Toussaint Louverture: Slave Revolt to Haitian Revolution

[00:00:01]It is the 29th of August 1793 in  the French colony of Saint-Domingue,   modern-day Haiti. A proclamation has  started to spread around the colony,   one that comments on the progress of the revolt  against French colonial rule almost exactly two   years after it first began. In the proclamation,  the author asserts “I want Liberty and Equality   to reign in St. Domingue. I am working to make  that happen. Unite yourselves to us brothers   and fight with us for the same cause.” It is a clarion call to arms for those amongst the   former slave population who have not yet committed  to the Haitian Revolution, but its author will not   be around to enjoy Haiti’s full independence when  it is acquired years later. The man will instead   die an ocean away in France itself, a martyr  to the cause he fought for….his name Toussaint   Louverture….leader of the Haitian Revolution. The man known to history as Toussaint Louverture   was born into slavery at the sugar plantation  of Bréda at Haut-du-Cap in Saint-Domingue,   present-day Haiti. As slave children took their  surname from the plantation, he was known as   Toussaint Bréda. A lack of birth records means  that his date of birth is unknown. Estimates   range from the late 1730s up to 1746. Most  historians believe he was born in the early 1740s,   and his name Toussaint, which means ‘All Saints’,  may indicate that he was born on All Saint’s Day,   the 1st of November, though his son Isaac claimed  that Toussaint was born in May. Toussaint himself   seemed to think he was born in 1743, though  this was possibly just his own guess.   Toussaint’s father Hippolyte was born in Africa  and brought to Saint-Domingue. According to Isaac   Louverture’s account, Hippolyte was the  son of Gaou-Ginou, a king of the Allada   people in Benin. Since historians have failed to  identify a monarch of this name among the Allada,   most scholars believe that Toussaint’s father may  have been a powerful aristocrat. Even at Bréda   Hippolyte commanded respect among the slaves. He  was separated from his wife and children after   being enslaved and remarried a slave woman at  Bréda named Pauline. Toussaint was their first   child. They would have four more children. The French colony of Saint-Domingue that   Toussaint was born in occupied the western  third of the island of Hispaniola, named by   Christopher Columbus in 1492. The indigenous  Taino people, whose population collapsed due   to war and disease within a generation or two of  Spanish colonisation, called the island Ayiti,   meaning ‘land of mountains’. During the  17th century, the French began settling   on the western part of the island, which Spain  formally ceded to France in 1697 at the end of   the Nine Years’ War in Europe. The French colony  was known as Saint-Domingue after Santo Domingo,   the main Spanish settlement on Hispaniola.  French settlers established many plantations   on the island and the colony soon became the  world’s largest producer of sugar and coffee.   While a new administrative capital was founded at  Port-au-Prince on the western coast in 1750, the   colony’s main commercial centre was Cap-Français  on the northern coast, which by 1789 was a   thriving cosmopolitan port boasting a population  of 20,000 people. However, the extraordinary   wealth of the colony was based on the exploitation  of the island’s half a million slaves,   the majority of whom were transported from Africa.  Most slaves were forced to toil in the fields in   the searing heat and were denied any political  and civil rights. In response to the cruelty of   the slave economy, from the mid-1740s escaped  slaves known as maroons fled into the hills,   forming armed bands to defend themselves against  any attempts by their former masters to hunt   them down. A charismatic spiritual leader named  François Makandal led the movement in its early   stages, and while he was captured and executed in  1758 he remained a legend and inspiration among   slaves dreaming of liberation. In addition to the  half a million black slaves and some 30,000 French   colonists, the colony also hosted a similar number  of mixed race individuals known as mulattoes who   were free and allowed to own slaves of their  own, but subject to various forms of legal   discrimination that prevented them from enjoying  equal status to the white population.   Very little is known about Toussaint’s youth, but  he appears to have been a thin, sickly child, who   was nicknamed ‘Fatras-Baton’ or ‘little stick.’  Despite this label, Toussaint grew up to be an   athletic young man and became a strong swimmer and  rider. He would have been brought up to speak Fon,   the native language of his parents in Benin, and  during his childhood he acquired Haitian Creole,   a language which combined French with influences  from various West African languages. Toussaint   is likely to have learned standard French  from the Jesuit community, which controlled   the Catholic Church in Cap-Français until 1763  when French colonial authorities removed them   from the island amid a broader crackdown on  the entire Jesuit movement in the Americas.   After his parents’ death in 1774, Toussaint  received lessons in history, geography, and   mathematics from his godfather Pierre-Baptiste,  a freedman who had been educated by the Jesuits.   Pierre-Baptiste lived to be over 100 and Toussaint  remained in touch with him throughout his life.   It is possible that as a young man Toussaint  read Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Civil   War and the Histoire des deux Indes, an  encyclopaedic history of international   trade first published in 1770 and compiled  by the Enlightenment writer, the Abbé Raynal,   from a variety of different sources, including  Denis Diderot. Toussaint was possibly influenced   by passages from the encyclopaedia about the  moral injustice of slavery and believed that   sooner or later a great man would  emerge among the slave population   to lead an uprising to liberate himself  and his comrades from their oppression.   Toussaint’s advanced education was only  possible because, unlike the majority of   slaves on Saint-Domingue, he was not required to  toil in the fields. He was a domestic servant who   looked after the plantation owner’s livestock and  horses, a task that he was eminently suited to   owing to his skilled horsemanship, which earned  him the nickname ‘Centaur of the Savannah.’   During the 1770s, Toussaint served as the  coachman for Antoine-François Bayon de Libertat,   a Frenchman who managed the Bréda estate between  1772 and 1789. In this capacity Toussaint was   trusted by Bayon to travel around the colony as  his representative. While Toussaint experienced   less brutality as a slave than most of his peers,  he still suffered from legal discrimination and   was not immune from racial violence. On one  occasion, Toussaint was walking home from Mass   with his prayer book in hand when he was violently  assaulted by a white man with a wooden stick,   who told him that a black man should not read.  