A History of the World (61 page)

So why did such a lush, successful place become the nightmarish demonstration of all that can go worst in human public life? The answer is slavery, and what happened when slavery collided with the high ideals of French democracy. Saint-Domingue saw the first and only successful revolt by black slaves against their white oppressors. And though the eventual outcome was bleak for the people of Haiti, quickly forgotten when the white northern nations had moved beyond sugar plantations and slave ships, the uprising has at its heart one of the most inspiring leaders of the eighteenth century.

His name was Toussaint L’Ouverture. His father was an African chief who had been captured in war, sold as a slave and bought by a French planter. His son Toussaint, one of eight children born to the displaced chieftain and his Catholic wife, had a privileged upbringing compared with most slaves, learning a little French and Latin, and rising to become overseer of livestock on his master’s estate. Though he never suffered the tortures and regular whippings of most of the wretched sugar-plantation workers, he was nevertheless a slave until
freed, aged thirty-three. By the time of the French Revolution, he was already in his forties and grey-haired, and known as ‘Old Toussaint’. His surname ‘L’Ouverture’ was a nickname referring either to his later ability as a military commander to find ‘openings’ in enemy ranks, or possibly to the gaps between his teeth.
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He was small, a superb horseman, and a man of charisma.

Toussaint’s world was part of the Atlantic slave trade, which lasted for nearly four centuries until it ended in the late nineteenth century. It is estimated that 12.4 million people were captured in Africa, loaded onto slave ships and taken to the Caribbean, South America and North America, nearly two million of them dying on the crossing, even before they reached the plantations.
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Add to that the huge death rate caused by the African wars, after Ashanti, Dahomey, Kongo and other kings, realizing how lucrative captives could be, slaughtered both old and young, then took the healthy adults to the coast in death marches. Then add the mortality rate in the holding-pens for slaves on the coast and the number who died in the first year or two of plantation ‘seasoning’, and the total death rate was probably higher than the number of slaves crossing the Atlantic – some sixteen million.
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The systematic capture of African slaves to work in the labour-intensive open-air factories of the sugar plantations had been pioneered by Arab Muslims, who had faced slave rebellions themselves in Mesopotamia. But this was pushed to its logical extreme by the combination of Atlantic navigation, the conquest of fertile new lands, and by Europe’s insatiable desire for cheaper sugar, tobacco and cotton. It was the Portuguese who began the business on their early acquisitions, the Cape Verde islands and Madeira, in the late 1400s. Their large colony in Brazil explains why Portuguese slavers would eventually account for 40 per cent of the trade; but soon most other European seafaring nations were involved too, from the Spanish and French to the Dutch and the Danes. In the eighteenth century, however, it was the British who had become dominant.

There are few darker (or better-known) stories in history than that of the ‘Middle Passage’, the stage in the triangular trade in which crammed slave-ships took the human muscle from Africa to the Americas. The sugar and other raw materials their labour produced were then imported back to Europe, European manufactured goods having been sent to the colonies in the first stage of this traffic. In effect,
before the full flood of the industrial revolution, the more advanced European economies were using foreign human labour as the machines to drive their own prosperity. Today, the stories of the anti-slavery movement of outraged Christian reformers are particularly celebrated. But brave men and women though they were, they do not wipe away the two centuries of trade.

All this is simple, and not so remote. The sweet taste of sugared tea in the mouth – the satisfying smack of rum on the lips – the soft feeling of a fresh cotton shirt – the calming exhalation of good tobacco smoke – these were the intense physical pleasures that allowed generations of Europeans to avert their eyes from the slave economy on which they depended. Even with television and the other modern communication media, it remains very easy to enjoy a slickly designed computer tablet, a line of cocaine or bright throwaway clothing without thinking too hard about how they come to be so cheaply available. From the 1600s on, huge fortunes were made from Glasgow to Lisbon, fine terraces erected in Bristol and Nantes, powerful politicians funded in London, Paris and Amsterdam, by the slave trade. The cruelty of the trade, from the brandings and whippings on the plantations to the feeding of slaves to sharks and the use of cannibalism as a punishment, was so nauseating that it makes a mockery of much of the style and intellectual swagger of Enlightenment Europe. The slave ships, packed with shackled men and women, stank so badly that their arrival could be smelt when they were well offshore. Sharks followed them across the Atlantic for the bodies regularly tossed overboard.

