Toussaint L'Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines: The History and Legacy of the Haitian Revolution’s Most Famous Leaders

Table of contents :
Toussaint L'Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines: The History and Legacy of the Haitian Revolution’s Most Famous Leaders
About Charles River Editors
Introduction
Columbus and the Spanish Empire
Colonial Haiti
Toussaint L’Ouverture
The Start of the Revolution
The Emergence of Revolutionary Leaders
A New Chapter
Haiti
Different Legacies
Online Resources
Further Reading
Free Books by Charles River Editors
Discounted Books by Charles River Editors

Citation preview

Toussaint L'Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines: The History and Legacy of the Haitian Revolution’s Most Famous Leaders By Charles River Editors

A 19h century painting of Toussaint L'Ouverture

About Charles River Editors

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Introduction

Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson’s painting of Jean-Baptiste Belley “I was born a slave, but nature gave me a soul of a free man…” - Toussaint L'Ouverture The island of Hispaniola is the second largest island in the Antilles chain behind Cuba, and host to the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Haiti, however, covering the western third of the island, is a French-speaking territory while the Dominican Republic, which occupies the other two thirds, is a Spanish-speaking territory. The Dominican Republic, although classified as a developing nation, has never been struck to the same degree by the malaise of poverty, corruption of its neighbor, languishing in the lower ten percent of nations ahead only of some of the most conspicuous failed states in Africa. Many historians and analysts have posed the question of why, and the answer seems to lie in Haiti’s uniquely tortured history.

Hispaniola entered the European record in 1492 when Christopher Columbus made landfall on its southern shore during his first trans-Atlantic voyage, and he named his discovery in honor of the Spanish Crown that had funded and sponsored the voyage. Leaving the crew of the wrecked Santa Maria on the island, he returned to Europe, leaving his men to establish the foundations of the settlement of La Navidad and the first beachhead of the European seizure of the Caribbean and the New World. Columbus would revisit the island three times, leading a vanguard of pioneer colonists to commence the exploitation of the New World. The indigenous people of Hispaniola, the Tainos and Arawak, initially greeted the landing with ambivalence, but as more and more of them were enslaved, and as their country was occupied, they entered a period of precipitous decline. Through a combination of disease, the violence associated with enslavement and general assimilation, they had virtually disappeared from the landscape within a century. In the meanwhile, as the Spanish colonists looked around them, searching for a means to exploit this great discovery, and as the occupation spread to the mainland and the interior of South America, the early search for minerals yielded to the establishment of a plantation economy, with an emphasis initially on sugar, and later cotton, coffee, indigo and other crops. Thus, even by the 16th century, slaves were being imported to Hispaniola, and over the next few centuries, the population of African slaves came to represent a sizable majority of the population there. This would set the stage for one of history’s most unique revolutions, which makes it somewhat fitting that the two men at the forefront of the Haitian Revolution offered stark contrasts when compared with each other. Toussaint L'Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines: The History and Legacy of the Haitian Revolution’s Most Famous Leaders chronicles how the only successful slave uprising came about and examines the backgrounds of the men who led it. Along with pictures and a bibliography, you will learn about the two leaders and the revolution like never before.

Toussaint L'Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines: The History and Legacy of the Haitian Revolution’s Most Famous Leaders About Charles River Editors Introduction Columbus and the Spanish Empire Colonial Haiti Toussaint L’Ouverture The Start of the Revolution The Emergence of Revolutionary Leaders A New Chapter Haiti Different Legacies Online Resources Further Reading Free Books by Charles River Editors Discounted Books by Charles River Editors

Columbus and the Spanish Empire We are black, it is true, but tell us, gentle men, you who are so judicious, what is the law that says that the black man must belong to and be the property of the white man?” – Toussaint L'Ouverture

Columbus Lands in the New World, by L. Prang (1893) “As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts.” – Christopher Columbus Christopher Columbus’ enterprise of sailing to the Indies emerged directly out of the cultural and economic environment he discovered in Lisbon, Portugal as a young man. As John Noble Wilford has observed, “Ideas do not emerge in a vacuum. Even a man of his intuition, zeal, and selfassurance could not have conceived of such a scheme in a time much earlier or a place much different from Portugal in the late fifteenth century”. Columbus’ previous world had been that of the richly diverse but limited and fully charted Mediterranean; his world now was that of a country deeply engaged in exploration and expansion.

Since the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans heavily cut off European access to Asia via land, Portugal had begun to exploit its position at the edge of the Atlantic to set out to largely unmapped territories in search of new routes, new resources, and ultimately, a new path to the East that would circumvent the Ottoman blockade. But even prior to conceiving that goal, the Portuguese had been at the vanguard of oceanic exploration, and by the 1420s had already arrived at and established settlements on the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Azores. The intellectual architect of Portuguese exploration was Prince Henry the Navigator, who was motivated by religious zeal to send expeditions down the Atlantic coast of Africa, initially hoping to check Muslim power on the continent and make contact with Prester John, a legendary Christian king in Africa (the legend was probably a garbled version of the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia). In the decades prior to Columbus’s arrival in Lisbon, Portuguese expeditions had pushed farther and farther southward down the West African coast, opening up new trade in gold, ivory, and African slaves along the way. By the 1450s, the goal of circumnavigating Africa to reach Asia had been conceived. Furthermore, the Portuguese were being strongly encouraged by the Catholic Church. In the 1450s, the Pope issued papal bulls promising Portugal that at least among Catholic nations, Portugal would be given a trade monopoly in lands they discovered in Africa south of the Sahara. That was all the motivation the Portuguese needed: by then, the Portuguese had already sailed to Sierra Leone, on the western coast of Africa about half of the way down the continent. And in 1488, the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias became the first European to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, discovering much to his amazement that the Indian Ocean was connected to the Atlantic Ocean. One of the missions of Dias’ expedition was to sail to India, which was a stated objective despite the fact the Portuguese did not realize they could sail around Africa to Asia. Dias did not reach India, but in 1497, Portugal’s most famous explorer, Vasco da Gama sailed around Cape Good Hope, sailed north up the eastern coast of Africa and then sailed to Calicut, India, arriving in 1498. Columbus would make his name by promoting a different route than that sought by the Portuguese, but the Portuguese explorers and traders had prepared the way for his ideas in several ways. First, the increasing

confidence about long-distance sea travel, based in part on improved nautical technology and cartographical accuracy, made the notion of connecting distant regions by sea far more plausible than it had been even a hundred years earlier. For much of the Middle Ages, it was assumed that any routes connecting Europe and Asia would be land routes. Medieval cartography had always shown the possibility of sea routes, since they showed the three known continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa to be surrounded by a continuous body of water, but sea travel was regarded as far too dangerous and untested. The Portuguese explorations of the 15th century began to make this conviction look like an unfounded prejudice. Just as importantly, he became aware of the work of an Italian geographer based in Florence, Paolo Toscanelli, who on the basis both of recent Portuguese reports and of his prolonged studies of ancient cartography calculated that the shortest route to Asia lay across the Atlantic. Columbus apparently became aware of Toscanelli through the Florentine scientist’s correspondence with a Portuguese acquaintance, Fernão Martins. Columbus himself wrote to Toscanelli in the early 1480s expressing enthusiasm for a westward route to the Indies and soliciting more details. Toscanelli was encouraging in his reply but died soon after writing it, leaving Columbus to continue his calculations on his own.

Toscanelli’s map, which calculated Asia’s position across the Atlantic As Columbus’ discussions with Toscanelli and Toscanelli’s map make clear, the notion that Columbus “discovered that the earth was round” and had trouble finding backers for his enterprise because most of his contemporaries believed he would fall of the edge of the flat earth is one of the most blatant falsehoods of the many myths that have come to surround his biography over the centuries. The spherical shape of the planet had been assumed by educated Europeans for nearly 2,000 years by the time Columbus arrived on the scene, and the groundwork for his enterprise had been laid by generations of geographers who worked with a relatively accurate picture not only of the earth’s shape but of its dimensions. Columbus’ true disagreement with many of his contemporaries had to do with a different question: the true circumference of the spherical earth, and the relative amount of its surface covered by land and by water. Different geographers and cosmographers had come to different conclusions, even though the Greek astronomer Eratosthenes had in fact calculated the earth’s circumference quite accurately in the 3rd century BCE. In addition to the lack of empirical verification through circumnavigation, Eratosthenes’s estimate had failed to become the consensus position because of confusion

over the different systems and units of measurement used successively by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and medieval Christians. Such confusion contributed to Columbus’ calculation of a much shorter distance between the western tip of Europe and the eastern tip of Asia: when reading the estimates of medieval Arab cartographers, he took them to support the much smaller figure, when in fact they were simply working with a longer unit of measurement. Thus, the experts who ridiculed Columbus, far from being ignorant flat-earthers, were actually working from highly accurate measurements and had good reason to believe that Columbus’s expedition would run out of water and supplies before reaching Asia. They only lacked one important piece of information: there was another land mass between Europe and Asia. This fact would both foil Columbus’ initial goal of reaching Asia and ultimately place a different set of tasks before him. It was only natural that Columbus would first present his proposal to the Portuguese monarchy, which had sponsored so much exploration over the previous decades and had been reaping increasing rewards from their African trade routes. He did so for the first time in 1485, and after an initial rejection, returned with a second proposal in 1488, which met with an even more definitive rejection. In addition to the skepticism of King John II’s official advisers, who correctly argued that Columbus’s estimate of the distance to Asia was far too short, his plan was in competition with an alternative proposed route that would pass around the southern tip of Africa. This was clearly the safer option, and once the Portuguese navigator Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached the Indian Ocean in 1488, Columbus’s hopes for Portuguese support were dashed. As it turned out, Columbus chose an auspicious moment to make his proposal to the so-called Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella. The two had married in 1469, uniting several previously separate kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula, most importantly the large kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. In the meantime, they had set out to reunite the peninsula under a fervently Catholic monarchy, which involved ridding their territories of non-Christian subjects. These efforts would come to a head in 1492 with the conquest of the southern kingdom of Granada from its Muslim rulers and the expulsion of all Jews who refused to accept baptism.

