Toussaint Louverture (11 page)

Substitute the word “liberty” for “master,” and you have something almost identical to the policy that Toussaint Louverture would institute in 1801, as military governor of Saint Domingue.

The same day that Bayon de Libertat resumed his post at Breda, most of the runaway slaves also returned to the plantation—some intermediary must have been able to find them and let them know that the regime was about to change. Against expectation, the slave Louis recovered from the self-inflicted wound on his throat, though Bayon
reported that he now wheezed like an asthmatic and had a hard time making his speech understood. As the work gangs returned to their normal routines, the epidemic among the horses and cattle also subsided.

Apparently one of de Libertat's personal retainers, a man with a knowledge of veterinary medicine and a knack for diplomacy with discontented slaves, assisted considerably with restoring order at Breda— assistance which may have been enough to justify his manumission. Toussaint was in his thirties at this time, still only approaching the prime of his powers, and it was a very unusual thing for a valuable male slave to be freed at that relatively young age. With the several skills he was known to possess, Toussaint a Breda might have earned and saved the money to purchase his own freedom, or he might have had his liberty as a gift, in recognition of some extraordinary service such as playing an indispensable role in restoring the plantation from chaos to good order. In a letter to the French Directory in 1797, Toussaint himself credits Bayon de Libertat (not the comte de Noe) with having set him free: “Twenty years ago the heavy burden of slavery was lifted from me by one of those men who think more of their duties to fulfill toward oppressed humanity than the product of work of an unfortunate being. Here I speak of my former master, the virtuous Bayon.”
¹⁷

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
fatras,
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.