Read Toussaint Louverture Online
Authors: Madison Smartt Bell
Toussaint Louverture (6 page)
and see this land which we have watered with our sweat—or what shall I say: with our blood; these edifices we have raised
in the hope of a just compensation; have we received it? No, Monsieur General; the king, the universe have bemoaned our fate, and have broken the chains which we were dragging, while we, humble victims, were ready to bear anything, we never wanted to leave our masters: what shall I say: I deceive myself, those who should have been fathers to us, after God, were tyrants, monsters unworthy of the fruit of our labors … No, it is too late; God who fights for the innocent is our guide; he will never abandon us, thus our device: Victory or death.
The letter goes on to demand that all the white colonists evacuate the Northern Department and Le Cap itself; they might depart unmolested if they left the country to the former slaves—”we are only after our dear liberty.” The letter concludes by swearing a third time “to win or to die for liberty”
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This letter was never sent, however, unless leaving it to be found in the routed camp could be considered away of both sending it and not. And hard-pressed as the white colonists might have been in 1791, they were a long way from considering evacuation of the north. By the summer of 1792, the goals of the rebel leaders were changing again, in the direction of conciliation and settlement.
That spring, when it had become clear that the members of the first commission were having no success at all in resolving the crisis in Saint Domingue, the French National Assembly also decided to change tactics. French legislators were inclined to believe, without much other basis than the colonists' propaganda, that the
gens de couleur
were behind all the disturbances in the colony, not only those in which they themselves took part but also the hugely destructive slave rebellion in the Northern Department. No one was quite ready to believe that the black slaves could have organized and carried it out all on their own. This suspicion was reinforced by Procurator Gros after his release; he had enjoyed a privileged view of the rebel organization and insisted that it was manipulated by
hommes de couleur
and by free blacks—two racially and socially different groups which were easy to confuse and
commingle on paper. So the comte de Guiton, addressing the National Assembly, was referring mostly to the mulattoes when he said, “We are without the means to resist them. Their progress is frightening. So we will have to treat with them; nothing is more immediate than this necessity.”
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On April 4, 1792, the National Assembly, increasingly radicalized and now influenced by an organization called Les Amis des Noirs, a French society advocating mulatto rights and with strong abolitionist leanings, passed a law guaranteeing civil and political rights to all free men, regardless of their race, or parentage, or status at birth. Still more alarming to Saint Domingue's white colonists was the term that all elected bodies formed without the participation of voters recognized by the law of April 4 were void and must be dissolved, pending new elections. Saint Domingue's Colonial Assembly accepted the new law as regards the rights of free men of color, but quickly decreed, on the 12th of May, that slavery would be perpetual in the colony.
On the strength of the law of April 4, Governor Blanchelande toured the Western and Southern departments, where he had some success in reconciling the confederations of
grands blancs
and
gens de couleurthsit
occupied most of the countryside with the
petits blancs
who had occupied Port-au-Prince and the other port towns, often with the support of sailors from ships in the harbor; these sailors were more and more inclined to identify themselves with the Jacobin revolutionaries in France. Meanwhile, the Northern Plain and the mountains surrounding it remained very much a no-go area for colonials of any faction. What the rebel slaves were actually doing up there, no one could know for certain. But they had at least temporarily eliminated slavery in a large swath of territory, creating a sort of free zone that included Dondon, Grande Riviere, Valliere, and the border town of Ouana-minthe on the Massacre River, and they had a wide open line of communication with Spanish Santo Domingo.
In July 1792, a wonderfully eloquent letter emerged from this quarter, addressed by the “Chiefs of the Revolt” to the General Assembly and the national commissioners (though the latter, except for Roume, had given up and gone back to France):
Gentlemen,
Those who have the honor to present you with these Memoirs are a class of men whom up to the present you have failed to recognize as like unto you, and whom you have covered in opprobrium by heaping upon them the ignominy attached to their unfortunate lot. These are men who don't know how to choose big words, but who are going to show you and all the world the justice of their cause; finally, they are those whom you call your slaves and who claim the rights to which all men may aspire.
For too long, Gentlemen, byway of abuses which one can never too strongly accuse to have taken place because our lack of understanding and our ignorance—for a very long time, I say, we have been victims of your greed and your avarice. Under the blows of your barbarous whip we have accumulated for you the treasures you enjoy in this colony; the human race has suffered to see with what barbarity you have treated men like yourself—yes, men—over whom you have no other right except that you are stronger and more barbaric than we; you've engaged in [slave] traffic, you have sold men for horses, and even that is the least of your shortcomings in the eyes of humanity; our lives depend on your caprice, and when it's a question of amusing yourselves it falls on a man like us
[sic]
who most often is guilty of no other crime than to be under your orders.
We are black, it is true, but tell us, Gentlemen, 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? Certainly you will not be able to make us see where that exists, if it is not in your imagination—always ready to form new [phantasms] so long as they are to your advantage. Yes, Gentlemen, we are free like you, and it is only by your avarice and our ignorance that anyone is still held in slavery up to this day, and we can neither see nor find the right which you
pretend to have over us, nor anything that could prove it to us, set down on the earth like you, all being children of the same father created in the same image. We are your equals then, by natural right, and if nature pleases itself to diversify colors within the human race, it is not a crime to be born black nor an advantage to be white. If the abuses in the Colony have gone on for several years, that was before the fortunate revolution which has taken place in the Motherland, which has opened for us the road which our courage and labor will enable us to ascend, to arrive at the temple of Liberty, like those brave Frenchmen who are our models and whom all the universe is contemplating.