It was in this environment of territorial expansion, burgeoning military and political confidence, and evangelizing fervor that Columbus first brought his proposal to Spain. Partly due to his interest in the Bible and partly due to the religious nature of his audience, the proposal to sail west to the Indies that Columbus made to Ferdinand and Isabella was based on his interpretation of the Second Book of Esdras (2 Esdras 6:42), which Columbus interpreted as meaning the Earth was comprised of six parts of land to one of water. Although the monarchs, on advice from their official cosmographers, rejected the Genoese mariner’s plan once again, they also provided him with a certain amount of encouragement, offering him a stipend if he chose to stay in Spain. Clearly, although they were uncertain about the plan, they did not wish Columbus to sell his ideas to a rival power such as Portugal, whose maritime advantage the Spanish royals were desperate to weaken.

Depiction of Ferdinand and Isabella Thankfully for Columbus, the expedition finally spotted land on October 11, 1492, and ironically, after all the false reports about sighting land, Columbus was initially skeptical when the crew actually did see land. He wrote on October 11, “The crew of the Pinta saw a cane and a log; they also picked up a stick which appeared to have been carved with an iron tool, a piece of cane, a plant which grows on land, and a board. The crew of the Nina saw other signs of land, and a stalk loaded with rose berries. These signs encouraged them, and they all grew cheerful. Sailed this day till sunset, twenty-seven leagues. After sunset steered their original course west and sailed twelve miles an hour till two hours after midnight, going ninety miles, which are twenty-two leagues and a half; and as the Pinta was the swiftest

sailer, and kept ahead of the Admiral, she discovered land and made the signals which had been ordered. The land was first seen by a sailor called Rodrigo de Triana, although the Admiral at ten o'clock that evening standing on the quarter-deck saw a light, but so small a body that he could not affirm it to be land.” Scholars have long attempted to determine which of the many tiny islands that now make up the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands the explorers might have first spotted, but the mystery remains. It is known from Columbus’ and other accounts that the inhabitants of the island called it Guanahaní, and upon setting foot there and claiming it for the Castilian crown, Columbus called it San Salvador (“Holy Savior”). While the excitement of landfall was obviously enormous, it should be recalled that Columbus was likely very puzzled by what he encountered. Before they had even set foot on the land, they first encountered a strange but friendly people who could spin and weave, but owned no horses or draft animals. The Europeans noticed that the natives had no iron, but their jewelry, or at least some of it, was made of gold. On San Salvador and several subsequent small islands, Columbus proceeded in the same way: he claimed the territory for Spain, announced to the unaware inhabitants that they were now subjects of the Spanish royals, engaged in small-scale barter with the natives, gave them what were for them unusual glass beads and bells in exchange for parrots, javelins, and other local objects, and looked around for anything that seemed to be of real value, according to his standards. Here he was soon successful, or so he thought, because some of the “Indians,” as he called them (in an error whose effects on nomenclature remain to this day) were wearing small pieces of gold as nose rings and earrings. This was, to Columbus’ mind, his first indication of the famed wealth of the East – to him, it seemed gold was so abundant that even these poor and marginal peoples possessed some.

Columbus’ exploration during the first voyage Columbus’ log and his early letter to his financier Luis de Santángel, which are the earliest accounts of the “discovery,” project a politically expedient confidence and optimism since he did not wish to lose his contract with Ferdinand and Isabella, but Columbus was likely very confused by what he found. The people and their way of life clashed with what he expected, and the disposition of the many small islands he found was difficult to reconcile with the maps of the East Asian coast he had so avidly studied. His most important goal was to reach terra firma, since it was there that he would find the great trading empires whose wealth he wished to tap into. Thus, the early accounts contain a number of strategies of interpretation that attempt to fit what he has found into his preconceived framework. First of all, he attempted to map the territories he found in the Caribbean, however improbably, onto Asian geography as he understood it. The northern islands of the Bahamas, he imagines, may be part of the island empire of Cipango (Japan); the long coast of Cuba, where he arrived next by heading to the southwest, must be part of China. Second, in his repeated emphasis on the gentleness and peacefulness of the natives, he is also insisting on their status as “natural slaves,” an intellectual category used in the ancient world to justify slavery. More specifically, he concluded, they

must be among the peoples from whom the Great Khan drew his many slaves; at the same time, he set the stage for the slavery-based colonization that would soon overtake the Caribbean islands and, within a few decades, wipe out their entire indigenous population. In fact, Columbus began this trend by essentially kidnapping six Guanahaní natives, in his words, “so that they will learn to speak,” i.e. become interpreters for the expedition. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Columbus decided at this point to proceed with great haste back to Spain, as he announced in his log on January 8, 1493. Since he believed that he had ultimately come close to a source of great wealth, he may have wished to return with reinforcements in the instance of any hostilities. After all, Columbus believed the great armies of the Khan could have been nearby. Furthermore, he may have sought to reassure the Spanish Crown of his success and guarantee his share of the wealth that he now felt confident about extracting from the lands he had encountered. Furthermore, the crew had thus far spent over five months at sea and three months exploring with no major setbacks, no mutinies, and no hostile encounters with the natives. On the heels of his apparent success and the approval of the Spanish crown, Columbus managed to assemble a much larger fleet for his second trip across the Atlantic, which began on September 24, 1492. His expeditionary force now consisted of 17 ships, including the Niña but neither of the other two vessels from the previous voyage. It is clear from the number of men and quantity of supplies carried over that Columbus now intended to establish more permanent settlements and pave the way for the establishment of full-scale colonies. He also brought with him a contingent of friars, who would be entrusted with the evangelization of the natives. When they returned to Hispaniola on November 28, 1493, Columbus discovered that the natives of the islands were not quite as passive and accommodating as he first imagined. The 39 men who he had left behind to garrison La Navidad, the first European settlement in the Americas since Leif Ericsson’s Norse colony in Newfoundland, had been wiped out. The men, presumably as a result of their rapacious desire for gold and probable abuse of local women, eventually became unwelcome among the nearby tribes, who likely exterminated them. The consensual and peaceful

colonization that Columbus had promised to undertake had been little more than a brief illusion. In the wake of Columbus’ historic expedition, Portugal’s King John II protested that according to the 1479 Treaty of Alcáçovas, which divided the Atlantic Ocean between Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence, some of the newly discovered lands rightly belonged to Portugal. To make clear the point, a Portuguese fleet was authorized and dispatched west from the Tagus to lay claim to the “Indies,” which prompted a flurry of diplomatic activity in the court of Ferdinand and Isabella. At the time, Spain lacked the naval power to prevent Portugal from acting on this threat, and the result was the hugely influential 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. The Treaty of Tordesillas was one of the most important documents of its kind of the age, for it established the essential parameters of the two competing empires, the first of the major European imperial entities. The Treaty of Tordesillas drew an imaginary line from pole to pole, running 100 leagues west of the westernmost islands of the Azores. According to the terms of a supporting papal bull, all the lands to the west of that belonged to Spain, and all of those to the east belonged to Portugal. What this meant in practical terms was that Portugal was given Africa and the Indian Ocean while Spain was granted all the lands to the west, including the Americas and the Caribbean, all collectively known as the “Indies,” or the New World.

A map depicting the line drawn by the Treaty of Tordesillas

The Treaty of Tordesillas contained an anomaly. Unknown at the time to its drafters, the treaty’s line cut across the westernmost brow of South America, more or less from the mouth of the Amazon to Porto Alegre, both in modern Brazil, meaning that everything to the east of that legally belonged to Portugal. This fact was only revealed in 1500 thanks to an expedition by the Portuguese mariner Pedro Álvares Cabral. While en route to India, his expedition sailed in a wide arc in the mid-Atlantic searching for the trade winds and unexpectedly landed off the coast of the South American mainland. There was little the Spanish could do about it, and as a consequence, the vast Portuguese colony of Brazil was established in a region nominally claimed by Spain. Meanwhile, the rapid spread of Spanish influence across the Caribbean and onto the mainland began almost immediately after Columbus made landfall. On the heels of his apparent success and the approval of the Spanish crown, Columbus managed to assemble a much larger fleet for his second trip across the Atlantic, which began on September 24, 1492. His expeditionary force now consisted of 17 ships, including the Niña but neither of the other two vessels from the previous voyage. It is clear from the number of men and quantity of supplies carried over that Columbus now intended to establish more permanent settlements and pave the way for the establishment of fullscale colonies. He also brought with him a contingent of friars, who would be entrusted with the evangelization of the natives. The urge to spread Christianity, in particular Catholicism, formed part of the royal obligation to the papacy that was written into the informal charter of every European monarchy at the time. The Muslim conquest of Europe and the Reconquista all tended to add urgency to the need to spread the true faith before it could be adulterated by Jews, Muslims, and later Protestants. At the time, during the reign of the Holy Roman Empire, the popes wielded as much power as the kings, and the intertwining of church and state was in many respects absolute. At the same time, Spain commanded a rapidly expanding mercantile empire, so while most of these early journeys of exploration were publicly authorized and sponsored, they were also privately organized and usually led by individual adventurers, or adelantado, acting loosely on contract for the Crown. An essential element of these expeditions was local labor and

resources, so early explorers tended to confine their interest to wellpopulated regions. They were not interested in geographic exploration for its own sake, but to evangelize and plunder, which meant the primary regions of the pre-Columbian empires and their capital cities became the targets of the Spanish Empire in the New World. Perhaps inevitably, a regional rivalry developed as the Portuguese began to establish a colony in Brazil and push its boundaries southwards. After the conquest of the Incas in the 1530s, the Portuguese threat prompted the authorization of a second expedition, commanded this time by Pedro de Mendoza with a force of some 1,500 men. The party arrived at the mouth of the Río de la Plata in 1536, and there Mendoza founded the settlement of Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Ayre. This was the basis of the future city of Buenos Aires, but its establishment was not without resistance from surrounding tribes. Members of the Querandí people, already familiar with Spanish methods and tactics of war from earlier encounters among the Incas, responded with violence, and in 1537, a year after its founding, Mendoza ordered the settlement abandoned. Some survivors broke ranks and sought succour among the Guaraní further upstream on the banks of the Paraná River. These early settlers assimilated reasonably easily with the Guaraní, founding the settlement of Asunción, which later became the capital city of Paraguay. The discovery of silver in Peru tended to shift Spanish attention north, but Asunción and the wide spread of satellite communities associated with it were all brought under direct Spanish control. As an indirect extension of Spanish rule, the practice of encomienda was introduced as a system of local patronage by which Spanish settlers were granted effective fiefdoms over certain regions and the subject populations within. According to the general regulations by which individual encomendero could function, they were responsible for the well-being and protection of the communities granted to them. Theoretically, in exchange for assuming responsibility for the religious conversion and training of the indigenous people, encomendero were granted the right to utilize the labor of the community for their own benefit. The theory underpinning the encomienda system was relatively benign so far as Spanish colonization practices went, but the potential for abuse is quite obvious, and ultimately, the system came to be regarded as a de facto form of

