brutality. C. L. R. James describes it in his masterpiece, The Black Jacobins:
Whipping was interrupted in order to pass a piece of hot wood on the buttocks of the victim; salt, pepper, citron, cinders, aloes, and hot ashes were poured on the bleeding wounds. Mutilations were common, limbs, ears and sometimes the private parts, to deprive them of the pleasures which they could indulge in without expense. Their masters poured burning wax on their arms and hands and shoulders, emptied the boiling cane sugar over their heads, burned them alive, roasted them on slow fires, filled them with gunpowder and blew them up with a match; buried them up to the neck and smeared their heads with sugar that the flies might devour them.
This torturous environment led to a predictably abject and suspicious culture. Black slaves and mulattoes hated each other. The man of color who was nearly white despised the man of color who was half white, who in turn despised the man of color who was a quarter white, and so on.
What’s more, the military power poised to crush any rebellion was enormous. Saint-Domingue provided a third of the world’s sugar and half of its coffee; it was the most profitable colony in the world, and therefore of massive strategic interest. Every empire wanted to control it.
So no, this environment was not ideal for rebellion.
Louverture’s rebellion was no mere slave revolt, but a much more complex disruption premised on meticulous military strategy and aimed at lasting change. Considered a genius even by his enemies, Louverture was able to blend the best, most useful elements from slave culture and from the colonial European culture that had enslaved him—and to mix in his own brilliant cultural insights. The resulting hybrid culture inspired a ferocious army, a cunning diplomacy, and a farsighted perspective on economics and governance.
WHO WAS TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE?
Louverture was born into slavery on the Bréda estate sugar plantation in Saint-Domingue in, we think, 1743. Much of his personal history is fragmentary and uncertain—no one bothered to keep detailed records about obscure slaves. Historians also disagree about many of the turning points in the country’s revolution, agreeing only that its leader was an extraordinary man.
As a child, Louverture was so frail his parents called him “Sickly Stick” and did not expect him to live. Yet by age twelve, he had surpassed all the boys on the plantation with his athletic feats. In time he became known as the colony’s greatest horseman. Even as he neared sixty, he often rode 125 miles in a day.
Louverture was just five feet two and by no means handsome. Laconic, with a stern, probing glance, he was immensely energetic and focused. He slept two hours a night and could live for days on a few bananas and a glass of water. His education, position, and character gave him tremendous prestige among his fellow slaves long before the revolution. He never doubted that his destiny was to be their leader.
While still a teenager, he was made caretaker of the estate’s mules and oxen—a post usually held by a white man. Louverture seized this rare opportunity to educate himself in his free time and to read through his master’s library, including Julius Caesar’s Commentaries and Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, or History of two Indies, an encyclopedic account of trade between Europe and the Far East. Caesar’s work helped him understand politics and the art of war, and Raynal’s gave him a thorough grounding in the economics of the region and of Europe.
But his education and position did not exempt him from the fundamental indignity of being black. One day, as he was returning from Mass carrying his prayer book, a white man took notice. Louverture would recall that the man “broke my head with a wooden stick while telling me ‘do you not know that a negro should not read?’” Louverture apologized and stumbled home. He kept the vest soaked with his blood as a reminder of the incident. Years later, after the rebellion began, he met his tormenter again and, his biographer Philippe Girard writes with satisfaction, “killed him on the spot.”
The estate’s attorney, François Bayon de Libertat, recognized Louverture’s abilities and made him coachman. Around 1776, he freed Louverture; Louverture was now paid to drive Libertat’s coach. At the time, fewer than one in a thousand black men were set free. The father of the Haitian Revolution earned his freedom by forming a special bond with a white man.
Louverture used every carriage ride with Libertat to expand his network, making contact with nearly all of his future allies. The rides also enabled him first to understand, and then to master, French colonial ways. Louverture gradually came to a realization that no one else in colonial Saint-Domingue had arrived at: culture, not color, determined behavior.
One astonishing demonstration of this truth was that after he’d been freed, Louverture purchased slaves, usually to free them in turn. But he also strove to get ahead in the colonial manner, the only manner available to him at that point: off of slave labor. In 1779, in a brief and unsuccessful attempt to make money, he leased a coffee plantation worked by thirteen slaves. One of them was Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who in later years would become his second in command—and then go on to betray him.
If there was a motivational trigger for Louverture to turn from commerce to statecraft, perhaps it came in 1784, when he read a famous passage written by Abbé Raynal, a proponent of liberty who hoped for a slave revolt: “A courageous chief only is wanted. Where is he, that great man whom Nature owes to her vexed, oppressed, and tormented children? Where is he?” According to one account, Louverture read this passage over and over, dreaming that he might be that courageous chief.
LOUVERTURE’S RISE
Once news of the French Revolution of 1789 reached the island, insurrection was in the air. The initial rebellion on the Manquets plantation in 1791 stirred up slaves on the surrounding plantations, and within a few years the insurrectionary force grew to fifty thousand men, one hundred times the size of the largest slave revolt in U.S. history.
Louverture had known of and perhaps helped shape plans for the uprising, but he waited to see how it would go, only joining in a month after it began. The colony’s political situation was extremely complicated, with numerous factions, parties, and shifting alliances, and it was unclear what would happen on your plantation next week, let alone to the whole island over time.
When Louverture joined the rebels he was about forty-seven and already known as “Old Toussaint.” Within a few months he had appointed himself brigadier general and was leading one of the three chief rebel groups. To build support, Louverture implied that he was acting on behalf of the French king, Louis XVI, who, he said, had issued him a document promising the rebels three days of rest a week in exchange for their efforts. He was able to pull off this ruse because almost none of his followers could read and write.
Between 1791 and 1793, he and the rebels made such progress that France dispatched eleven thousand troops to hold them back—more than the nation sent abroad during the U.S. War of Independence.
After Louis XVI was guillotined in Paris in 1793, the British and Spanish invaded Saint-Domingue, each hoping to seize the prize while France was preoccupied. Once Spain declared war on France, Louverture went to the Spanish commander and offered to integrate his six hundred men into the Spanish army, which other rebellious slave groups were also joining. And so Louverture became a colonel in the Spanish army, fighting the French.
The following year, seeing an advantage for himself and his troops, Louverture defected to the French army. Within a year, he and his men, now five thousand strong, had retaken almost all of the French towns he had just conquered for Spain, and subdued several rebel groups still allied with the Spanish. These victories, in concert with military setbacks in Europe,