Toussaint slipped away but never forgot the   incident, and during the slave rebellion years  later he encountered the same man and killed him   without a second thought. Although Toussaint was  designated a creole since he was born in Haiti,   one biographer, Sudhir Hazareesingh, argues that  he maintained a close affinity with his African   roots. He inherited knowledge of herbal medicine  from his father and combined this with Caribbean   and European medical knowledge. His abilities as a  healer ensured that he was respected by his peers.   He spoke the Fon language to fellow Alladas who  lived in Bréda, and after his parents’ death he   sought help from an African-born woman named  Pélagie, a close friend of his late mother,   who helped him take care of his siblings and his  children. Near the end of his life, Toussaint   claimed to have had 16 children, of whom 11 had  already predeceased him. In the early 1760s,   he married a free black woman named Cécile,  who gave him three children. Their eldest son,   named Toussaint after his father, died in 1785. By  this time Cécile had already left him for another   man, and in around 1782 Toussaint married a slave  named Suzanne, who was the niece of his godfather,   Pierre-Baptiste. Toussaint had two sons  with his second wife and also adopted   her son Placide from a previous marriage. During the 1770s and 1780s, Toussaint and his   family enjoyed a comfortable existence, enabling  them to share their surplus with plantation   workers who were in need. Archival research  from the 1970s showed that by at least 1776,   Toussaint was no longer a slave and had been  formally emancipated. Toussaint possibly owed   his freedom to Bayon de Libertat, who made the  request to the nephew of the plantation owner,   Count Louis-Pantaléon de Noé, after crediting  Toussaint with playing a major role in restoring   order to Bréda after a large number of slaves  fled the plantation in 1773 in response to the   brutality of an estate manager named Delribal, who  appears to have temporarily displaced Bayon. In   his twin capacity as a coachman trusted by Bayon  and as a figure of authority and respect among his   fellow slaves, Toussaint successfully brokered  an agreement resulting in Delribal’s dismissal,   Bayon’s reinstatement as manager, and the  voluntary return of the escaped slaves.   These circumstances led the grateful Bayon to  petition successfully for his coachman’s freedom,   after which Toussaint worked as a salaried  employee. Indeed, other records from 1776   show that Toussaint was not only a free man,  but that he acquired a slave of his own named   Jean-Baptiste. In 1779, Toussaint also took out  a lease on a small coffee estate with 13 slaves   from his son-in-law, though the enterprise was  unsuccessful and he abandoned it within a couple   of years. While these developments may cast some  doubt on Toussaint’s alleged later pedigree as a   freedom fighter, his brief stint as a plantation  manager allowed him to better understand the slave   economy, and after the failure of his project he  appears to have freed several of the slaves. The   failure of the enterprise coincided with the  breakdown of his first marriage with Cécile,   his return to Bréda, and his marriage to Suzanne.  Since his wife and children continued to be slaves   at Bréda, Toussaint chose to remain on the  estate, but he used his influence with Bayon   to ensure that his family members worked in the  house rather than having to endure backbreaking   labour in the fields. Toussaint also ensured  that his adoptive mother Pélagie was exempted   from all labour duties by 1785, four years  before he formally bought her freedom.   By 1789, Toussaint was in his mid-40s and  had been a free man for almost two decades.   He continued to live on the slave plantation with  his family, retaining a strong sense of solidarity   with his black brethren, and was understandably  reticent about admitting that he had been formally   emancipated by his white employer Bayon. His  own freedom jarred with the fact that the vast   majority of his peers were still enslaved,  and while Toussaint was pragmatic enough to   realise that a slave uprising was unlikely to  succeed, he was prepared to assume Makandal’s   mantle when circumstances presented themselves.  Such an opportunity came in the wake of the   French Revolution of 1789, which split the white  community on Saint-Domingue. During the 1780s,   wealthy planters had resisted royal efforts  to improve conditions for slaves by enforcing   existing legislation against brutal punishments.  Paradoxically, this meant that slaves and critics   of slavery were more sympathetic to the monarchy,  while the planters welcomed the revolution as an   opportunity to assert their independence from  France. The revolution in France inspired an   uprising on Saint-Domingue late in 1790 by Vincent  Ogé, a mulatto who demanded the right to vote but   refrained from forging an alliance with black  slaves. While Ogé was arrested and executed in   Saint-Domingue, in May 1791 the National  Assembly in Paris passed a law granting   voting rights to persons of colour whose parents  were also free. This minor concession provoked   outrage from the planters as a challenge to  their privileges, and led to the outbreak of   conflict between whites and free persons of  colour in the southern part of the colony.   Toussaint, like the other domestic slaves and  servants who worked in the houses of their   masters, would have heard them talking about  the revolution. In their interpretation of the   events in Paris, the white slaves of France had  overthrown the tyrannical yoke of their masters   and were now living in abundance. Although the  French Revolution had protected property, which   included slaves, the underlying principles of  Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité naturally appealed   to the half-million slaves in Saint-Domingue.  Fuelled with these idealistic notions,   a group of slaves led by a priest named Dutty  Boukman gathered at a secret Vodou ceremony in   the woods of Bois Caïman near Cap-Français on  the 21st of August 1791 to plan an insurrection   to eliminate the members of the Colonial Assembly  at Cap-Francais. While their efforts to violently   overthrow the colony’s political elite three  days later, on the 24th of August, failed,   the slave rebels did kill their masters in the  plantations around the port. Thereafter they   rapidly took control of northern Saint-Domingue.  Their success encouraged other slaves to join   their ranks and their numbers swelled from 10,000  at the end of August to 80,000 by November.   Toussaint’s role in the insurrection has been  a source of controversy. By remaining at Bréda   and protecting the Bayon family he seems to  have taken a back seat during its early weeks.   However, Toussaint later claimed to have  been involved from the very beginning,   and there are even suggestions that he  coordinated with Bayon to organise the uprising   behind the scenes as part of a royalist coup  to eliminate the planters seeking independence.   