slavery, from which, in many instances, it was indistinguishable. Despite the cordiality of early encounters, the indigenous people under the encomienda suffered brutal exploitation at the hands of the Creole elite, and diseases brought by the foreigners began to ravage populations that had no immunity. The populations in the region declined so precipitously that by the late 16th century, the encomienda system had largely collapsed across much of Argentina. That said, in Paraguay, and in and around Asunción, which were isolated by Spain, the system continued, and in places where there were bountiful resources and well-established relationships, the system survived for generations in a mutually beneficial form. The collapse of the encomienda system was attributed largely to the collapse of the native population, but authorities in Lima were also reluctant to entertain appeals that encomienda be transmissible or inheritable. In the absence of viable labor reserves the Spanish elites began to cast around for alternatives, by which time the phenomenon of the Transatlantic slave trade had begun to gather momentum. Indigenous slaves, or yanakuna, were purchased, but their numbers were insufficient, and many indigenous people simply did not adapt to forced labor. By 1580, the first black slaves from Africa were beginning to appear in the New World, sourced initially from traders and merchants in Brazil. Slaves were never imported into Argentina in the sorts of numbers commonly found in Brazil and the Caribbean, but as agriculture and mining began to take root, more slaves were brought in. Cotton was tried as a commercial crop in and around Tucumán and Salta, which also required slaves, but little came of it, and efforts at mining here and there also produced disappointing early results. By the end of the 17th century, Spanish settlements in the west of Argentina had begun to focus on livestock, most notably the raising of cattle and agricultural produce for local consumption. The 17th century also brought about the beginning of a decline of the Spanish Empire, despite the dramatic growth of Spanish America and the galleons of gold crossing the mid-Atlantic. Many of these ships fell victim to British and French pirates, a certain amount of social and economic stagnation set in, and by then, the native populations were already in rapid decline. The labor shortages led to demographic shifts that in turn led to sporadic bouts of warfare between settlers and natives. Slave and wage labor

helped to plug the gaps, but the 17th century was one of dislocation, insecurity, and economic inertia. Between 1702 and 1714, the “War of the Spanish Succession” was fought, and it secured the Spanish throne in favor of the French Bourbon family. That brought about a series of major policy shifts at home and in the Spanish colonies. The first years of Bourbon rule in Spain were naturally preoccupied with consolidating royal authority over Spain itself, but by the 1750s, under the reign of Ferdinand VI, the Spanish leaders began turning their attention to the affairs of Spain’s overseas empire. What followed was a series of reforms known as the “Bourbon Reforms” that aimed to revitalize the wider colonial bureaucracy and stimulate economic growth. The Bourbon reforms can perhaps best be described as “enlightened” or “benevolent despotism,” a concept of government developed in 18th century Europe during the Enlightenment. Absolute monarchs enacted legal, social, administrative, and educational reforms inspired by the philosophical emergence of the Enlightenment, at least to a point. After all, none of these were meant to threaten the sovereignty of any monarch or compromise the established social order. The Bourbon kings strove to bring the colonial territories of Spain under more effective central control, but they also wanted to expand existing industries and introduce new means of production and economic activity in order to enhance the economic benefits of the colonies to Spain. In conjunction with that, the Spanish rulers sought to enhance military support and protection for Spain and the colonies, and for communication between Spain and her overseas territories in America, Africa, and Asia.

Colonial Haiti

A map of Haiti before the Haitian Revolution “Worked like animals, the slaves were housed like animals…defenseless against their masters, they struggled with overwork and its usual complement – underfeeding.” – C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins The first African slaves to make landfall on Hispaniola came in 1517, when, according to at least some sources, up to 15,000 African slaves arrived, sourced from the markets of West Africa and Senegambia. It certainly was an evil fate for a man, woman, or child to find themselves on a slave ship bound for the Caribbean, for in the long history of slavery, there has never been a more sustained, cynical and industrial-scale exploitation of slave labor. The pitiless demands of industrial sugar production in the New World absorbed and reduced enormous numbers of people into figures on a ledger, with their lifespans and utility factored into projections and profit and loss columns in the clerical houses of Europe’s expanding capital and industrial sectors.

In relatively short order, the island of Hispaniola and its capital of Santo Domingo became the base for all future Spanish expansion in the region. Indeed, the first court of the Spanish Crown to be established in the Americas was in Santo Domingo in 1526. However, by the closing few decades of the seventeenth century, with the extraordinary rampage of conquest and plunder underway on the mainland, Spanish interest in the island began to wane, and as time passed, the colony fell into decline. This occurred more or less as European imperial jostling over global real estate was growing acrimonious, and the sheer value of shipping traffic and the general piracy of the whole process bred a culture of European pirates, mainly British and French, who preyed upon the lucrative sea lanes with the tacit approval of their nations of origin. The neglected western quarter of the island of Hispaniola, remote from Spanish administration, began to host autonomous communities of mainly French-speaking pirates and privateers. Then, as more and more official French naval traffic began to ply the region, the island of Tortuga, located a few miles off the modern shoreline of Portde-Paix, became the semi-official French base of operations for all maritime activity in the region. From this base, the French laid claim both to the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe and the mainland territory of French Guiana, and this was established as the base of the French overseas empire in the Caribbean. The Spanish, in the meanwhile, while taking note of this incremental French takeover of the western portion of the island, did nothing to actively oppose it, pulling back on the east of the island by degrees, and by the beginning of the middle of the seventeenth century, they had effectively abandoned the western island. The first French governor was appointed in 1665 to what was now known as the French colony of Saint-Domingue, formally recognized only 30 years later in the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick. While under Spanish rule the island had always tended to languish as a backwater, the French were quick to recognize the potential of their new colony as a major link in the growing network of plantation islands taking root in the Caribbean. High rainfall, numerous rivers and fertile valleys and hillsides were all ideal for large scale agriculture, and the proximity of indented shorelines offered cheap and easy access to the outside world. As capital and industry transformed the economic landscape of Europe, and as

the demand for luxury commodities like tobacco, sugar and coffee climbed dramatically, the acreage under agricultural production throughout the region followed suit. Before long, Saint-Domingue had grown to become a central pillar of the French overseas economy, and an import agricultural supplier to metropolitan France. Indeed, the prospects and beauty of Saint-Domingue earned it the name “The Pearl of the Antilles,” which for a privileged few it no doubt was, but for those engaged in the labor of production, it certainly was nothing of the sort. The only real obstacle standing in the way of explosive growth was labor, but it was a significant obstacle indeed. Until then, the creeping advance of Portuguese and other trade interests south along the Atlantic coast of Africa had been sustained in the hope of reaching and exploiting the “Golden East.” Africa seemingly had very little offer, but as the first shiploads of black African slaves began arriving in the New World to provide the fuel for the development of the region, Africa entered the international trade network as a supplier of slave labor to the New World. As slaves began arriving on Caribbean shores in large numbers, the industries of the region and the massive flow of revenue back to the various metropolitan investors became dependent on the slave trade. By the time the French Revolution took place in the late 18th century, about 35,000 whites and free blacks and people of color, or gens de couleur, were vastly outnumbered in Saint-Domingue by a population of enslaved blacks numbering upwards of 500,000. Moreover, slavery in the context of the New World plantation economies was, without doubt, the most cynical and ruthless of the age. In a simple, economic calculation, it was determined, fairly universally across the region, that it was ultimately cheaper to secure a consignment of African slaves, work them to death under inhuman conditions, and replace them in preference to supplying the conditions of comfort and life necessary for natural increase and a more reasonable life expectancy. Very often the plantations and estates of the island were owned in absentia by European landlords, on whose behalf they were run by members of the petit Blancs, or the “little white” class, whose standards of humanity were very often abysmal. To morally justify such a clear and obvious abandonment of Christian values in their treatment of their fellow human beings, the notion was popular that blacks were not indeed human

and did not possess a soul. This was not universal, of course, for while domestic slavery was relatively humane in the context of slave labor and very often paternal, the lot of the field worker was brutal and cruel, and it was so arduous that a heavy regime of enforcement was in place every that relied on the simple expedient of violently punishing disobedience. The net result of this was that the lot of an average slave in the Caribbean was indescribably miserable, made even worse by the necessity of an outnumbered minority of whites to impress time and again upon their human property the futility and consequences of any act of rebellion. In 1685, the French, in a rather liberal act in the context of the times, introduced by royal fiat a system of laws governing the institution of slavery in French overseas territories, known as the Code Noir. It can certainly not be said of the Code Noir that it provided what we would understand today as a humanitarian code, but it did at least define certain basic rights, central to which was the right, indeed the requirement that a slave be baptized into the Catholic faith. This, as philosophers and historians have since noted, was the first official acknowledgement that black African slaves possessed a soul, and therefore humanity, which was, of course, a departure from the essential understanding that enslaved back Africans possessed no such thing. They were traditionally regarded as livestock, but frequently treated in a manner that would have deeply bothered conventional pastoralists. However, even as Saint-Domingue remained a center of slave labor, the utterly audacious concepts of Liberté, égalité, and fraternité espoused during the French Revolution were circulating among the slave barracoons by the 1790s, and men and women whispered among themselves, wondering what it could all mean. Most potent of all was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which, although it made no specific mention of slaves, nonetheless declared all men equal, and as acknowledged Christians, slaves too were men. Of course, as much as this inspired those within the enslaved communities of Saint-Domingue, it provoked the horror of land and slave owners. In turn, they pointed to another canon of the Declaration, which protected private property, and continued to insist every slave in the colony was private property.