Saint-Domingue was one of the hungriest markets for slaves during the heyday of British and French slave-shipping because the disease-ridden tropical climate and the rigours of cutting and boiling sugar-cane killed them off so quickly that the landowners always wanted more. In the century running up to the French Revolution around 850,000 slaves had been brought there; but far from the black population increasing, as one might have expected, by the time the revolution broke out there were only 435,000 blacks in the colony. There was nothing specifically French about this. The figures for British-run Jamaica were similar. It is a loss of life so huge that it goes a long way towards explaining what happened when those slaves finally did rise up.

The colony, ruled by Louis XIV’s 1685 Slave Code, had developed
a complex and volatile population. There were the rich white planters, often the second, or the disgraced, sons of French aristocrats. There was a larger class of poorer whites – shopkeepers, artisans, plantation overseers and some farmers. Then there was a yet larger class of part-white, part-black people, the abundant fruit of a century or more of white men taking black women. These ‘mulattos’ were in turn divided into a hierarchy, depending on how black or white their parentage was. Some had become relatively rich themselves and were deeply resented by the poorer whites, though they had no political rights. Finally, in the huge majority, came the blacks – mostly, but not all, slaves. Groups of escaped blacks had found refuge in Saint-Domingue’s highlands, where they practised voodoo cults and occasionally plotted to attack the plantations.

Into this explosive mix, arriving like a firecracker, came news of the French Revolution. The rich whites were, unsurprisingly, mostly royalists, as were the local officials and army officers. But many of the other whites were enthusiastic republicans, as were many mulattos. Then, hovering across the border and hoping to take advantage of the chaos were the Spanish in their colony, which was the other half of the island, Santo Domingo; and not far across the sea, the British, with their colony of Jamaica and their awesome navy.

The story of the Haitian Revolution was therefore bound to be a complicated one. Rebel slaves sometimes joined with the Spanish against the French revolutionaries; the French fought on each side; the mulattos might take the royalists’ side, or even that of the invading British. Everyone was struggling for position, while the news from Paris kept changing. In the early part of the revolution, middle-class Parisian democrats, many of whom had made good money from the sugar trade, were keen to preserve slavery. Anti-slavery campaigners, including Englishmen, hoped the revolution would be a turning-point, but in this they were frustrated. Debates in the Convention about Saint-Domingue were conducted in mumbled, embarrassed code, avoiding the very word ‘slave’.

Later, as the revolution became more democratic, black rights were proclaimed. In January 1794 a former slave, Jean-Baptiste Belley, speaking in the Convention, demanded the abolition of slavery and was acclaimed with great emotion. The twentieth-century Marxist historian C.L.R. James, who wrote the pioneering account of the Haiti
uprising, said: ‘It was fitting that a Negro and an ex-slave should make the speech which introduced one of the most important legislative acts ever passed by any political assembly.’
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Yet all too soon, as the anti-Jacobin reaction set in, the mood in Paris swung violently against the slaves and in favour of the old order.

The man trying to hold a course that would lead to the complete freeing of all the blacks of Saint-Domingue was Toussaint L’Ouverture. To start, with the French Revolution brought conflict between the rival royalist and republican French, and between the poor whites and the mulattos, who wanted their rights too. There were uprisings by slaves on other French islands, Martinique and Guadeloupe, too.

Toussaint, a Catholic and a herbal physician, began as a cautious and moderate leader of the rebel slaves, looking for compromises and ready to do deals for an amnesty for the leaders – which, treacherously, would have left most of the rebels returned to slavery. For a time he fought with the Spanish royalists against the revolution, so suspicious was he of the poorer white radicals. But as he became a more experienced and successful military leader – he had carefully studied Julius Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
and seems to have had as much natural aptitude for war as Napoleon himself – Toussaint adopted the all-or-nothing Rights of Man approach of the Jacobin leaders in Paris. He turned a ragtag mob of angry slaves into a disciplined, clever and determined army that won victory after victory.