While the slave rebels did initially take up  arms in the name of King Louis XVI of France,   whom they regarded as the protector of their  rights, there is no archival evidence that the   rebellion was a royalist conspiracy. Toussaint did  apparently play a key role from the very start,   since the most prominent leaders of the  uprising such as Dutty Boukman, Jean-François,   and Georges Biassou were all coachmen and would  have been known to him. After Boukman was killed   in combat in November 1791, Jean-François and  Biassou emerged as the leaders of the uprising.   Toussaint initially sought to remain in the  shadows, giving him the freedom to mediate   between the white masters and the black slaves  should the opportunity arise. In October 1791,   after ensuring the safety of his own family and  that of his employer, Bayon de Libertat, Toussaint   left Bréda and formally joined the uprising,  serving as an advisor to Georges Biassou under   the title ‘General Doctor’. This was owing to his  reputation as a healer. During the early months of   the uprising, the rebels proved that they could  hold their ground against the white militia,   but struggled to expand their control beyond  the north of the colony. Their destruction of   the plantations had also led to food shortages and  in December the rebel leaders offered to negotiate   with the three civil commissioners who had just  arrived from Paris. Their relatively modest   demands were for the amnesty of 300 rebel leaders,  the abolition of the use of the whip against   slaves, and three days of freedom each week. When  the offer was rejected by the Colonial Assembly,   an infuriated Biassou threatened to execute all  of the white hostages, Toussaint persuaded him not   only to spare them, but to pardon them the next  day. Despite this demonstration of magnanimity,   the failed peace negotiations convinced Toussaint  that there was no choice but to continue the   struggle for general emancipation to the bitter  end through full scale war and revolution. When   the colonial authorities offered an amnesty  for free people of colour in spring 1792,   Toussaint rejected the offer and instead  reinvented himself as a revolutionary leader. He   received military instruction from a former white  officer from Cap-Français and a black officer who   had served in the colonial militia. By mid-1792  he had trained a loyal body of 500 to 600 men   while remaining under Biassou’s nominal command. In July 1792, the rebel leaders wrote a defiant   letter to the colonial assembly accusing them of  betraying the ideals of the French Revolution.   While Toussaint’s name was absent among the  signatories, he may have been its author. At   the time, the revolution was still being driven by  moderates in Paris who were unwilling to abolish   slavery, but following the storming of the  Tuileries Palace on the 10th of August that   late summer, the radical Jacobin faction gained  control of the political agenda. The monarchy was   abolished, and Louis XVI was executed in January  1793. The political upheavals encouraged France’s   European colonial rivals, primarily Britain and  Spain, to take advantage of the revolutionary   disturbances in Saint-Domingue. While the  British sought to take control of the colony   by forming an alliance with the planters, the  Spanish provided support to the slave rebels as   part of their plans to regain full control of the  island. In early 1793, Toussaint began negotiating   an alliance with the Spanish, and by June 1793  Jean-François and Biassou were given the rank   of lieutenant general in the king of Spain’s  army, while Toussaint was named colonel and   later promoted to general. His reputation for  fairness attracted thousands of new recruits,   bringing his independent command to 4,000 men.  The Spanish alliance strengthened the rebel forces   and threatened the French at Cap-Français. In  response, the French commissioners Léger-Félicité   Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel promised to grant  freedom to all slaves who joined the fight against   Spain. The announcement on the 20th of June led to  hostilities in Cap-Français between the Frenchmen   who supported the commissioners and the planters  who were determined to defend slavery. During a   three-day battle, the port was destroyed, up to  10,000 people were killed, and the commissioners   emerged victorious following intervention  by the slave insurgents in their favour.   However, as a sign of his increasing confidence,  Toussaint rejected Sonthonax’s offer and affirmed   his loyalty to the king of Spain while  denouncing the Republicans’ hypocrisy   and the execution of King Louis XVI. He, like  many of the black insurgents in Saint-Domingue,   instinctively favoured monarchy over republicanism  due to African political traditions. In August,   Toussaint adopted the surname Louverture, meaning  ‘the opening’, which may refer to the opening   of a revolutionary path or his ability to break  enemy lines in battle. In increasing desperation,   while perhaps acting according to his genuine  political convictions, Sonthonax announced the   end of slavery in northern Saint-Domingue on  the 29th of August. However, he saw freedom as   a gift of the French Republican government and  believed that while the slaves were to be given   political rights, they would have to return  to work on the plantations. The proclamation   encouraged a number of rebels to defect from the  Spanish to the French, but Toussaint continued   to view Sonthonax with suspicion and remained  in Spanish uniform. Meanwhile, a British force   of 600 men landed in southern Saint-Domingue in  September to make common cause with the white   planters. They gradually took over several ports  on the west coast. The presence of British ships   in the Caribbean failed to prevent a French ship  carrying a multiracial delegation to convey news   of Sonthonax’s proclamation to Paris. On the  4th of February 1794, the National Convention   in France ratified the proclamation and even  abolished slavery across all of France’s colonies,   granting citizenship to all French subjects  regardless of race. The further radicalisation   of politics in France had a profound effect on  Saint-Domingue, where the island was divided   between the British in the south and west, and the  French and Spanish in the north. Spanish regular   forces were reluctant to take the offensive and  relied on the slave rebels to do much of the   fighting, but the black forces were themselves  crippled by bitter infighting, as Biassou   raided Louverture’s supplies in early 1794. By May 1794, Toussaint Louverture and his 4,000   men controlled a substantial part of northwestern  Saint-Domingue from his headquarters at Gonaïves.   The disagreements with Biassou and reports of  white planters beating slaves in plantations   under Spanish protection led Toussaint to question  his allegiance to the Spanish. On the 5th of May,   after discussions with the French general, Etienne  Laveux, he made the fateful decision to defect to   the French, raising the Republican tricolour  at Gonaïves. Shortly afterwards he defeated   his former comrades-in-arms in Spanish uniform  to consolidate his control of the northwest.   