and Louverture - with no guidance from precedent and little
support from the French government - managed the transition. He had to confront
daunting questions: What, precisely, is freedom? How do you transform a society
made by slavery into one that assures the dignity and freedom of former slaves?
He was a pioneer not only because he created and consolidated freedom in the colony but also because the regime he created ultimately
fell short in crucial ways. It was a failure shared by all those governors in
the Americas who would follow in his footsteps.

Despite the lengths to which Louverture went to prove that
the colony could be profitable without slavery, the French under Bonaparte
ultimately tried to re- establish slavery, with disastrous results for the tens
of thousands of French troops and many local fighters and civilians who died in
the conflict that ensued. Bonaparte and his advisers believed they could
isolate and overthrow Louverture and the other black leaders of the colony, and
that the population would submit. They did not understand how deeply the revolution had transformed
the colony. It had created a racially integrated army made up largely of ex-slaves, many of them
officers; in one case, a former master served in a unit commanded by his former
slave. On the plantations, laborers received payment, had some control over
their work regimes and were able to carve out more time and space to cultivate food for themselves. Whatever their
dissatisfaction with Louverture's regime, they knew it was an important advance
over slavery. When the French threatened to take freedom away, many were ready
to fight. Even after Louverture was captured in mid-1802, and after most of his
major generals had capitulated to the French, small groups of insurgents kept
fighting.

French brutality and the specter of a return to slavery
steadily expanded the resistance, which finally triumphed with the creation of
Haiti in 1804.

The pace of change during the Haitian Revolution was
remarkable. In a few years, slaves gained not only freedom but French
citizenship. When France turned against emancipation, they created an
independent state. In forging a new community, they dramatically expanded the
meaning of freedom.

"When France turned against emancipation, they created an
independent state."

At the time of independence the majority of Haitians had
been born in Africa. Historians have struggled with the question of how best to
understand the actions and ideas of this extremely diverse African population,
most of whom left no written documents behind. In thinking about this question,
Bell at times leans, unwisely, on the term "tribal" as a way of
describing the perspective of these exiled survivors of the Middle Passage.
While there were communities of language and meaning forged out of common background in Africa - there
was a massive influx of people from the Kongo region during the decades before
the revolution, when up to 40,000 slaves arrived each year in the colony - they
were linked by a range of religious, linguistic and political affinities that
cannot be subsumed under the term "tribe." The revolution, meanwhile,
created and sustained new identities among people on the move, and on the
march, as they forged a life for themselves beyond slavery. They often
identified themselves not as members of a particular group from Africa but as
"Africans," joined by the experience of exile and oppression in the
New World.

In contrast to most of the African-born protagonists of the
Haitian Revolution - indeed, most of the ex-slaves who participated in it -
Louverture left behind a large collection of documents. A few were written by
his hand in a phonetic French, but most - including many letters and occasional
pamphlets - were dictated by him to secretaries, and edited and re-edited as
they read drafts back to him in sessions that often lasted through the night.
Among them is a series of letters, well showcased in Bell's biography, in which Louverture
explains how he negotiated with a group of rebels, giving us a partial glimpse
of his skills at oratory and negotiation. Such writings, only a few of which
are translated into English, represent a major intellectual and political
legacy, and they drive Bell's chronicle of his rise and fall.

When the first biographies of Louverture were written in the
nineteenth century, to write about Haiti was inevitably to intervene in the
debate about the morality of slavery and the capacities of former slaves to be
free. For those who supported slavery, the violence of the insurgent slaves -
often exaggerated in atrocity stories that maintain their purchase to this day
- and the situation in Haiti in the nineteenth century were represented in such
a way as to argue that blacks needed to be contained by white domination.

Abolitionists - including Thomas Clarkson, Frederick Douglass
and Victor Schoelcher, who wrote a biography of Louverture - told a different
story, celebrating the victory in Haiti as part of a larger assault on slavery,
arguing that the violence of the insurrection was generated by the violence of
the institution it justly sought to destroy. Even for those who had ambiguous
feelings about the revolution, Louverture stood as a clear refutation of ideas
of black inferiority. Effusively celebrated by his allies, he also gained the
grudging (if conveniently posthumous) admiration of the French general Pamphile
de Lacroix, who had fought against him.