Their greatest was against the British, who tried to take over the colony, pretending to side with the blacks and mulattos and the cause of liberty but really intent on exploiting France’s weakness. British ministers were all too aware that slaves on their island, Jamaica, had revolted in 1760. Toussaint toyed with British offers, but was becoming ever more enthusiastic about the ideals of the French Revolution, if not about the agents sent by France to keep him in check. He inflicted on the British army one of the most embarrassing defeats in its history. This has been quietly ignored by patriotic historians, but it cost so many British casualties that it rivalled the toll in the Peninsular War against Napoleon.

Toussaint was a complicated leader. He genuinely seems to have revered France but decided that, in practice, this colony had better be run almost independently by himself, just to make sure no attempt was made to bring back slavery. As the revolution stumbled and more
conservative leaders took power in Paris, he warned them that if they were to try it, they would be attempting the impossible: ‘We have known how to face dangers to obtain our liberty – we shall know how to brave death to maintain it.’
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By this time, for all the bloodshed and suspicion, the slave revolt had radically changed racial attitudes on the island. When a mulatto rival of Toussaint’s called Rigaud was accused of refusing to obey him because his leader was a full-blown negro, he erupted: ‘Is it a tint of colour, more or less dark, which instills principles of philosophy or gives merit to an individual?’ He went on: ‘I am too much a believer in the Rights of Man to think that there is one colour in nature superior to another. I know a man only as a man.’

After expelling the British and taking over Santo Domingo, Toussaint became for several years the virtual dictator of the colony. He seems to have done an extraordinary job in restoring a land devastated by war, making the workers go back to the plantations to prevent famine, beginning to establish schools and a system of local government, creating lawcourts, building a fine hotel, introducing simple taxes and tackling smugglers. Surrounded by other former slaves and liberal whites, he held open soirées where he could be petitioned, and criss-crossed the island on horseback to check every administrative detail. He introduced a printed constitution, with a general assembly subordinate to himself as governor. Gleaming there in the Caribbean was the chance of a genuinely multiracial commonwealth ruled by blacks.

It was gleaming far too brightly, however, for the liking of that other self-appointed ruler, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had no time for blacks and fully understood that the permanent loss of Saint-Domingue, which had once accounted for two-thirds of France’s overseas wealth, would be a terrible blow. He played cat-and-mouse with Toussaint, until a brief interlude of peace with Britain and his other enemies allowed Napoleon to send twenty thousand troops – the largest army that had ever left France by ship – to crush the black revolution.

Toussaint had by now fallen out with some of his ablest lieutenants and more radical black supporters, who thought he was too lenient to the whites and too hard on his own people. He dithered about whether he wanted a complete break with France, and about how radical his new free island should be. But when Napoleon’s
generals landed, they found him almost as difficult to defeat as the British had. A savage new war broke out, and the black regiments, singing their revolutionary songs back at the French, came close to winning. Had a few of Toussaint’s senior commanders not switched sides, he could have held on until the season of rain and disease arrived to finish off the invaders. As it was, he parleyed for an armistice, was betrayed, arrested and packed off to France, where Napoleon had him confined in an icy prison until he died.

This was not the end of the story, however. Toussaint’s capture did not crush the spirit of the freed slaves. The French commanders began a brutal attempt to exterminate the mulattos and to kill so many blacks that they would be cowed back into slavery. But the mass drownings, burnings and attacks with specially trained dogs had the opposite effect, and a new guerrilla war began. For the first time, it became something close to a full race war, the black forces now led by a whip-mark-scarred former slave called Jean-Jacques Dessalines. He had been a brilliant general under Toussaint, but possessed none of his moderation or modesty. Terrible atrocities were committed by both sides. As local revolts erupted all around them, French willpower gave out and the remnants of Napoleon’s grand invasion force fled from the island, to be captured by waiting British naval ships.