Sonthonax and Polverel welcomed Louverture’s  defection, but they were soon recalled to Paris   to answer charges from the exiled planters,  leaving Laveux as governor to face the British   and Spanish without the prospect of reinforcements  from France. This meant that Louverture’s army was   the key to the cause of French Republicanism  on the island. He soon proved his worth by   pushing back the Spanish positions in the east.  Toussaint was a charismatic military leader who   always led from the front. For instance, in  July 1794 he spearheaded an attack against   Jean-François’ position at Dondon, reporting that  the enemy commander escaped with, quote, “only his   shirt and his trousers.” With talented officers  under his command such as Henri Christophe, his   adopted nephew Hyacinthe Moïse, and Jean-Jacques  Dessalines, Louverture defeated Jean-François   again in December 1794 to take control of  the Grande-Rivière to the east of Dondon. In   another demonstration of his military prowess, he  defeated a renowned white creole army by leading   his cavalry in a frontal assault to distract the  enemy while his two infantry columns manoeuvred   around the flanks of the highway supported  by murderous artillery fire. In October 1795,   Louverture and Moïse combined to defeat a Spanish  counter-offensive by Jean-François and Biassou.   Back in Europe, the Spanish had already signed  the Treaty of Basel with France in July 1795,   and the two black leaders soon went into exile. After the French and Spanish made peace,   Louverture turned his attention to the British,  laying siege to the British garrison at the port   of Saint-Marc. The beleaguered British military  presence on the island, which had been much   reduced by an outbreak of yellow fever, received  substantial reinforcements in early 1796. Now   equipped with a large light cavalry force and  having recruited some 7,000 black infantrymen,   the British were poised to take over the island  and Louverture had to withdraw and adopt a   scorched earth strategy. While the British could  not be dislodged from well-fortified positions   such as Saint-Marc, they were not equipped  to fight a guerilla war. Moreover, Toussaint   had a reputation for moving swiftly and appearing  where the British did not expect him. Furthermore,   the crippling attrition from disease led many  British soldiers on the ground to conclude that   the war could not be won and that they had no  business on Hispaniola. Conversely, Louverture’s   victories against foreign enemies won the  admiration of the French Republican authorities,   and in March 1796 he marched into Cap-Français to  put down an insurrection by mulattoes who briefly   captured Laveux and appointed General Jean-Louis  Vilatte as governor. On the 1st of April 1796,   a grateful Laveux named Toussaint as deputy  governor and labelled him the “black Spartacus”   in reference to the Roman gladiatorial slave  leader, a nickname which Louverture was proud to   accept. Louverture admired Laveux’s commitment to  the cause of emancipation and Laveux trusted him   to issue proclamations on his behalf. However,  the fall of the Jacobins in Paris in July 1794   strengthened pro-slavery opinion in France  once again. In response Louverture encouraged   Laveux to stand for election to the legislative  assembly. Both Laveux and Sonthonax were elected,   and while the former left for France in  October, the latter remained on the island.   Laveux’s departure left Louverture as the  senior general in the French Republican   army on Hispaniola. His appointment as  general-in-chief was formalised several   months later. He was determined to expel the  British from Saint-Domingue and reunite the colony   under French control. At a time when General  Napoleon Bonaparte was gaining a reputation   in northern Italy for his quick marches, which  allowed him to gain local superiority over his   Austrian foes before the latter had time to summon  reinforcements, Louverture’s ability to traverse   mountainous territory in the shortest amount  of time, on one occasion covering 64 kilometres   of mountainous terrain in a single day, was  already well known to the British. In June 1797,   Louverture took advantage of the absence of the  main British army to capture several forts around   Saint-Marc, effectively employing his artillery  to breach their walls. While Louverture’s men were   unable to dislodge the British from Saint-Marc  itself, the war had taken a devastating toll   on the British forces on the island. Out of some  20,000 British soldiers sent to Saint-Domingue,   over 12,000 perished, mostly of disease. The  remainder were holed up in a few forts dotted   around the western coast. In early 1798, Thomas  Maitland, who had recently taken command of the   British forces on the island, decided to seek  negotiations with Louverture. Under an agreement   signed on the 30th of April 1798, Louverture  secured the British evacuation of Saint-Marc   and Port-au-Prince in return for a general  amnesty for French counterrevolutionaries.   Further agreements in August paved the way for the  departure of the remainder of the British troops.   Louverture’s success in expelling the British  through his military and diplomatic efforts were   welcomed by the French, but his enhanced stature  and prestige caused anxiety among the French   authorities. Although Sonthonax had appointed  Louverture as general and arranged for his son   Isaac and stepson Placide to receive an education  in mainland France, the two clashed on several   issues, including the return of white planters  who had left Saint-Domingue in the wake of the   slave insurrection. The Republican Sonthonax  regarded the planters as counterrevolutionaries   who had been banned from returning to the island,  while Louverture believed that their return could   reinvigorate Saint-Domingue’s economy, which had  been devastated by war. When Louverture arranged   for the return of his former employer, Bayon de  Libertat, in July 1797, Sonthonax reminded him   that aiding the return of an émigré was illegal.  Louverture responded by sending Sonthonax a   letter signed by several of his senior generals  suggesting that the colony’s interests would be   better served if he were to return to France. When  Sonthonax’s took the hint, the French Directory   in Paris sent General Joseph d’Hédouville to  Saint-Domingue as a commissioner with orders   to curb Louverture’s powers and develop a civil  bureaucracy as a counterweight to Louverture’s   control of the military. The new commissioner’s  presence from May 1798 did not prevent Louverture   from negotiating with Maitland behind his back to  secure the departure of British forces from the   colony. When Hédouville attempted to replace Moïse  as commander of the Fifth Regiment, it provoked an   uprising among Louverture’s men which resulted in  Dessalines marching on Cap-Français with orders   to arrest the commissioner. Hédouville prudently  decided to leave Saint-Domingue in October 1798,   leaving his powers with André Rigaud, a  mulatto general and Louverture’s rival,   who had established a semi-independent power  base in the south of the colony with a force   of some 8,000 men. Since Louverture had  twice this number under his command,   he was confident that he could prevail and  bring the whole colony under his control.   