Toussaint L’Ouverture “For too long we have borne your chains without thinking of shaking them off, but any authority which is not founded on virtue and humanity, and which only tends to subject one's fellow man to slavery, must come to an end, and that end is yours.” – Toussaint L’Ouverture The man who would emerge as the first substantive leader of the Haitian Revolution, and who would become known as Toussaint L’Ouverture, was around the age of 46 when the talk of revolution began among the slave communities on the island. He belonged to a class of slave known as creoles, which meant simply that he had been born into slavery on the island, as distinct from the bossales (like his father), who were captured in Africa, transported across the Atlantic, and traded on the island. In his youth, his name would have been Toussaint Bréda, which was simply the name of the plantation upon which he was born. Archival materials dealing with life and death in any slave society are almost always minimal, and Saint-Domingue was no exception. Thus, since Toussaint himself was cautious of sharing any personal biographical details and his literacy was marginal, very little is known about his origins and background. His biographical information tends to be drawn from the layers of mythology and hagiography that have been molded and fashioned over the years, which, in the end, usually fail to shed little authentic light on the matter.[1] Nonetheless, certain facts have come to be accepted. His father, who went by the name Hippolyte, was born into a noble caste of the West African territory of Benin, captured and sold in the slave market of Dahomey, probably to Portuguese traders, along with a wife and a child. Hippolyte was thereafter sold to the Bréda plantation at Haut de Cap in Saint-Domingue, and what thereafter became of his African wife and child is unknown. He never saw or heard from them again. It seems that Hippolyte’s higher breeding and attributes won him some reprieve on the Bréda plantation (owned at that time by the French Comte de Noé and managed on his behalf by a certain Bayon de Libertate), where he met and was able to marry and settle in a certain amount of comfort with a

domestic slave known as Pauline. They had five children, one of whom was Toussaint, born, as his name implies, on All Saints Day in 1843.[2] This presents a very curious picture in the context of the times, for very few slaves were ever granted the conditions to marry, settle, and reproduce, so those who did so must have had special skills or were in the good graces of those overseeing the slaves. Legend has it that Toussaint was a sickly child, nicknamed Fatras-Bâton, or the “Clumsy Stick,” whose physical disadvantages were outweighed by an indomitable spirit and a determination to be stronger and faster than any of his peers. Another curiosity is that he is known to have been an accomplished equestrian, which implies that he had regular access to horses. It seems that when he entered into the working legion of the plantation as a young teenager, he had the responsibility to care for and maintain the animals, in particular the horses. Another part of the myth of Toussaint L’Ouverture is the fact that he was formally educated and had an accomplished standard of literacy. This was probably not true, and although he did learn to read and write, and he eventually aspired to learn classic French, it could not be said that he was educated to any particular standard. Dominican and Jesuit clergy were well represented on the island, and it can fairly be guessed that as an evidently gifted youth, he would have attracted their interest and attention. He also, it would seem, was interested in traditional herbalism and medicine which tends to suggest that he was in contact with and educated by the many voodoo priests and holy men to be found in the slave barracks. Voodoo, of course, was, and is a syncretic version of Christianity heavily influenced by African animism and traditional spirituality, ubiquitous throughout the islands, and in particular within the Maroon communities of escaped slaves who lived in isolated pockets in the remote mountainous interior of the island. In all probability, Toussaint’s favored status, his work with animals, his multilingualism, and his natural intelligence would have spared him from the worst of the daily horrors of slavery, but it would have done nothing to remove him from daily racism and displays of gross prejudice. He once related a story of himself returning one day from Mass with his prayer book under his arm, to find himself under assault by a petit blanc. He later wrote,

“A white man broke my head with a wooden stick, while telling me ‘do you not know that a negro should not read?’” The injured and bleeding slave apologized as was expected, begged for forgiveness, and slipped away which was the most pragmatic thing that he could do under the circumstances. He kept his blood-soaked tunic, however, as a reminder of that day, and as the story goes, he later encountered the same man during the height of the revolution and killed him on the spot. From a young age he was given supervisory roles on the plantation, leading gangs of workers and gaining the trust of both them and the plantation management. Perhaps in a sign of the times, his higher potential was acknowledged, and he was allowed the opportunity to express it. When he was about eighteen years old, he married a slave woman named Cécile, in a Catholic ceremony, and then sometime later another named Suzanne (the fate of Cécile is obscure), and through one, and then the other, he established and maintained an extensive and loyal network of family and relations.[3] By the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, records suggest that Toussaint Bréda had been a nègre libre, or a free black man, for some time, and what is more, he was himself a minor land and slave owner.[4] The circumstances of his manumission are unknown, as is his acquisition of land, but the two are probably related. His emancipation could only have been achieved with the agreement and goodwill of Bayon de Libertate, and it was probably granted sometime in the early 1770s. There is also evidence that in 1789 he took out a lease on behalf of his son-in-law on a coffee estate which was worked by 13 slaves, and although not a particularly successful venture, it does present a curious dichotomy that was probably more often reflected in the lives of free black men than not. By the start of the revolution, gens de couleur and free black men accounted not only for a sizable percentage of land ownership but also a large share of slave ownership. It is perhaps worth pointing out again that slave ownership did not always imply unbridled violence and brutality which was particularly true among domestic slaves. They at times existed in a type of paternal, extended family with their owners, the women not infrequently intermingling in a system of concubinage that was perhaps not altogether different to the lot of women in rural Africa. Toussaint is known to have freed a number of his slaves, and since the circumstances of life were not always improved by manumission,

attachment to a sympathetic and fair-minded owner might have at times been a preferable option.

The Start of the Revolution “Peace in the head, peace in the stomach. – Jean-Bertrand Aristide For the people of Saint-Domingue, the defining question was simply whether the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen applied to the gens de couleur and blacks, for nothing in the document had been specifically articulated in this regard. The grand blancs, comprising both the elites of the land and slave-owning classes and the higher echelons of colonial administration, who were allied with the metropolitan authorities, were naturally aghast at the turn of events. Initially, at least, the petit blancs and the gens de couleur were both ecstatic, believing themselves to now be socially and politically equal with the grand blancs. Of course, nothing was quite that simple. The grand blancs were divided between those local, landowning elites loyal to the notion of greater independence and those administration officials whose loyalty was owed primarily to Bourbon France. In 1790, a delegation of gens de couleur travelled to France to present a petition to the National Assembly pressing for a statutory grant of voting rights to all property owners and taxpayers of the colony, regardless of ethnicity or racial admixture. This was granted, and returning to the colony with the delegation was a wealthy Dominican gen de couleur by the name of Vincent Ogé, whose interest was to ensure that the French government decree was respected and enacted. When it was not, Ogé raised a small legion of armed men and marched on Le Cap.

Ogé This was a preliminary effort at rebellion, and in common with most young revolutions, it was as bold and inspiring as it was disorganized and ill-fated. When he was defeated in February 1791, Ogé was captured and put to death by the colonial authorities in a manner both cruel and dramatic, as a stark warning to those who might be similarly inspired. He and his deputy were both broken on the wheel in the central square of Cap-Français, known also as Le Cap, and then left out in the tropical sun until they both died of dehydration and shock. Very likely witnessing this grotesque execution was Toussaint himself, whose sense of it all was simply that Ogé had too narrowly focused his rebellion on the rights of the gens de couleur, thereby neglecting the brooding mass of enslaved blacks whose numbers and natural motivation would have made a vital difference. According to one story, during his trial and interrogation, Ogé held up a handful of black seeds and sprinkled in a few grains of white. Then, while shaking them up in his

cupped hands, he offered them to the judges with the comment, “Where are the whites?” If he did say that, it would have served as a foreboding warning about the different sizes of the populations on the island, but either way, with his brutal execution, the grand blancs sent a clear message to anyone with similar aspirations. Initially at least, this certainly damped down any expressions of revolutionary ardor stirred up by events in France, even if it also served to cut a deeper division between whites and gens de couleur. In time, that division would grow, very much to the detriment of the grand blancs as the revolution gathered momentum. The first sign of an organized rebellion by the enslaved blacks of the island had come in the mid-18th century in the form of a minor insurrection organized by a Maroon leader known as François Mackandal, a firstgeneration slave from Senegambia who was also a prominent voodoo priest. First, Mackandal created natural poisons that he distributed to domestic slaves to add to the meals of their masters, and after that, he led a brief and explosive guerrilla uprising that was quelled fairly quickly after he was captured in 1758 and burned at the stake. However, it would not be until August 1791 that a series of nighttime mass meetings were held in the northern mountains, attended by both slave leaders and the leadership of the dispersed maroon communities. These meetings were led by a voodoo priest of widely respected authority by the name of Dutty Boukman, and presumably they were rich with voodoo ceremonies and fired by the passions generated by the French Revolution. The key aspect of the meetings was an acknowledgement that blacks outnumbered every other caste and race on the island by a significant degree, and if they were organized and led, a slave rebellion would be unstoppable. Thus, it was agreed that an uprising of slaves would take place on August 24, 1791, with the objective of seizing the northern port of Cap Français on the date that the Colonial Assembly of Saint-Domingue was scheduled to meet. A pig was sacrificed, its blood was consumed, and on August 22, two days earlier than planned, an armed rebellion erupted, triggering the commencement of what has since come to be known as the Haitian Revolution. Armed with simple weapons, slaves burst out of their barracoons, slaughtered supervisors, and attacked and overran the

plantations. White owners and managers, along with their families, were indiscriminately slaughtered, the plantations themselves were burned, and the crops were put to the torch. Whites who were able to do so fled to Le Cap, where they mounted a desperate defense, stopping the rebels only within feet of the city walls. Thousands of rebel bodies were left littering the battlefield.

A depiction of the rebellion in 1791 During this bloody episode, the Bréda plantation appears to have been spared the orgy of violence and destruction that overwhelmed its neighbors, thanks perhaps to Toussaint himself. Toussaint knew in advance what was afoot, and he arranged for Bayon de Libertate’s family (the estate manager himself was away) to be safely taken to Le Cap, where they joined hundreds of other women and children on ships carrying refugees to neighboring islands or the United States. He then made provision for the safety of his own family by sending them across the land frontier into the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, after which he gathered up the 1,000 or so slaves attached to the Bréda estate and marched with them towards the nearest rebel camp.

