Toussaint Louverture (9 page)

Toussaint was outwardly an extremely devout Catholic, and late in his career he set out to repress Vodou, which only means he may have been the first (but far from the last) Haitian ruler to forbid Vodou publicly while at the same time secretly practicing it. The association of his surname with Legba lent a spiritual power to the essential message of the proclamation from Camp Turel: that Toussaint Louverture alone was master of the crossroads of liberty for the former slaves of Saint Domingue. At the moment that Sonthonax announced emancipation, it was critical for Toussaint to distinguish himself from the Frenchman and to do whatever he could to place himself at the head of the men who would henceforth be known as the
nouveaux libres,
or newly free.

This maneuver was all the more important since Toussaint himself was actually an
ancien libre.
When the Haitian Revolution broke out in 1791, Toussaint was a free man, and had been free for at least fifteen years. He had been an owner of slaves himself, though he did not want anyone to remember it.

The second son of Toussaint's legal marriage, Isaac Louverture, wrote two memoirs concerning his father. The first is an anecdotal account of events, most of which Isaac personally witnessed, during the invasion of Toussaint's Saint Domingue by Napoleon Bonaparte's army. The second, though less complete and more fragmentary than the other, is almost the only source available on Toussaint's ancestry and his childhood. The memoir which Toussaint himself wrote during his final imprisonment is wonderfully vague on these matters. Though it is a sort of autobiography, Toussaint's memoir was meant as a legal brief for a military trial which never took place, and so cannot safely be taken at its full and apparent face value.

What becomes obvious from his memoir, his correspondence, his proclamations and public addresses, his more casual statements that have survived in memory, and even from the way he told a tale of himself through his actions, is that Toussaint Louverture always shaped and controlled his own story—the narrative which presented him as a character—with great deliberation, care, and ingenuity. His awareness of the importance of his public image, and that it could be fashioned without a very strict regard for the truth, is one of the several peculiarly modern qualities that put him centuries ahead of his time.

Isaac Louverture had been sent to school in France in his early teens. He returned to Saint Domingue in 1802, essentially as a hostage of the army sent by Napoleon Bonaparte to subdue what Bonaparte had decided to regard as a rebellion against the authority of what was swiftly becoming his government in France. Isaac's reunion with Toussaint was brief, and it is unlikely that he had any opportunity to speak to his father again after both were arrested later that year. Though Toussaint was deported from Saint Domingue on the same ship as his wife Suzanne and his three legitimate sons, he was allowed no contact with them during the voyage and in France he was imprisoned in a province far from his family. Isaac never returned to the island of his birth, so his notes on Toussaint's life before Napoleon's invasion depend on his own childhood memories, and probably those of his mother, who finished her days in Agen, near him. Thus it is possible that elements of his story are apocryphal.

By Isaac's report, Toussaint was the grandson of an African king named Gaou-Guinou, of the Arada “warrior nation.”
¹
Intertribal African wars were a constant source of supply for the slave trade. Gaou-Guinou's second son (also and somewhat confusingly known as Gaou-Guinou) was captured in one of these and sold to traders who shipped him to Saint Domingue, apparently along with numerous warriors of his tribe. The colonial writer Moreau Saint-Mery describes the Aradas, who came from Africa's Gold Coast and whose reddish yellow skin tone often caused them to be mistaken for mulattoes in Saint Domingue, as well-known for both intelligence and ferocity.

The unfortunate African prince and his tribesmen ended up on Breda Plantation, near the village called Haut du Cap, just a few miles southeast of Cap Francais (and a few more miles northwest of Bois Caiman). “Far from his native land,” writes Isaac, in the flowery French style of the early nineteenth century, “the second son of Gaou-Guinou no longer heard … the fierce and terrible songs of the warriors of his nation, in which they celebrated the valor of their king and of his ancestors; but he had held on to their memory. In his captivity he met some of his own who, subjects like himself in another hemisphere, recognized him for their prince, and paid him homage, and saluted him after the fashion of their country. Humanity and good intentions soft-
ened misfortune in the establishment of the comte de Noe. He [the African prince] enjoyed total liberty on the lands of his protector. He had five blacks to cultivate a portion of land which was assigned to him. The Catholic religion became his own; he married a beautiful and virtuous woman of his country. Both of them died almost at the same time, leaving five male children, of whom the youngest, who resembled his ancestor,
*
received the name of Gaou, and three daughters. The oldest of the five male children was Toussaint-Louverture, less illustrious for the rank his ancestors held in Africa than for himself.”
²