In September 1798, after negotiating the  British withdrawal from Saint-Domingue,   Louverture wrote to Laveux of the progress he  had made since joining the French Republicans.   He stated, “I found, my dear general and  good friend, the colony dismembered, ruined,   sacked, occupied by the rebels, the émigrés, the  Spanish and the English. I am leaving it peaceful,   purged of its external enemies, pacified, and  advancing towards its restoration.” Louverture’s   achievement had been extraordinary. Within the  space of four years he had defeated the Spanish,   negotiated the withdrawal of the British, and  defeated several factional rivals in the process.   Without any formal military training, Toussaint  Louverture exhibited his mastery of tactical and   operational warfare while leading from the front  and frequently exposing himself to danger in the   heat of battle. Louverture’s concern for the  men under his command and his opposition to   brutal punishments ensured that he had a loyal  army staffed by competent officers whom he could   rely on to execute his orders efficiently. His  extensive experience as a conduit between white   colonists and black slaves also provided him with  the political and diplomatic skills to secure   promises for the liberation he desired, firstly  from the Spanish and later from the French.   While Toussaint was pragmatic and switched his  allegiances during the conflict, his embodiment of   the cause of universal freedom, rather than just  that of white Europeans, provided a sense of moral   clarity that galvanised his men and encouraged  French Republicans to support him. In his letters   to the French Directory in late 1797, Louverture  attacked conservatives who labelled black Haitians   as savages by highlighting the savagery of  colonial slavery, and warned that any efforts to   reimpose slavery upon men who had experienced  freedom would be futile and dangerous.   For all his military success and his rise to  power in Saint-Domingue, Toussaint recognised   that the colony’s economy had been devastated by  war, and sought all the external help he could   get. After making peace with Maitland, Louverture  came to see the British as a plausible commercial   partner at a time when the Royal Navy was  largely in control of the Atlantic Ocean   and the Caribbean Sea. Although he continued  to recognise nominal French sovereignty, and   France was still at war with Britain, Louverture  pursued an independent trade policy by negotiating   a secret treaty to lift the British naval blockade  on Saint-Domingue in return for a commitment not   to stir up trouble in the British colonies of the  Caribbean. Although news of the treaty was broken   by the London press in December 1798, there  was little the Directory could do in Paris,   and Hédouville’s replacement as commissioner,  Philippe Roume, was effectively reduced to a   ceremonial figurehead. Louverture was emboldened  to negotiate with the United States of America,   which was then engaged in the undeclared Quasi-War  with France at sea. Unlike his predecessor George   Washington and successor Thomas Jefferson, both  of whom were slaveholders from Virginia, President   John Adams was a northerner from Massachusetts  who opposed slavery and appreciated the commercial   opportunities offered by the resumption of  trade with Saint-Domingue. After Louverture   promised that American ships would be protected in  Haitian ports, the US Congress passed legislation   to restore bilateral trade in early 1799.  Louverture then secured the right to buy guns   and ammunition from American traders. Although  he had refused demands by both the British and   the Americans to repudiate his colonial ties  to France and declare outright independence,   Louverture did fulfil his promise to help the  British keep order in the Caribbean by informing   them of a plot by Isaac Sasportas, a Sephardic  Jew of Portuguese descent from Saint-Domingue, to   foment an uprising in Jamaica supported by 4,000  French soldiers from Saint-Domingue. Louverture’s   information led the British colonial authorities  to arrest and execute Sasportas in December 1799.   Louverture’s commercial agreements with the  British and Americans caused alarm in Paris,   and the Directory believed that sooner or later  the rich sugar colony would slip away from French   control. The Directory’s solution, as implemented  by Hédouville before returning to France, was to   stir up hostility between Toussaint and Rigaud.  After a period of uneasy coexistence, Louverture   now concluded that he could no longer allow  Rigaud to remain in control of the ports in the   south and the west, since it risked the landing  of a French expeditionary force joining up with   Rigaud to overthrow Louverture’s government. In an  increasingly bitter racial conflict between black   and mulatto armies, Rigaud accused Louverture of  secretly conspiring with the British to restore   slavery to Saint-Domingue, while Louverture  likewise accused Rigaud of seeking to bring back   slavery with the aid of French conservatives. The  mulatto general took the initiative in June 1799   by seizing the coastal town of Petit-Goâve on the  southern peninsula. This encouraged the talented   mulatto cavalry commander Alexandre Pétion to  defect from Louverture and rally to Rigaud. A   series of revolts in the north and west compelled  Louverture to move north to put them down, and he   dispatched Dessalines to deal with Rigaud in the  south. During this period Louverture survived two   separate assassination attempts that resulted  in the killing of his physician and coachman   respectively. He blamed Rigaud for attempting  to assassinate him. Louverture regained the   initiative by requesting a US naval blockade  of key ports under Rigaud’s control, while   Dessalines was largely left to his own devices and  prosecuted a ruthlessly efficient campaign against   the mulattoes. Contemporary accounts indicate that  up to 10,000 mulatto soldiers and civilians were   killed by Dessalines’ men, though these figures  were possibly hugely exaggerated to inflate   Dessalines’ supposed military prowess. While the  so-called War of the South was underway, General   Bonaparte seized power as First Consul in Paris  in November 1799 and quickly sought to reintroduce   special laws in the colonies. While Bonaparte’s  objective was to exploit the colony for its   wealth, he recognised that Louverture was still in  control of much of Saint-Domingue and stated that   the new laws would not infringe on the liberty of  the black population. Not long after Bonaparte’s   commissioners arrived at Saint-Domingue to confirm  Louverture as general-in-chief in June 1800,   Rigaud left for the French colony of  Guadeloupe in the eastern Caribbean.   