By then Toussaint was about 47, which was older than the average life expectancy of a slave, and he was apt to describe the moment as one of “a beautiful delirium, born of a great love of freedom.” At first, he applied himself to the care and rehabilitation of the wounded, of which there were a great many, thanks to the simple consequences of a disorganized, human wave tactic. The French had guns, and once they were organized, static defenses and disciplined musketry accounted for thousands of rebel casualties. However, very quickly, captured weapons began to appear in the rebels’ ranks, and as organization and tactics were refined, the rebels began to maneuver and fight to much better effect. Within a month or so, several smaller towns of the countryside had been overrun and destroyed. Boukman circulated the fiction that if a slave died in battle, he would reawake in Africa, and this, harkening back to an almost unbearable yearning, was a very powerful motivating idea indeed. In November 1791, Boukman was killed in battle, which caused the unrelenting advance of the uprising to suddenly falter. At the same time, it created a leadership vacuum that could not be easily filled. The command of an irregular army of untrained and undisciplined slaves was something rather different from the leadership of a local contingent or a large professional army, and it took time for the man capable and predisposed to such leadership to be identified. Initially, the overall command of the rebel army fell to two men: Jean-François Papillon, an African born slave, and Georges Biassou, an island-born slave. Neither man was literate or particularly well versed in military strategy, so they tended to look to Toussaint, the “Chief Physician of the Army,” as the only learned and literate man among them. Realizing, as Napoleon would later famously put it, that an army marches on its stomach, Toussaint gave the two leaders the novel advice to halt the indiscriminate destruction of crops and plantations, and soon enough Toussaint was himself placed in command of a large rebel detachment, which he then drilled and organized according to the military journals that he had read and studied. He had no direct military experience of his own, but he discovered within himself, as did others, both an aptitude for leading men and an instinctive understanding of battlefield tactics. He divided his men into ranks, appointing officers who were trained according to both their own

and Toussaint’s capacity, with the result that his unit began to achieve far better results and much lower battlefield fatalities.

A depiction of Biassou To date, the fighting had tended to be concentrated in the wealthy and established north of the island, the heartland of the grands blancs, but by November, a separate rebellion of gens de couleur erupted in the south and west of the colony, the traditional enclaves of the landed and wealthy nonwhites. They began to press for their particular objectives of social, political and economic equality. In the meanwhile, despite its best efforts, the leadership of the rebel army could not sustain an open-ended campaign without suffering starvation and desertion. No meaningful logistical capacity existed, and the propensity of the rebels to wantonly destroy the very productive facilities needed to supply them did nothing at all to help. The rebellion would have been successful if it had achieved victory quickly, but it did not, and now it was effectively bogged down in a siege. Towards the end of November 1791, sensing an opportunity, three commissioners appointed by the metropolitan government in France arrived on the island to open negotiations. Word circulated that a

large French expeditionary force was anchored just over the horizon, and in a state of disarray and depletion, neither Jean François Papillon nor Georges Biassou had any faith that the rebel army could survive. They accepted the terms of peace in exchange for the French government’s pardon and an agreement that the rebel slaves would return to their plantations on the understanding that they would not be punished. This was an extraordinary capitulation, news of which circulated as it was under discussion, and it came to the utter dismay of the rebels. A key member of the rebel delegation, of course, was Toussaint, the only literate member, and it would certainly appear that he was party to this understanding. Ultimately, however, negotiations floundered on the intransigence and unwillingness of the local grans blancs to have anything to do with a negotiated settlement, as they were surely aware in any case that the rebellion was collapsing under its own weight. Negotiations thus ended, and the commissioners returned to France.

The Emergence of Revolutionary Leaders “We have dared to be free. Let us dare to be so by ourselves and for ourselves.” - Jean-Jacques Dessalines With the two main rebel leaders at a loss and the rebellion itself in a state of dangerous hiatus, Toussaint took it upon himself to approach the Spanish on the other side of the island to source food and weaponry to sustain the rebellion. The Spanish authorities agreed, but it was hardly an act of generosity given that Santo Domingo was also a slave colony – it was a pragmatic move to frustrate the French. The Spanish may have rightly reasoned that once the slaves had done the work, they could regain control over the entire island. The Spanish helped provide Toussaint and his dwindling rebel army an opportunity to consolidate, rebuild, and reorganize as the French government dispatched an expeditionary force of seasoned French troops commanded by Comte Étienne-Maynaud de Laveaux. By then Toussaint had gained a reputation as a tough and disciplined commander, still in a formal alliance with the Spanish, and now well established at a fortified position at La Tannerie in the northeast of the colony. Throughout most of 1792, he devoted his energies to organizing and training his troops, during which the administration of the island was taken over by one of three more commissioners sent out from France. These commissioners also arrived with a force of 6,000 seasoned French troops. This tended to put all of the rebel forces on the back foot, and the first probing encounters went very badly for the rebels, not only for Toussaint himself, who lost more than half of his men in a series of one-sided battles, but also for Biassou and Papillon, who suffered similar losses. Then, a respite came as a result of the French Revolution and events in France. News reached the island of the execution in January 1793 of King Louis XVI and the establishment of the French Republic. Furthermore, Britain and Spain were now at war with France, which completely altered the dynamic of the battlefield. De Laveaux was forced to divert manpower and resources away from the rebellion to defend the coast, while reinforcements and resupply was thrown into doubt. It also offered the rebels once again an opportunity to consolidate and reorganize.

Perhaps most importantly, all of this offered the grand blancs of SaintDomingue, the landowning elite, a unique opportunity. The fundamental political ambition of the grands blancs was independence from France under terms defined by them, and with France increasingly embroiled in a European war, the moment could hardly have been more auspicious. A confused, amorphous and headless rebel army, comprising tens of thousands of men, with perhaps three times as many on call at any time, was trapped between the impossibility of a return to slavery and an inability to seize victory. It was hungry, the resources of the land were dwindling, and there was within the ranks a sense of nervous desperation. It faced a professional French army now on the defensive, while in the wings the gens de couleur and the grands blancs were watchful and poised to leverage any opportunity to their own advantage. The British and Spanish offered that opportunity, and the grand blancs took it by allying with both against France and placing the colony under nominal British rule. This ironically placed the grand blancs and the rebel armies in a de facto alliance, and sensing an opportunity, Toussaint formally allied himself with the Spanish, accepting the rank of colonel in the Spanish army. Thereafter, the situation became even more complicated. Soon after the formalization of the First Republic in 1792, a second French force arrived in Saint-Domingue, led by General François-Thomas Galbaud, a royalist who happened to be on the high seas when the guillotine blade dropped on the neck of Louis XVI. Having initially been sent the colony to suppress the slave rebellion, he altered his priority to keeping the island in the monarchists' hands. With this understanding, he was welcomed by quite a number of whites who saw in him a bulwark against the republic.

Galbaud Upon landing at Le Cap, Galbaud moved quickly, securing the city and dealing roughly with any republican resistance. French Commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, a republican, responded to this by offering freedom to any slave who would fight on behalf of the nascent republic, an offer which many took up, as did most of the gens de couleur. Now with a much-reinforced army, Sonthonax retook Le Cap, and true to his promise on August 29, 1793, he issued a blanket order of emancipation. The expectation now was that the freed slaves would flock to the republican cause, and many did, but Toussaint was distrustful of the decree, realizing that it was not

sanctioned by the French government and would thus be unlikely to stand. He, Papillon, and Biassou instead crossed the border into Spanish Santo Domingo, taking with them the straggling remnants of the rebel army, now comprising no more than 600 men.

Sonthonax From Santo Domingo, Toussaint made his pitch for the leadership of the revolution, styling himself “General of the Armies of the King, for the Public Good,” and calling vaguely for unity and popular support. This was also the moment that he began to use the name L’Ouverture, which means simply “the opening,” or “the beginning.” Liberty and equality were his stated goals, but implicit in this too was the pursuit of independence. He was, of course, entirely aware that the Spanish were using him, but he was using them too, and thanks to Spanish and British support, he was at last able to build up a modern armory of weapons and train his soldiers under the guidance of a professional army. He also selected a corps of competent and loyal officers, among whom was a gifted 35-year-old commander by the name of Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

Dessalines An altogether rougher edged and wilder character than Toussaint, JeanJacques Dessalines was born into slavery on a plantation near the GrandeRiviere-du-Nord in the north of the colony. He was known then as JeanJacques Duclos, taken from his mother’s married name. She adopted it from her husband, who in turn, as was customary at the time, took it from his first owner. His parents were both first-generation slaves, and while their ancestral origins in Africa are unknown, a majority of the slaves imported into Saint-Domingue originated from the Senegambia region of West Africa. His experience as a plantation slave had also been somewhat more typical than Toussaint’s, with his mind and body both scarred by early exposure to the punishing conditions and the violence and brutality of his situation. Like Toussaint, he was promoted to the position of foreman or commandeur, but

his rise was based less on his ability to lead than his natural persuasion towards violence, his ability to instill terror, and an unmistakable intelligence that belied his illiteracy. In or around 1788, Jean-Jacques Duclos was purchased by a free black man named Dessalines, whose name Jean-Jacques then adopted and kept. While accounts vary regarding how he fared under his new master, it would seem that his lot was not improved in the slightest by his black owner, and he subsequently developed an enduring hatred of free blacks, who he felt exceeded their white counterparts in the inhumane treatment of slaves. It all served to mold and fashion a man with an instinct for violence, deeply suspicious of nearly everyone, and given to the brooding paranoia and cruelty of a sociopath. Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James described Dessalines as “unable to read or write, his body scarred with strokes from the whip, but a born soldier, soon to hold high command.” As soon as the rebellion broke out, Jan-Jak, as he was known, was among the first to pick up a weapon and join the disorganized, bloody melee that characterized the first wave of fighting. He quickly found himself serving under Papillon, and he also quickly gained an informal promotion to the rank of lieutenant. He followed Papillon to Santo Domingo, where he also accepted a commission in the Spanish army. He would serve often as Toussaint’s second in command, and although Toussaint admired Dessalines and trusted him to carry out his orders, he was suspicious of Dessalines’ loyalty and wary of his often unrestrained and unreasonable violence. In the meantime, with the help of the authorities in Santo Domingo, Toussaint trained and girded his army, now answering to him as supreme commander, and he led them back across the frontier into Saint-Domingue, sweeping through the northern regions and taking town after town. This time, with discipline instilled, the destruction and savagery that characterized the first wave of the rebellion was absent, and this had the effect of winning over a number of blancs and gens de couleur as well as disaffected French soldiers, quickly swelling the ranks of Toussaint’s army. By the end of 1793, Toussaint and his Spanish allies had taken most of the central regions of the French colony, driving a wedge between the Republican-controlled regions of north and south. The British landed troops on the south of the island, welcomed by islanders more sympathetic to the British king than the French,