This romantic tale strains credibility without absolutely defying it. Though it seems unlikely that a slave owner would be foolhardy enough to leave an African war chief more or less at liberty among a group of men who had quite recently been his soldiers, the history of the last days of colonial Saint Domingue is rich with examples of similarly self-destructive behavior. More recent research supports the idea that Toussaint's father was indeed the son of the junior Gaou-Guinou, who was shipped to Saint Domingue with his first wife, Affiba, and two children. The Arada prince was baptized with the name of Hyppo-lite and survived, though blind, until 1804. François Dominique Toussaint—Louverture-to-be—was the child of Hyppolite's second marriage to a woman named Pauline, which produced four daughters and three sons besides Toussaint: Jean, Paul, and Pierre, all of whom would later adopt the name of Louverture.

There is, however, one difficulty with this version of Toussaint's origins: he does not appear in the property lists of the comte de Noe, nor in those of Monsieur de Breda, the uncle from whom Noe inherited Breda Plantation in 1786 and who was the actual owner of the property during Toussaint's childhood and youth.

No written record of Toussaint's birth has ever been found either, and he contradicts himself (and others) concerning the date. His name suggests strongly that he was born on All Saints' Day, but does nothing to tell us the year. A letter he addressed to the French Directory in 1797 declares that he had “arrived at the age of 50 years when the French Revolution, which changed my destiny as it changed that of the whole
world, had just begun.'
³
This statement yields a birth date of 1739, yet according to Isaac Louverture, Toussaint was born in 1746, whereas a couple of other early biographers offer 1743, and in 1802 Toussaint himself, a prisoner in France, gave his age as fifty-eight, which supposes yet another birth date of 1745. In the absence of written records it is likely that he himself could only guess at the year of his birth, within this roughly seven-year spread, but it is clear enough that he was either in his late forties or early fifties when destiny changed everything for him.

He had lived much, much longer than the average slave in Saint Domingue—against expectation, for he was born a frail and sickly child and legend has it he was not expected to survive. Perhaps he owed his early nickname, Fatras-Baton (Throwaway-Stick), to this childhood frailty. But all slaves too old, unhealthy, or injured to work were marked
Sisfatras
(trash) on the lists of slaves on Breda Plantation. Toussaint had the care of his father (who actually outlived him) once he was old and blind, and the name Fatras-Baton might also have implied that he was in charge of all the infirm slaves at Breda.

According to Isaac's notes, Toussaint was educated by his godfather, Pierre Baptiste, who had a good knowledge of French, some knowledge of Latin, and “even some notions of geometry.”
⁴
Baptiste, who by Isaac's description was most likely a freedman, got his own education from someone whom Isaac terms a “missionary,” and who very probably was a Jesuit priest. It seems almost certain that Toussaint learned to read and write during his childhood or early youth, though in later life he liked to say that he had taught himself these skills when already in his forties, thus very shortly before the revolution began.

A legal document to which Toussaint was a party in the 1770s is signed by someone else in his stead, suggesting that Toussaint could not write his own name at that date. But this suggestion might very well have been a ruse. The white colonists of Saint Domingue frowned on literacy among their slaves, fearing the dangerous ideas that might be introduced, and there is evidence that the slaves themselves saw reading and writing as rebellious if not revolutionary acts—which it would have been most advisable to practice in secret. Another story, perhaps apocryphal, holds that Toussaint was beaten bloody by a colonist who saw him reading a book on the main street of Haut du Cap, and that
Toussaint wore the bloodstained coat until, in the early days of the revolution, he found his assailant again and killed him.

Almost all of Toussaint's correspondence was dictated to secretaries. A few surviving letters written from prison in his own hand reveal that he was able to write in French, rather than the much more common Creole patois in which slaves communicated with their masters and among themselves, though his spelling was strictly phonetic. He seems to have read Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher who had himself once been a slave. In public addresses he made at the height of his power, he occasionally referred to Machiavelli, and his career indicates that he had mastered many fundamentals of
The Prince,
whether or not he learned them from the book.