By July 1800, Louverture was in undisputed control  of the whole of Saint-Domingue and could devote   more attention to the economic revival of the  colony. When Louverture invited the white planters   to return to their plantations they found that  their former slaves were unwilling to work for   them and had begun cultivating their own small  plots of land. After emancipating the slaves,   Sonthonax and Polverel still required them to  work the land, and although they were now paid   a small wage and worked fewer hours, their  freedom was limited and they were subject   to fines and imprisonment if they refused to  work. Louverture adopted a similar approach   as governor of Saint-Domingue, investing in his  own plantations, and he urged workers to respect   private property and to work hard, rebuking those  who refused to do so. For many plantation workers,   little had changed, and there were occasional  rebellions against Louverture’s rule. Louverture’s   prestige and reputation among the black population  allowed him to convince the rebels to stand down,   by persuading them that they could only  guarantee their freedom if they showed   that they were capable of abiding by the laws  which obliged them to work, however, there was   little he could offer when they complained of  poor treatment by white managers. Toussaint’s   rule did bring genuine racial equality to the  cities, where he re-established theatres with   black and white actors sharing the same stage, but  this was the experience of a small minority.   The withdrawal of the British in 1798 and  Rigaud’s departure in 1800 reduced Toussaint’s   manpower requirements. Thousands of men who had  taken up arms and risked life and limb for the   cause of freedom under Louverture’s command  were now required to work on the plantations.   While the army continued to be prepared for  a foreign invasion, Toussaint also employed   it to enforce his work directives, leading to  increased resentment among the labourers and   increased confidence among the returned émigrés.  In 1801, Louverture introduced restrictions on   black farmers’ ability to buy small plots of land,  crystallising inequalities between a small number   of wealthy landowners and the mass of landless  workers. Toussaint’s economic philosophy and   his desire to revive the colony’s productive  potential undermined the political ideals he   championed on his path to power and alienated his  natural supporters. Meanwhile, in January 1801   Louverture further consolidated his position by  ordering his adopted nephew Moïse to invade Santo   Domingo. Although the Spanish colony had been  formally ceded to France under the terms of the   1795 Treaty of Basel, it remained largely under  Spanish administration, but Moïse’s 10,000 men met   little resistance and took over the entire colony  within a month, leaving Toussaint in control of   the whole island of Hispaniola. By doing so,  Louverture had acted against instructions   from Bonaparte and the French authorities on  the island, who feared his increasing power.   Louverture then moved to formalise his power by  convening an assembly in early February 1801 to   formulate a constitution for Saint-Domingue. The  members of this body included white planters and   free mulattoes, but no former slaves apart from  Toussaint himself. When the constitution was   promulgated in June 1801, Article 3 confirmed the  abolition of slavery, but Article 14 codified the   continuation of the new plantation economy.  Article 6 banned the public observance of   any faith other than Roman Catholicism, a step  backwards from the religious freedom in France.   The Haitian constitution of 1801 also concentrated  power in the hands of the Governor, who had the   power to propose legislation for consideration  of the Central Assembly of Saint-Domingue. The   members of this new legislative body would  initially be appointed by the Governor,   subject to election every two years. The  constitution explicitly stated that Louverture   was to be the first Governor, and granted him  the right to remain in office for life and to   nominate a successor for a five-year term in the  event of his demise. Other measures prohibited   political gatherings challenging the government  and empowered Toussaint to use the army to   disperse them. The constitution also made little  reference to French sovereignty, except for an   article which gave the Governor the responsibility  of corresponding with metropolitan France. When   Louverture sent the constitution to France in July  1801 seeking Napoleon’s endorsement, he claimed   that, quote, “this constitution was received by  all classes of citizens with transports of joy   that will not fail to be reproduced when it is  sent back bearing the sanction of government.”   This naively optimistic statement was indicative  of Louverture’s increasing detachment from the   people, and in October 1801 he was shocked by a  major uprising involving 6,000 farm labourers who   claimed the support of General Moïse. Louverture  dispatched the loyal Dessalines to crush the   rebels before arresting Moïse and executing him  without trial. Faced with these challenges to   his authority, Louverture doubled down, labelling  those who refused to work as “evil men, thieves   and assassins,” and decreeing that any individuals  making seditious statements against the government   would be brought before a military court to  answer charges, with draconian punishments   including death, six months of hard labour, and  deportation for those found guilty. The former   rebel leader was now an authoritarian ruler. Louverture’s efforts to revive the plantation   economy saw coffee exports return to two-thirds  of their 1789 level, while sugar exports reached   one-third. The improvement in the island’s  economic fortunes came at a significant   political cost to Toussaint and sowed the seeds  for his downfall. Historians note the parallels   between Toussaint’s fate and that of Maximilien  Robespierre, the French Jacobin leader who   owed his rise to power in 1793 to the impoverished  masses only to have them turn on him in 1794 after   he initiated the Terror of the guillotine in  France, leading to an estimated 16,000 deaths.   While Toussaint was within his rights to use  armed force to put down the revolts against him,   his execution of Moïse shocked his supporters and  left him politically isolated. In addition to the   domestic disturbances, Louverture had also angered  Bonaparte back in France with his constitution and   his invasion of Santo Domingo. Bonaparte, who had  previously been ambivalent towards Louverture,   could not tolerate the challenge to his power  and authority by a former slave and vowed to   restore direct French rule on Saint-Domingue.  