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 fellowman to slavery, must come to an end, and that end is yours. You Gentlemen who pretend to subject us to slavery— have you not sworn to uphold the French Constitution of which you are members? What does it say, this respectable Constitution?—what is the fundamental law?; have you forgotten that you have formally vowed the declaration of the rights of man which says that men are born free, equal in their rights; that the natural rights include liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression? So then, as you cannot deny what you have sworn, we are within our rights, and you ought to recognize yourselves as perjurers; by your decrees you recognize that all men are free, but you want to maintain servitude for four hundred and eighty thousand individuals who allow you to enjoy all that you possess; by your creatures you offer us only to give liberty to our chiefs; but it is still one of your maxims of politics that is to say that those who have been the half of our work would be delivered by us to be your victims. No, we prefer a thousand deaths to acting that way toward our own kind. And you want to accord us the benefits which are due to us, they must also shower onto all of our brothers …
Gentlemen, in very few words you have seen our way of
thinking—it is unanimous and it is after consulting everyone to whom we are connected in the same cause that we present to you our demands, as follows.
First: General Liberty for all men detained in slavery.
Second: General amnesty for the past.
Third: The guarantee of these articles by the Spanish Government.
Fourth: the three articles above are the basis and the sole means to be able to have a peace which would be respected by the two parties, and only after the approbation that would be made in the name of the Colony and approved by M. the Lieutenant General and the National Civil Commissioners to present it to the King, and to the National Assembly. If like us, you desire that the articles above be accepted, we will commit ourselves to the following: first, to lay down our arms; second that each of us will return to the plantation to which he belongs and resume his work on condition of a wage which will be set by the year for each Cultivator who will begin to work for a fixed term.
Here, Gentlemen, is the request of men who are like you, and here is their final resolution: they are resolved to live free or die.
We have the honor to be, Gentlemen, your very humble and obedient servants.
(Signed)
Biassou, Jean-Fran$ois, Belair
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Between this letter and the one signed by Jean-François in September 1791 falls the failed negotiation with the members of the first commission. Only a few months before, the leaders of the revolt had been quite ready to sell their brethren back into slavery in return for a handful of liberties to be shared among themselves. Now it must be liberty for all or death, a demand expressed in similar terms to those of the September ‘91 letter, and founded on the idea of a natural human right to freedom. That notion had first been derived, by both the American
and the French revolutions, from the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
When the revolt first erupted out of Bois Caiman, most of the slaves who took part understood it to be a protest against the conditions of slavery. As of the writing of this letter, the rebellion now focused its attack on the entire institution of slavery—and did so in extraordinarily sophisticated terms for a gang of supposedly ignorant, illiterate, and generally uncivilized blacks. The authors show a detailed knowledge of the rhetoric of both the American and the French revolutions, and a familiarity with specific documents of the latter, like the Constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Their grasp of the abstract principles is very firm and they are astute and accurate in applying those principles to their own situation. Moreover, the practical clauses at the end of the letter show a thorough knowledge of the various levels of the French governmental system, at both the colonial and the national level: the writers had a clear idea of what it would take to make such an agreement stick.
Who wrote it? The white colonists of Saint Domingue dismissed it as the work of white or mulatto conspirators and instigators, which the uneducated blacks could never have written themselves; they must have merely signed it, perhaps without even understanding the content. At this time, the white colonists were, somewhat understandably, in a very paranoid and cynical state. They also had a near-pathological tendency to underestimate their black adversaries.
Most likely the letter was the product of a committee, and much of its phrasing may have been the work of other hands than those that signed it. All the black leaders (whether or not they could read and write themselves) made use of secretaries, often captured clerks like Procurator Gros. There were also the priests who had entered the rebel slave encampments, notably the Abbe Delahaye, who did have an interest in improving the lot of the slaves. It has long been assumed that Delahaye and other priests in the rebel-ruled free zone played a large part in composing such missives. Under interrogation by the French in 1793, Delahaye reluctantly admitted to having helped draft a few of them.
At the same time it really does seem that the letter expresses the
point of view, the fears, and the hope of the vast majority of rebel slaves who could not read or write but nevertheless had become aware of their leaders' earlier scheme to sell them down the river. One senses that this demand for liberty for all, not just a few, must have been composed with their full knowledge and dispatched with their approval. That point is underlined by the statement that the authors' “way of thinking” has been formed by “consulting everyone to whom we are connected in the same cause.”
Of the three signatories, Jean-François and Biassou were by then recognized as the two most formidable leaders of the black revolt. Charles Belair, who was Toussaint's nephew by blood or adoption, was a child of fourteen in 1792. Given his tender age and the relationship, some suspect that Belair's name was used as a screen and that Toussaint was really the third author of the document. Though pure speculation, the idea is intriguing nonetheless. Toussaint had signed other missives that were sent to the whites earlier—but those messages were a lot more moderate than this one. During this early period of the revolution, Toussaint seemed to be doing everything in his power to pass completely unnoticed. If he was noticed, by an observer like Gros, he was always playing a mediatory role—displaying his willingness and his ability to temporize between violently opposed factions.
The letter of July 1792 describes very clearly almost all the points of policy which Toussaint Louverture would fight to achieve over the next decade. Jean-François and Biassou would both be trafficking in slaves themselves before they were done. Toussaint, from this day forward, was always committed to general liberty. The idea of restoring the plantations with free, wage-earning labor was one he pursued to the very end. And the principle of natural human rights was bedrock to which he would always return. That black slaves were laying claim to the natural rights which white Frenchmen had declared for themselves is the most radical aspect of the document. The black leaders, and especially Toussaint, understood very well that in order to justify the institution of slavery, the white slave masters needed to define black men as something less than human. The black men would fight, and many would die, to annihilate that definition.