If he had not read all of the Abbe Raynal's
Histoire des deux Indes,
he certainly had read the notorious passage in which the radical priest predicts a violent end to slavery: “All that the negroes lack is a leader courageous enough to carry them to vengeance and carnage. Where is he, this great man, that nature owes to its vexed, oppressed, tormented children? Where is he? He will appear, do not doubt it. He will show himself and will raise the sacred banner of liberty. This venerable leader will gather around him his comrades in misfortune. More impetuous than the torrents, they will leave everywhere ineffaceable traces of their just anger.'
⁵

In Isaac's version, Toussaint was born on Breda Plantation. During his youth, the plantation had among its team of French managers a man named Beage. In his maturity, Toussaint would be renowned for his self-control; he distinguished himself from the other rebel leaders by a more temperate disposition and a much cooler head. Still, at the age of eighteen he lost his temper with Beage in an argument about a horse, and went so far as to strike him. Such events were almost unheard-of: any slave who forgot himself so far as to hit a white man was liable to punishment by death, and more than likely a very slow and painful death. Apparently in this rare case the unusually humanitarian program which Isaac credits the comte de Noe with installing at Breda was respected by the manager. If Toussaint's rash action had any consequences, they were not permanent or fatal.

From an early age, Toussaint had been put in charge of much of Breda's livestock. It was a logical assignment for a slave too small and frail to be of much service in the cane fields; moreover, Toussaint seems to have had an inborn talent for working with animals, which his masters encouraged him to develop. With something like a natural jockey's build, Toussaint would become famous as a horseman—even Frenchmen who sneered at his style admitted there was no horse he could not handle. He also became an expert horse trainer and had considerable skill as a vet. When Bayon de Libertat took over the management of Breda in 1772, Toussaint emerged as the new steward's coachman and probably his most trusted black subordinate. “Having fathomed the character of Toussaint,” the manager recalled in 1799, “I entrusted to him the principal branch of my management, and the care of the livestock. Never was my confidence in him disappointed.”
⁶

It was difficult for slaves to marry in colonial Saint Domingue, as the Code Noir made it illegal for a married couple and their children to be separated by a sale. Perhaps for that reason, Toussaint married rather late in life, when he was over forty. However, his life before his marriage did not lack for romance. Though he was never a handsome man, Toussaints unusual skills, intelligence, and status as a
commandeur
and trusted personal servant of Breda's manager seem to have made him attractive enough to women that he was able to father eight
enfants naturels
outside the confines of wedlock: four sons (Jean-Pierre, Didine Gustave, Benjamin, and Rainville) and four daughters (Martine, Marie-Noel, Rose, and Zizine).

Toussaints wife, Suzanne Simon Baptiste, was mother to a ten-month-old son named Placide at the time of their marriage in 1782. By some accounts, this infant's father was a mulatto named Seraphin Clere. Placide was light-skinned, and once identified himself in a legal document as a
griffe
(one of sixty-four officially recognized permutations of combined European and African blood). However, Toussaint acknowledged paternity of Placide when he married Suzanne, at which point his capacity to father children out of wedlock had already been thoroughly proved. Placide's skin tone might well have been accounted for by Toussaint's Arada heritage. And Toussaint's relationship to
Placide was markedly closer than what he had with the two younger children of his marriage, Isaac and Saint-Jean; in 1802 Placide joined Toussaint's army in resisting the Napoleonic invasion, while Isaac declared himself incapable of taking up arms against the French. Later on, during their exile in France, the issue of paternity soured the relationship between the two (half?) brothers, and Isaac tried legal means to prevent Placide from using the Louverture name. Portraits of Isaac and Placide (almost certainly drawn from life) show a marked resemblance between Isaac and the most credible portraits of Toussaint Louverture, while the Placide-Toussaint resemblance is slight to nonexistent. On the other hand, when Toussaint enumerated all of his eleven children to the interrogator Caffarelli in the prison of the Fort de Joux, he pointedly included Placide among his three legitimate sons.