While Bonaparte’s ability to intervene in   Saint-Domingue had been limited due to the  ongoing war against Britain, a preliminary   peace agreement was made with the British in  September 1801, later confirmed by the Treaty   of Amiens in March 1802. This gave Napoleon a free  hand to launch an expedition to Saint-Domingue now   that the Royal Navy was no longer impeding the  French passage across the Atlantic Ocean.   Many years later, while in exile in Saint-Helena,  Napoleon attributed his ill-fated decision   to invade Saint-Domingue to the colonial  lobby and his wife Josephine, a creole from   the French Caribbean colony of Martinique  who had other interests in the Caribbean.   However, in 1798 Josephine had  requested and secured Toussaint’s   assistance in reviving production on her estates  in Saint-Domingue. As a measure of her gratitude,   she invited Toussaint’s sons Isaac and  Placide to dinner on several occasions.   Bonaparte’s decision to turn on Toussaint  instead appears to have been motivated by   a desire to restore the pre-revolutionary system  of production, with Saint-Domingue as the lynchpin   of a restored North American empire incorporating  the Louisiana territory west of the Mississippi,   which had been ceded by Spain back to France in  1800. Bonaparte assembled a large expeditionary   force of 20,000 men, many of whom had been  suppressing royalist uprisings in France. The   expedition was commanded by General Charles  Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc, who was married to   Napoleon’s sister Pauline. The mulatto generals  Rigaud and Pétion sailed with the expedition, as   did Louverture’s sons Isaac and Placide, who had  been studying in France for several years. They   carried a letter from Bonaparte to their father  assuring him of his peaceful intentions, both as   a means to conceal Bonaparte’s true objectives  to reinstate the pre-revolutionary plantation   economy, and also to secure Toussaint’s submission  to Leclerc through peaceful means. Meanwhile,   Leclerc also carried letters from Bonaparte  promising the black cultivators that he was   there to protect their freedom from Louverture’s  tyranny. After leaving the port of Brest in   December 1801, Leclerc’s expedition appeared off  the coast of Saint-Domingue in late January 1802.   Louverture had expected Bonaparte to take action  and had acquired 30,000 muskets from the United   States to defend the island, but he was shocked  to learn of the size of Leclerc’s expeditionary   force, remarking “We are going to die. The whole  of France has come to Saint-Domingue. She comes   to avenge herself and force the black people  back into slavery.” He hurried to Cap-Français   to support the garrison commander Henri  Christophe and ordered him to resist Leclerc’s   landing on the 2nd of February 1800. After holding Leclerc off for two days,   Christophe evacuated the port city and razed it  to the ground. While Louverture’s rallying cry to   the black labourers whom he had recently alienated  fell on deaf ears, he remained defiant and adopted   a scorched-earth strategy aiming to exhaust the  supplies of the French. Dessalines led a column of   loyal troops to strike at weak and isolated French  units. Nevertheless, around half of Louverture’s   18,000 men had deserted to Leclerc, accepting  French assurances not to reintroduce slavery.   Recognising his strategic weakness, Toussaint was  prepared to negotiate with Leclerc, who was also   seeking a diplomatic solution after being shocked  by the ferocity of the Haitian resistance. Leclerc   therefore dispatched Isaac and Placide and their  tutor Coisnan to Toussaint, where they presented   him with the letter from Napoleon assuring him  of his peaceful intentions and urging him to   work alongside Leclerc to govern the colony.  Louverture understood that his safety could   not be guaranteed if he submitted to an invading  army whose officers included his rivals Rigaud and   Pétion and refused the offer, though he gave his  sons a free choice of allegiance. Isaac sided with   Leclerc but was persuaded by his mother to remain  at home, while Placide declared for his father   and was given command of a guards battalion. After  receiving reinforcements on the 17th of February,   Leclerc expanded his offensive and attempted  to trap Louverture in a pincer movement. A   week later Louverture ambushed a French column  commanded by General Rochambeau, whose father had   been an essential ally to George Washington  at Yorktown more than two decades earlier.   The battle of Ravine-à-Couleuvres ensued, with  Louverture leading from the front to attack the   French. While Rochambeau managed to fend off the  attack and estimates of manpower and casualties   on each side differ considerably, the casualties  inflicted on the French galvanised Louverture to   continue the fight. A more significant engagement  took place in March at the fort of Crête-à-Pierrot   on the Artibonite River near Saint-Marc, where  Dessalines’ garrison of 1,200 men held off a   much larger number of French besiegers for three  weeks. Although Dessalines abandoned the fort on   the 24th of March, he had killed over 2,000  Frenchmen. Louverture gained in confidence   following Dessalines’ tenacious resistance and  encouraged black uprisings behind enemy lines.   Dessalines’ heroics at Crête-à-Pierrot  failed to prevent the defection of several   key subordinates and in early May Henri Christophe  surrendered and joined Leclerc. From late April,   Louverture had been considering the prospect of  his own surrender, and agreed to do so in return   for a guarantee of freedom and for the men of his  army to be integrated into the French command and   to retain their ranks. Louverture made peace with  Leclerc at Cap-Français on the 7th of May 1802,   securing most of his negotiating objectives  including an amnesty for himself and his   leading generals. After learning of  Louverture’s negotiations with Leclerc,   Dessalines also submitted to Leclerc, though  criticised Louverture for giving up the fight.   Louverture refused to help Leclerc restore  order and retired to his estate at Ennery.   The French commander continued to see him as  a threat and instructed General Jean-Baptiste   Brunet to send Louverture a letter inviting  him to consultations at his headquarters.   Despite warnings from supporters that he risked  arrest, Louverture agreed to meet Brunet with a   small bodyguard on the 7th of June. After the two  men exchanged pleasantries, a body of grenadiers   stormed into the room and arrested Louverture.  Toussaint had unwittingly walked into the trap   driven by a sense of his own infallibility,  though other historians argue that Louverture   willingly sacrificed himself, recognising  his decisions had compromised his cause and   anticipating that one of his protégés would assume  the leadership of the revolution in his stead.   After arranging for the arrest of Louverture’s  family and close associates, Brunet placed   them onto a ship to take them to France. As he  stepped on board, Louverture warned the Frenchmen,   “In overthrowing me you have cut down in  Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree   of liberty; it will spring up again from the  roots, for they are numerous and they are deep.”   