while the Royal Navy blockaded the French-held ports. The French were now backed into a corner and in a desperate situation. They were cut off from reinforcements and facing pressure on all fronts, with an enemy that would be merciless if they were defeated or surrendered. Back in Paris, in February 1794 the National Convention met in an emotional debate to formalize the emancipation order given by Galbaud, declaring slavery abolished in all of France’s overseas territories. Moreover, it granted full rights of citizenship to all men living under French rule. This placed Toussaint and his rebel alliance in a uniquely difficult position, for now they found themselves in an alliance with the Spanish, a slaver nation, against France, a free nation, and this presented an obvious ideological difficulty. Before long, Laveaux received a discreet dispatch from Toussaint proposing that he and his rebel army change sides and come over to the French. Laveaux embraced this idea like a rope thrown to a drowning man, and while greeted with deep disquiet by the likes of Biassou and Dessalines, Toussaint then brought his rebel army over to the side of the French. The Spanish garrison was attacked, and Biassou and Papillon were ousted, leaving Toussaint as the undisputed leader of the rebel army. This was an extremely adroit political maneuver, but it placed upon him an odious responsibility. It was necessary, if the utility of wage labor was to be seen to be viable, that it proved itself in Saint-Domingue. However, in the wake of emancipation, few free men were willing to return to the plantations, so it became necessary to apply some pressure. Dessalines was placed in charge of the business of applying that pressure, which allowed Toussaint to distance himself from any ugly but necessary ramifications. If and when the policy backfired, it would be easy to blame any excesses on the exuberance and seeming independence of his deputy. Perhaps not surprisingly, it did backfire. Toussaint was already under a cloud for his apparently quixotic decision to deliver the French a reprieve at the last minute by switching sides, and forcing free men to labor in their old plantations against their will carried with it more than a little of the sting of slavery. By relying on Dessalines, he dealt with periodic rebellions ruthlessly, concerned obviously less about the disappointment of his own people than the fact that their liberty was hanging on altogether by the thinnest thread. Now allied with the French, he found himself fighting both

the British and the Spanish, and that situation was always extremely complex, subject to the buffeting ebb and flow of political currents in Europe. When Spain was defeated by the French in 1795 as part of the War of the First Coalition, the Spanish were effectively emasculated on the island of Hispaniola, and they ceased to be a problem for Toussaint. At the same time, the end of that year, the British found themselves confined to a few fortified positions. In gratitude, Republican France, in the person of Laveaux, appointed Toussaint L’Ouverture the Lieutenant-Governor of the French colony of Saint-Domingue and commander of the army.

A depiction of Toussaint in uniform

A New Chapter “Do you think that men who have been able to enjoy liberty will calmly see it snatched away?” - Toussaint L'Ouverture The phenomenon of a freed slave and rebel soldier leading the colonial administration in Saint-Domingue and commanding its army, while gestures of extraordinary liberalism, also tended to sit poorly with many among the grands blancs and gens de couleur, and increasingly among the emancipated slaves themselves. Toussaint felt the uncomfortable creep of reversion as the Directory, the new committee of government in Paris, aired its conservatism by publicly pondering the re-imposition of slavery in the colonies. Philosophically, Toussaint, as a revolutionary leader, was confronted with a multicultural society, still bitterly fractured along race and class lines and possessing a raft of statutes defining the rights and limitations of each. While his vision was for an egalitarian society that celebrated multiculturalism, there seemed to be no appetite for it anywhere in the colony, and certainly not in Paris. The post-revolutionary French philosophy certainly did espouse assimilation and multiculturalism as an ideal, but not necessarily a policy, and more conservative elements were beginning to gain the ascendancy on both sides of the cultural divide, placing the decree of emancipation in obvious peril. As the movement to reimpose slavery gathered strength with the commencement of the Napoleonic Era, Toussaint found himself under increasing pressure to remove the whites and gens de couleur from the colony altogether. It perhaps goes without saying that the main proponent of this view was Dessalines, an increasingly powerful figure within the armed forces and a progressively louder and more belligerent voice. The situation for the French, of course, was very delicate. Once the genie of emancipation had been let out of the bottle, it would be very difficult to return. Blacks still outnumbered whites and gens de couleur by a significant amount, and any outright ouster or arrest of Toussaint would achieve nothing more than triggering a renewed uprising. Nonetheless, French officials intrigued against him and worked to undermine his reputation and authority, aided in this regard by the leadership of the gens de couleur. Toussaint remained a servant of the French Republic, and he was commander of the army at the pleasure of the French administration, so while he continued to

proclaim and demonstrate his loyalty to France, he was aware all the while that this loyalty was not reciprocated. In the summer of 1799, the gens de couleur rose in rebellion in the north and the south, and with weary inevitability, another brutal and bitter civil war engulfed the colony, known this time as the War of Knives. Somewhat at the end of his tether, and with uncharacteristic ruthlessness, Toussaint moved quickly to crush the rebellion, dealing with these rebels in dramatic and violent fashion. Dessalines commanded forces in the south and Toussaint in the north. Numbers of gens de couleur were executed and many others summarily killed. Men were stuffed into cannons and blown to shreds while others were taken offshore in ships, killed, and dumped at sea. As this was taking place in Saint-Domingue, changes were underway in France. Napoleon overthrew the Directory and made himself consul of France, and while initially he offered his support to Toussaint, he also warned that the civil war had to end. With customary caution, Toussaint attempted to negotiate with the gens de couleur, but rather predictably without success, after which, with the tacit support of Napoleon, he crushed the rebellion with brutal finality. Knowing the nature of his top commander, he sent Dessalines south to impress upon the defeated the displeasure of the government, which was done with a heavy-handed display of violence that was quickly becoming Dessalines’ trademark. Rebels were publicly tortured and killed by the thousands. Dessalines himself was joyously in the thick of the slaughter. Toussaint later complained, “I told him to prune the trees, not uproot them.” In the meanwhile, upon his own authority, Toussaint moved to formalize a de facto French occupation of Spanish Santo Domingo by moving his army across the border. Resistance was minimal, and within a few weeks he was master of the entire island. While Napoleon no doubt received the news of a French victory with satisfaction, he was also unnerved by the independent nature of the commander of his colonial army. Toussaint’s profile, of course, was immeasurably enhanced at home by his bringing emancipation to the entire island. The cost, however, had been enormous, and by the turn of the century, Saint-Domingue was in ruins. By conservative estimates, two-thirds of the

blacks in the colony had been killed, as had two-thirds of the whites and a quarter of the gens de couleur. The cities were crumbling and most of the plantations were destroyed, along with their factories and intricate irrigation networks. The flight of capital and expertise had impoverished the colony, which had its infrastructure now lying in ruins. Toussaint effectively nationalized the plantations, leasing them to prominent men, usually senior officers, under terms that required them to rebuild and to remit one-quarter of the profits to their workers. Conditions of labor were codified in law and moderated, and to provide that labor, the army was sent out to force blacks to work. It was a balancing act to rebuild the shattered economy while convincing a free labor market that somehow their lives had improved. In fact, it is not impossible that some reflected on their current circumstances, many without even food, to wonder if they had not been better off before. In pursuit of this policy, Dessalines played an important role. Toussaint understood the simple economic reality that required the emancipated labor of the colony to return quickly to work. They were no longer slaves but “cultivators.” Many, perhaps even a majority, did not wish to return to work, having settled independently on the land, and as a consequence, coercion was required. Dessalines was given the job of “inspector of cultivation,” which was, in practical effect, an open endorsement to do what needed to be done to get the population back into the fields. A minor rebellion followed, but Dessalines handled it with customary brutality, leaving some 3,000 “cultivators” dead. In this regard, Dessalines was again very useful in offering Toussaint plausible deniability for the bloodshed that followed. Dessalines is supposed to have owned dozens of estates, and while this is almost certainly untrue, he was a major landowner and he as much as any other among the new elites was incentivized to get the population back to work. He held several leases, and in adapting his military tactics to the management of labor, he proved that he could behave with equal barbarity toward blacks as he could to whites and gens de couleur. A popular punishment for those who he imagined reluctant to work was to send them through a gauntlet of club-wielding troops. A contemporary observer remarked that 10 free citizens on any of Dessalines’s estates did more work than 30 slaves in the old days.

Naturally, this “cultivation” system was not popular, but furthermore, it was not particularly effective. Another unpopular policy opposed bitterly by Dessalines was Toussaint’s decision to encourage whites who had fled the colony to return, in part to professionalize the administration and return rational economics to the plantation system. Toussaint himself held four leases, and, as was true for all of the elite of his military, he accumulated conspicuous wealth very quickly. On his flagship estate, he built a virtual palace, lavishly furnished and decorated, and he carried himself, some were apt to observe, in the manner of a French aristocrat. He was on friendly terms with the Grand Empress Josephine, who was a creole from the island of Martinique and owned property on SaintDomingue, and he began to accumulate dictatorial powers, an appetite for pomp and ceremony, and a taste for wealth. In the spring of 1801, Toussaint gathered his inner circle and met with a view to drafting a constitution, realizing that as peace seemed possible between France and Britain, Napoleon would soon have the opportunity and the resources to reassert French control over the island. The constitution was really an attempt to preempt a French decree reinstating slavery, which many suspected was imminent, but it also marked an interesting milestone in Toussaint’s career. Ironically, no member of the constitutional assembly was black besides Toussaint himself. The key article was the third, which declared, “Slaves cannot exist in this territory and servitude is forever abolished. Here, all men are born, live, and die, free and French.” In addition to that, Toussaint claimed dictatorial powers, declaring himself governor for life, and while he was careful to couch the message in patriotic, pro-French rhetoric, he was essentially declaring the colony independent. French officials on the island worked hard to dissuade him from presenting the constitution to Napoleon, who could be relied upon to react indignantly, and to fly in the face of France and Napoleon could hardly go well. Toussaint’s enemies were stirred, for there was a sense now that Toussaint had gone too far and the French would be on their way before long. Anticipating precisely this, Toussaint purged those he knew or perceived to be disloyal with swift violence.