Louverture inspired the great Trinidadian writer and
activist C.L.R. James, who in the 1930s first wrote a play and then a history
about him. James's The Black Jacobins (1938) channeled Louverture into the
present, celebrating his heroism but also examining the tragedies and ironies
of his often dictatorial rule, using his story to trace the promises and
pitfalls of struggles for independence. The book has become a classic in the
literature of anticolonial revolts, inspiring many readers, including Bell.

ToussaintHaitiMap
In Haiti, meanwhile, several generations of scholars, from
Paulus Sannon and Edner Brutus to Roger Dorsinville and Claude Mose, have
written important works about Louverture, though unfortunately none have been
translated into English. Louverture's choices are often evoked in discussions
about the course of Haitian history. Sometimes he is favorably compared with
those who followed, particularly Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Louverture
distinguished himself for the way that he negotiated both with white planters
and the United States and Britain. Dessalines, in contrast, famously ordered
the massacre of most of the white inhabitants who remained in Haiti after
independence in an episode described in bloody detail by Bell in both his
novels and the biography.

Would Louverture have spared the whites? Would he have
crafted a better relationship between Haiti and other nations? Perhaps. But
when he fought against the French, Louverture was in many ways as resolute and
merciless as Dessalines would be later, and had he survived the brutal and
genocidal campaigns of the French during their final days in Saint-Domingue -
when even loyal black soldiers were massacred simply for the color of their
skin - he may have reacted as Dessalines did. And Dessalines, like Louverture,
combined repression with negotiation, allowing some whites to stay in the
country, naturalizing them, welcoming them into the black race when he decreed
all Haitian citizens to be black.

"Even loyal black soldiers were massacred simply for the
color of their skin."

After independence, many elites sought to continue
Louverture's economic policy of maintaining some plantations, and the coffee
economy boomed during certain periods, something usually forgotten in
streamlined histories that portray Haiti's subsequent economic history as one
of inexorable decline. Much of the population, however, for obvious reasons,
preferred to own their own land rather than toil on plantations, and to grow
food for themselves and for sale in local rather than international markets. Had it not been for the
relentless hostility of other countries, notably the crippling indemnity levied
by France in 1825 in return for diplomatic recognition, these economic
alternatives might have proved sustainable.

Today it is difficult to find a mention of Haiti in the
American press without the phrase "the poorest nation in the Western
Hemisphere" tacked on like some kind of dogged trademark. But as Haitian
architect Patrick Delatour noted in a conference last year, when Haiti was a
colony most of its capital was invested in the bodies of its slaves. When
Haitians refused their status as property and forced France to accept them as
people, they also transformed a rich colony into a poor nation. Was it their
fault that the two went together? ToussaintBandWinside

The autonomy and dignity that Louverture sought to
achieve, in his sometimes troubling way, is still more of a promise than a
reality in Haiti. To understand why, we need to grapple with both the successes
and failures of Haiti's leaders and the intensity of the forces arrayed against
them, much as Bell does with Louverture. That we still need to go back 200
years to find a way to look forward is in some sense a tragedy. But it is also,
as Bell suggests, an opportunity and a responsibility.

When Louverture's jailers discovered his corpse in April
1803, they found a piece of paper tucked into the bandanna wrapped around his
head. On it was a message. Louverture complained of being arbitrarily arrested
and sent off "as naked as an earthworm," with no chance to hear the
charges against him or to respond: "Is it not to cut off someone's legs
and order him to walk? Is it not to cut out his tongue and tell him to talk? Is it not to
bury a man alive?" Placing the paper on his forehead, writes Bell,
"was a magical act: a plea to the unseen world for justice." If
Louverture's plea for justice for himself is finally starting to be answered,
his denunciation is as relevant today as ever.

Laurent Dubois teaches
history at Michigan State University. He is the author of Avengers of the New World: The Story of the
Haitian Revolution (Harvard) and A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and
Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (North Carolina).

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