After crossing the Atlantic on the French ship  Héros, the Haitian captives arrived at the   port of Brest in early July. In a mirror of the  slave ships that sailed across the Atlantic in   the opposite direction, Toussaint was separated  from his family and would never see them again.   He was imprisoned for a month before being  transferred to the Fort de Joux in the Jura   mountains in eastern France, a location as far  from the sea as possible to prevent him from   escaping and boarding a ship back home. Upon his  arrival Louverture was placed in a damp cell and   deprived of his personal possessions, though he  managed to write a short memoir justifying his   conduct in Saint-Domingue, particularly after  Leclerc’s landing in February 1802. Louverture   also expressed his anxieties about the fate of  his family and ended the document with a plea for   Napoleon to show him mercy. This initial plea, and  two other letters addressed to Bonaparte in the   same vein, went unanswered by the First Consul.  Instead Toussaint’s health declined in prison,   his captor refused to send for medical assistance,  and he died there on the 7th of April 1803.   While Louverture was languishing in prison during  his final months, the situation in Saint-Domingue   was changing dramatically. News of the  reimposition of slavery in the Caribbean islands   of Martinique and Guadeloupe led the Haitians  to doubt Leclerc’s sincerity. Alexandre Pétion   turned against him, and Christophe and Dessalines  soon followed suit. As Louverture had anticipated,   the French expeditionary force was being crippled  by yellow fever, like the British before them,   and Leclerc himself succumbed from the  disease in November 1802. His successor,   General Rochambeau, unleashed brutal reprisals  against the population, which only encouraged   further defiance. After the shocking news of  Louverture’s death reached Saint-Domingue,   Dessalines emerged as the new leader of the  Haitian Revolution. Unlike Louverture, who was   unwilling to cut ties with France, Dessalines  was prepared not only to seek independence   from France but to eliminate the white population  entirely. He sought an alliance with the mulattoes   against the French and symbolically removed the  white band from the French tricolour to create   a red and blue flag. The renewal of hostilities  between France and Britain in May 1803 led to a   fresh British blockade of Saint-Domingue that  once again prevented the French from reaching   the colony. In response Napoleon gave up on  his North American and Caribbean ambitions.   He sold the Louisiana territory to the United  States in April 1803 and largely accepted that   Haiti would fall out of French control. By the  end of October, Dessalines controlled most of   Saint-Domingue, and on the 18th of November  he defeated Rochambeau at the Battle of   Vertières near Cap-Français, leading to the French  evacuation of the island. On New Year’s Day 1804,   Dessalines formally declared independence from  France and adopted the name Haiti for the new   state, the first post-colonial, black-dominated  country in the Americas. However, the disorder   in Haiti continued for decades. Infamously,  Dessalines ordered the mass slaughter of up   to 7000 predominantly white French Colonists a  genocidal act which many consider to be even more   egregious than the slave trade itself. Although  Louverture is criticised by some for tolerating   the population of the white French colonists  during his rule, it is almost certain that he   would not have permitted such a massacre of men,  women and children to occur during his leadership.   After being crowned Emperor Jacques I in October  1804 at Cap-Haitien, renamed from Cap-Français,   Dessalines followed in Louverture’s footsteps  in reintroducing the plantation economy and   was assassinated in a coup orchestrated by  Christophe and Pétion, who partitioned the   country between north and south. Haiti was not  reunified until Christophe’s death in 1820.   Celebrated as the only successful slave revolution  in history, the Haitian Revolution has inspired   colonised peoples to rebel against their  colonisers over the last two centuries. While   Jean-François, Biassou, Sonthonax, Laveux,  Dessalines, Moïse, Christophe, and Pétion   each played their part, the Haitian Revolution is  associated above all with the person of Toussaint   Louverture. Born around 1743 in Saint-Domingue to  an enslaved aristocratic family from west Africa,   Toussaint had the fortune of becoming a  well-educated and highly literate individual   who was trusted by his white masters and respected  as a figure of authority by the black workers.   Although he had been liberated by master Bayon in  his early 30s, Toussaint lived comfortably at the   Bréda plantation with his enslaved family during  the 1780s. When the slave uprising broke out in   1791, Toussaint emerged as one of its leaders,  switching his allegiance first to Spain and then   to Republican France in the name of universal  liberty. Although he had no military training,   Toussaint was an effective general, leading his  men to victory against the Spanish and British by   1798. His political and military abilities enabled  him to sideline his nominal French masters and   restore diplomatic relations with Britain and the  United States. His partial success in reviving the   colony’s economic prospects with draconian  methods came at the cost of alienating his   natural supporters, leaving him short of allies  when Bonaparte dispatched Leclerc to remove   him from power. While Toussaint was to die in  captivity thousands of miles away, his followers,   Christophe and Dessalines, eventually defeated the  French army and secured full Haitian independence.   Although widely hailed as a military genius and  visionary statesman who paved the way for Haitian   independence and gave his life for the cause of  universal freedom, Louverture was a controversial   figure. Critics argue that he turned his back  on his black brethren after assuming power by   re-establishing the exploitative plantation  economy and ruthlessly suppressing uprisings   against his rule, while others argue that  throughout his career Toussaint was a ruthless   pragmatist who was not driven by any ideological  principles but by his own personal thirst for   power. Perhaps he was all of these things at the  same time. What is unquestionable is that the   Haitian Revolution would not have played out in  the way which it did without his leadership.   What do you think of Toussaint Louverture? Was  he a revolutionary hero who embodied the cause of   freedom and skilfully exploited rivalries between  European colonial powers to advance his cause,   or was he an unprincipled politician  who craved power for himself and   ultimately betrayed the Haitian Revolution  that he led? Please let us know in the   comment section and in the meantime,  thank you very much for watching.