Indeed, Napoleon was indeed enraged when he heard about the constitution. While consulting with economists over the question of whether the colonies were more profitable with slavery or without it, he replied that “the sooner we return to that system the better.” In October 1801, peace between France and Britain was declared, and the blockade that had for so long prevented French troops from landing on the island was lifted. Napoleon’s brother-in-law, General Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc, was appointed to lead a French expeditionary force to SaintDomingue, overcome all organized resistance, and reimpose slavery. Toussaint was to be captured without violence, given due honors and consideration, but then returned with dispatch to France. As an incentive for him to submit, his two sons, Placide and Isaac, being schooled in France, would return with Leclerc as de facto hostages.

Leclerc On February 2, 1802, as Toussaint watched from a bluff above the harbor of Le Cap, one French ship after another disembarked troops and supplies. The same was true in other ports. The writing was on the wall, and Toussaint promptly ordered the destruction of the city before he led his army south. Nothing, he realized, would defeat the French other than the wholesale destruction of the colony. “Burn everything,” he wrote to Dessalines. “Block the roads, pollute the wells with corpses and dead horses. Leave nothing white behind you.”

This was precisely the sort of order Dessalines relished, and he set to work massacring any person known or suspected to be white, leaving piles of corpses in his wake as a warning to others. As the French campaigned, Leclerc, with the help of Toussaint’s own sons, persuaded Toussaint that Napoleon admired him, wanted peace, and that full honors would be given to him upon his surrender. However, after easily taking the main urban centers, the French ran into unexpectedly fierce resistance in the countryside, and due to shocking troop mortality from tropical fever, Leclerc was certainly in no position to claim a successful conquest. Fortunately for the French, Toussaint suffered a devastating military defeat at a pass known as Ravine-a-Couleuvres, after which one of his most trusted generals, Jacques Maurepas, abruptly took his men over to the French and was rewarded with the rank of general in the army of France. Upon that, Toussaint fell back on a sporadic guerrilla campaign, leaving Dessalines in command of a large conventional force. This had the effect of allowing Dessalines to emerge as the most powerful man in the colony. Dessalines occupied the old British fort at Crête-à-Pierrot, and from there he watched as French forces marched towards him across the plains below. The Battle of Crête-à-Pierrot was one of the defining actions of the Haitian Revolution. It took place on March 24, 1802 and was a bitter and hardfought battle from which the French emerged victorious, prompting Dessalines to follow his fellow commanders and declare his loyalty to France. Like Jacques Maurepas and Henry Christophe, he then carried his force across to the French, and in a signature act of betrayal, he joined the French in their hunt for Toussaint. While Jacques Maurepas would be dead in a year at the hands of the French and Henry Christophe would wait in the wings, Dessalines had immediate and far-reaching plans. In the ebb and flow of loyalty and alliance, Toussaint was now the common enemy, and for his plans to come to fruition, Toussaint needed to disappear.

A depiction of the battle Perhaps the greatest significance of the Battle of Crête-à-Pierrot was that it served to convince Toussaint that his situation was hopeless. After a brief negotiation by messenger, he entered Le Cap at the head of a small force of 400 men, not necessarily intending to surrender, but to negotiate a political solution. Under a deluge of flattery and subtle coercion, Toussaint was indeed persuaded to surrender, but to be fair, he hardly had a choice. He declined a commission in the French army, declaring that he wished to retire to his estate at Ennery on the north of the island. The decision was made on May 7, 1802, at which point the French resumed direct control of the colony. Leclerc, of course, was not about to allow Toussaint to remain on the island as a future leader and rallying point for renewed rebellion. A few months later, he was invited to the headquarters of one of Leclerc’s generals, Jean-Baptiste Brunet, who had him seized and arrested. Toussaint was taken immediately to Gonaïves, a port on the west coast, and was put aboard a ship waiting to transport him to France. While he could see the writing on the wall, Toussaint nonetheless expressed his wounded dignity and protested bitterly over his arrest and

transportation. While he wore his French general’s uniform for the duration of his voyage, it was stripped by Napoleon’s orders at the moment that he landed. He and his family were then separately incarcerated despite Toussaint’s insistence that they were innocent of any involvement. Toussaint was taken to Fort-de-Joux, an isolated position in the Jura Mountains, and there he was held indefinitely, ostensibly on a charge of treason, but with no formal indictment brought. He entered his cell on August 25, 1802, and he succumbed very quickly to the bitter cold of the northern European uplands. The picture is painted of a derelict black man in a stone-clad cell in the grip of a winter storm, faithfully completing his memoir, committing his revolutionary philosophy and personal odyssey to paper, and declaring his loyalty to France.

A picture of Fort-de-Joux Napoleon, intrigued by it all, was given a copy of Toussaint’s memoir and read it. A plea for a court martial was handed to the French leader, but he tossed it aside. That said, while it was interesting enough to have a black revolutionary imprisoned in his realm, he was certainly never tempted to free him. On April 7, 1803, just a few months before Haiti finally obtained its independence, Toussaint L’Ouverture died at the age of 60. His causes of

death have been variously cited as exhaustion, malnutrition, apoplexy, pneumonia, and tuberculosis.

Haiti “My name is despised by all who yearn for slavery, and that the oppressors will only speak it by cursing the day I was born.” – Jean- Jacques Dessalines Shortly after defeating Toussaint, Napoleon’s government reinstituted slavery on the islands of Guadalupe and New Granada, but the French were careful not to do the same on Saint-Domingue, at least not for the time being. However, the message that this sent to the free blacks of SaintDomingue was simply that their freedom would never be safe without full independence, and this simply prompted yet another mass uprising. The fighting in Saint-Domingue, from the days of the first rebellion to the last, was always characterized by excess violence and sprees of wanton destruction, and this time was no different. Leclerc, ailing in the tropical climate and soon to die of yellow fever, tried to fight fire with fire, meeting violence with terror in a complete abandonment of principle. When he died, his successor, the Vicomte de Rochambeau, a man of famously limited imagination, adopted the same tactic. The French response merely solidified the resistance, and the movement was now led by none other than Dessalines. The rebels benefited from the fact that Napoleon, once again embroiled in a European conflict, found himself for the second time forced to make a pragmatic decision. No longer able to support major French troop deployments in the Caribbean, he decided to concentrate his efforts in Europe. That year, the Louisiana territory was sold to the United States, which, if nothing else, was a clear sign that the French leader was rethinking his strategic interests in the New World. Aided by a renewed British blockade of French ports in the Caribbean, Dessalines, with a tactical brilliance few in the past would have credited him as having, succeeded quickly in overrunning the island, and by the end of 1803, the beleaguered French garrison was trapped in the northern port cities. In November of that year, Dessalines’ bloated force of rebels, flush with a series of victories, confronted Rochambeau outside the walls of Cap-Haitien and delivered the French general a decisive defeat. This forced the French command to surrender not to the advancing rebel army, but to British Commodore John Loring, whose ship took the French captives back to Europe.

Loring This was a defining moment, and despite the fact he was always unstable and never trusted by Toussaint, Dessalines declared Saint-Domingue independent on January 1, 1804. The name for the new nation was “Haiti,” the traditional Tainos name for Hispaniola. The word means “The Land of Mountains.” Dessalines had served as Governor-General of Saint-Domingue since November 1803, and with a largely illiterate and unsophisticated constituency, his trajectory towards dictatorial leadership was somewhat inevitable. His military prowess was by then widely acknowledged, not just on a personal level as a frontline warrior, but as a commander and strategist. Initially, he was eclipsed by Toussaint and others, mainly because of their

comparative sophistication, but also perhaps because of his independent streak and his violent ways. Almost immediately after the declaration of independence, Dessalines made himself Governor-General for life, an office that he held for less than a year before accepting the role offered to him by his senior military commanders as Emperor of Haiti. Thus, on October 6, 1804 in a lavish coronation held in Le Cap, he was crowned Emperor Jacques I. A few months later, an “Imperial Constitution” was promulgated that named him emperor for life with the right to name his successor. Observers overseas would undoubtedly have sagely nodded their heads, taking a “we told you so” attitude, as the common man of Haiti, after a generation of violent bloodshed and centuries of slavery, found themselves locked into a dictatorship of atrocious corruption and cruelty that would survive late into the 20th century. The international community balked at any suggestion of granting recognition to Haiti, and for a very long time no major country did. Indeed, the United States did not formally recognize Haitian independence until 1862, more than half a century after the fact. The practical effects of this lack of recognition were that they compounded the state of ruin in which the country languished. Still coping with more than a decade of brutally destructive civil war, on a subliminal level it simply crystalized an already potent sense of racial grievance among blacks in the territory. With justification, they sensed that, to the white powers of the world, the notion of a successful slave rebellion and a self-declared black republic was simply too abhorrent to allow. As the nation brooded over this slight, and as the population slid into the state of almost perpetual poverty that would characterize it from then on, it was Dessalines who appeared to take it most personally and to turn his thoughts to the remaining white population of the island. What followed was one of the darkest episodes in the history of Haiti. Dessalines sought to slake his fury and stamp his authority in one sweeping action. There were many voices at the highest level of the revolution calling for the complete annihilation of all whites and any gens de couleur overtly allied with the Europeans, but by the time Haiti was independent, a majority of grands blancs had already fled the island. Thus, the whites who remained

were mostly the petit blancs who were either unable to leave or felt somehow favored by the revolution. While the pressure to retain slavery mainly came from whites, the pressure to abolish it was also mainly spearheaded by whites, and a certain balance of understanding had settled, albeit briefly, on the racial dynamic of the country in the early 19th century. Dessalines, however, issued surreptitious orders to the fathers of every city in the nation to wipe out their white populations, using silent weapons to alert no one and to ease the dispatch of the task. Those who were ordered to massacre the whites did not completely comply while carrying out one or two high profile killings, most shied away from the wholesale massacres ordered by their emperor. Historians have sought to explain this restraint as a symptom of war-weariness, and perhaps that there was a general feeling that whites were necessary for the rebuilding of Haiti. Undeterred by their refusal, Dessalines embarked on a national tour, visiting each of the major centers in the company of a strong force of palace guard, and he personally oversaw the slaughters himself. An 1806 engraving that appeared in the French press pictured Dessalines, in imperial costume, one arm raised with a sword in hand and another clutching the severed head of a white woman. According to local legend, whenever the mood struck him, Dessalines personally plunged into the thick of the killing and derived great pleasure in doing the work himself.

An 1806 depiction of Dessalines holding the severed head of a white woman While it remains unclear whether Dessalines personally massacred civilians during this time, there is no denying how bloody and horrifying the massacres were. The stories describing various atrocities are numerous, and the atrocities were often officially orchestrated following a set pattern. For example, Dessalines’ men would rape mothers and daughters before killing husbands and sons. Once a city was completely purged, Dessalines would enter the city and declare amnesty to any white person who had somehow succeeded in escaping the slaughter. When various white people did emerge, they were seized and put to death in whatever manner happened to most

interest Dessalines that morning. Estimates vary for the toll of the massacres, but it is widely accepted that about 3,000-5,000 white Haitians were killed in the process. The massacres are bloody stains on Dessalines’ legacy, but they were also emblematic of his political acumen. Contemporaries like Toussaint had always considered him an obedient, simple-minded executioner whose iconoclastic bloodlust was his only attribute, so it must have struck them that Toussaint’s erstwhile deputy, a murderous brute, was the one to emerge from the scrum and seize Haiti’s crown. Likewise, if Dessalines’ political policies failed him, then in fairness most of the blame lay with foreign powers that would not recognize Haitian independence and would do no business with it. In fact, some navies occasionally went so far as to blockade the ports in an effort to strangle the life out of the fledgling black republic. In a situation like that, merely surviving the initial years of independence was an achievement for Haiti and its leaders. Toussaint is remembered as the revolutionary activist leavened by hard political reality, but in many respects, the same can be said of Dessalines, the rebellious acolyte who both emulated and betrayed his mentor. In a proclamation delivered in the aftermath of the massacres, Dessalines declared himself an enemy of European colonization who had saved his country and avenged America. Part of it warned, “Shiver in fear, tyrants, usurpers, scourges of the New World.” However, despite the tough words, he worked with great political fluency to try and pry open Haiti’s isolation, premised on a well-conceived export-based plantation model. To do so, he kept in place the cultivator system and worked with both dexterity and skill to maneuver Haiti into the international community. Perhaps inevitably, with a man of such undisciplined passion at the helm of government, disaffected comrades and fellow revolutionaries would begin to intrigue against him. One conspiracy was led by Alexandre Pétion and Henri Christophe, who are now regarded, along with Toussaint, as the founding fathers of Haiti. While en route to deal with a military disturbance north of Port-au-Prince, Dessalines was ambushed and gunned down, after which his body was dragged back into the city and mutilated.

Henri Christophe

Alexandre Pétion Before his death, Dessalines did not name his successor, and a style of revolutionary succession played out that would be repeated in Haiti over the coming decades. Henri Christophe was crowned Henry I, and the cycle further entrenched itself with each passing generation.

Different Legacies “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.” – Toussaint L’Ouverture Dessalines was one of the most complex and puzzling leaders of the early black liberation movement, and that all but ensured he would be mythologized beyond recognition in ways that are both good and bad. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the Haitian academic and anthropologist, remarked of Dessalines, “Most of the literature produced in Haiti remains respectful – too respectful, I would say – of the revolutionary leaders.” The same could also be said of Toussaint L’Ouverture, who has historically been depicted as a moderate in an era of radicalism, and a visionary, almost messianic leader in the great struggle for liberation. That his violence was less egregious and more controlled than Dessalines’ does not remove the stain of his many atrocities, but both men were products of an era of institutionalized brutality. They lived in a place where moderation was impossible, and the kind of violent behavior that would now be considered extreme was simply the norm. Dessalines, as far as his detractors have been concerned, was a dictatorial psychopath in his time ruling Haiti as Emperor Jacques I, and he set the tone for a standard and style of rule that would manifest much later in the likes of “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier. Henri Christophe would succeed Dessalines as King Henry I and follow the same pattern, which would be faithfully replicated in others. If anything, this style would not truly be broken until the 1991 election of the cleric Jean-Bertrand Aristide as the first democratically elected leader of Haiti. Dessalines was at the very least a radical with a profound hatred for the institution of slavery, based on his own experience of the very worst of it. In the same vein, he despised colonialism as a system, whites as a race, and the French above all else. This combination drove Dessalines to implement measures that left his legacy in stark contrast to the one enjoyed by Toussaint, even as he has been perhaps the most prominent of the revolutionary leaders in Haiti today. The national anthem is La

Dessalinienne, his likeness adorns stamps and currency, and his statue is displayed prominently on Port-au-Prince’s Champ de Mars.

A mural of Dessalines in Port-au-Prince While Dessalines serves on a visceral level as the fundamental hero of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint has been portrayed more as a revolutionary

ideologue and cerebral warrior, driven to war by necessity, but preoccupied with ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity and statehood. More has been attributed to him in popular culture than he perhaps deserves, but regardless, when their legacies are considered together, both Toussaint and Dessalines comprehensively defined the spirit of the Haitian Revolution.

Online Resources Other titles about Haiti on Amazon

Further Reading Alexis, Stephen. 1949. Black Liberator: The Life of Toussaint Louverture. London: Ernest Benn. Ardouin, Beaubrun. 1958. Études sur l'Histoire d'Haïti. Port-au-Prince: Dalencour. Beard, John Relly. 1853. The Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture: The Negro Patriot of Hayti. ISBN 1-58742-010-4 — [1863] 2001. Toussaint L'Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography (online ed.). Boston: James Redpath. — Consists of the earlier "Life", supplemented by an autobiography of Toussaint written by himself. Bell, Madison Smartt (2008) [2007]. Toussaint L'Ouverture: A Biography. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 978-1400079353. de Cauna, Jacques. 2004. Toussaint L'Ouverture et l'indépendance d'Haïti. Témoignages pour une commémoration. Paris: Ed. Karthala. Cesaire, Aimé. 1981. Toussaint L'Ouverture. Paris: Présence Africaine. ISBN 2-7087-0397-8. Davis, David Brion. 31 May 2007. "He changed the New World." The New York Review of Books. pp. 54–58. — Review of M. S. Bell's Toussaint L'Ouverture: A Biography. Dubois, Laurent, and John D. Garrigus. 2006. Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789–1804: A Brief History with Documents. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-41501-X. DuPuy, Alex. 1989. Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race, and Underdevelopment since 1700. Westview Press. ISBN 0-8133-7348-4. Ferrer, Ada. 2014. Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107697782 Foix, Alain. 2007. Toussaint L'Ouverture. Paris: Ed. Gallimard.

— 2008. Noir de Toussaint L'Ouverture à Barack Obama. Paris: Ed. Galaade. Forsdick, Charles, and Christian Høgsbjerg, eds. 2017. The Black Jacobins Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. — 2017. Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions. London: Pluto Press. ISBN 9780745335148. Geggus, David, ed. 2002. Haitian Revolutionary Studies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0253341044. Girard, Philippe. 2009. "Black Talleyrand: Toussaint L'Ouverture’s Secret Diplomacy with England and the United States." William and Mary Quarterly 66(1):87–124. — 2009. "Napoléon Bonaparte and the Emancipation Issue in SaintDomingue, 1799–1803." French Historical Studies 32(4):587–618. — 2011. The Slaves who Defeated Napoléon: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801–1804. University of Alabama Press. ISBN 0817317325. — 2012. "Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal." William and Mary Quarterly. — 2016. Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Basic Books. Graham, Harry. 1913. "The Napoleon of San Domingo", The Dublin Review 153:87–110. Heinl, Robert, and Nancy Heinl. 1978. Written in Blood: The story of the Haitian people, 1492–1971. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-26305-0. Hunt, Alfred N. 1988. Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 0-8071-3197-0. James, C. L. R. [1934] 2013. Toussaint L'Ouverture: The story of the only successful slave revolt in history: A Play in Three Acts. Duke University Press.

— [1963] 2001. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-029981-5. Johnson, Ronald Angelo. 2014. Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Joseph, Celucien L. 2012. Race, Religion, and The Haitian Revolution: Essays on Faith, Freedom, and Decolonization. CreateSpace Independent Publishing. — 2013. From Toussaint to Price-Mars: Rhetoric, Race, and Religion in Haitian Thought. CreateSpace Independent Publishing. Korngold, Ralph. [1944] 1979. Citizen Toussaint. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-20794-1. de Lacroix, F. J. Pamphile. [1819] 1995. La révolution d'Haïti. Norton, Graham Gendall. April 2003. "Toussaint L'Ouverture." History Today. Ott, Thomas. 1973. The Haitian Revolution: 1789–1804. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. ISBN 0-87049-545-3 Parkinson, Wenda. 1978. 'This Gilded African': Toussaint L'Ouverture. Quartet Books. Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. 2006. Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion. Westport, CT: Greenwood. ISBN 0-313-33271-1. Ros, Martin. [1991] 1994. The Night of Fire: The Black Napoleon and the Battle for Haiti (in Dutch). New York; Sarpedon. ISBN 0-9627613-7-0. Schlesinger Jr., Arthur M. World leaders, past & present – Toussaint L'ouverture. Schoelcher, Victor. 1889. Vie de Toussaint-L'Ouverture. Stinchcombe, Arthur L. 1995. Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The Political Economy of the Caribbean World. Princeton University Press. ISBN 1-4008-0777-8

The Collective Works of Yves. ISBN 1-4010-8308-0 Book I explains Haiti's past to be recognized. Book 2 culminates Haiti's scared present day epic history. Thomson, Ian. 1992. Bonjour Blanc: A Journey Through Haiti. London. ISBN 0-09-945215-4. L'Ouverture, Toussaint. 2008. The Haitian Revolution, with an introduction by J. Aristide. New York: Verso. — A collection of L'Ouverture's writings and speeches. ISBN 1-84467-261-1. Tyson, George F., ed. 1973. Great Lives Considered: Toussaint L'Ouverture. Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-925529-X. — A compilation, includes some of Toussaint's writings.

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Isaac L’Ouverture, Toussaint L’Ouverture’s son, published a memoir in 1825 that also offered a few snippets of biographical detail. This too is a disputed detail, and according to Wikipedia his date of birth was 20 May 1743. According to himself he fathered sixteen children, eleven of whom died before he did. Nouveua Libre described this liberated by the revolution and anciens libre those liberated before the revolution.