While still a teenager, he was made caretaker of the estate’s mules and oxen—a post usually held by a white man. Louverture seized this rare opportunity to educate himself in his free time and to read through his master’s library, including Julius Caesar’s Commentaries and Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, or History of two Indies, an encyclopedic account of trade between Europe and the Far East. Caesar’s work helped him understand politics and the art of war, and Raynal’s gave him a thorough grounding in the economics of the region and of Europe.
But his education and position did not exempt him from the fundamental indignity of being black. One day, as he was returning from Mass carrying his prayer book, a white man took notice. Louverture would recall that the man “broke my head with a wooden stick while telling me ‘do you not know that a negro should not read?’” Louverture apologized and stumbled home. He kept the vest soaked with his blood as a reminder of the incident. Years later, after the rebellion began, he met his tormenter again and, his biographer Philippe Girard writes with satisfaction, “killed him on the spot.”
The estate’s attorney, François Bayon de Libertat, recognized Louverture’s abilities and made him coachman. Around 1776, he freed Louverture; Louverture was now paid to drive Libertat’s coach. At the time, fewer than one in a thousand black men were set free. The father of the Haitian Revolution earned his freedom by forming a special bond with a white man.
Louverture used every carriage ride with Libertat to expand his network, making contact with nearly all of his future allies. The rides also enabled him first to understand, and then to master, French colonial ways. Louverture gradually came to a realization that no one else in colonial Saint-Domingue had arrived at: culture, not color, determined behavior.
One astonishing demonstration of this truth was that after he’d been freed, Louverture purchased slaves, usually to free them in turn. But he also strove to get ahead in the colonial manner, the only manner available to him at that point: off of slave labor. In 1779, in a brief and unsuccessful attempt to make money, he leased a coffee plantation worked by thirteen slaves. One of them was Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who in later years would become his second in command—and then go on to betray him.
If there was a motivational trigger for Louverture to turn from commerce to statecraft, perhaps it came in 1784, when he read a famous passage written by Abbé Raynal, a proponent of liberty who hoped for a slave revolt: “A courageous chief only is wanted. Where is he, that great man whom Nature owes to her vexed, oppressed, and tormented children? Where is he?” According to one account, Louverture read this passage over and over, dreaming that he might be that courageous chief.
LOUVERTURE’S RISE
Once news of the French Revolution of 1789 reached the island, insurrection was in the air. The initial rebellion on the Manquets plantation in 1791 stirred up slaves on the surrounding plantations, and within a few years the insurrectionary force grew to fifty thousand men, one hundred times the size of the largest slave revolt in U.S. history.
Louverture had known of and perhaps helped shape plans for the uprising, but he waited to see how it would go, only joining in a month after it began. The colony’s political situation was extremely complicated, with numerous factions, parties, and shifting alliances, and it was unclear what would happen on your plantation next week, let alone to the whole island over time.
When Louverture joined the rebels he was about forty-seven and already known as “Old Toussaint.” Within a few months he had appointed himself brigadier general and was leading one of the three chief rebel groups. To build support, Louverture implied that he was acting on behalf of the French king, Louis XVI, who, he said, had issued him a document promising the rebels three days of rest a week in exchange for their efforts. He was able to pull off this ruse because almost none of his followers could read and write.
Between 1791 and 1793, he and the rebels made such progress that France dispatched eleven thousand troops to hold them back—more than the nation sent abroad during the U.S. War of Independence.
After Louis XVI was guillotined in Paris in 1793, the British and Spanish invaded Saint-Domingue, each hoping to seize the prize while France was preoccupied. Once Spain declared war on France, Louverture went to the Spanish commander and offered to integrate his six hundred men into the Spanish army, which other rebellious slave groups were also joining. And so Louverture became a colonel in the Spanish army, fighting the French.
The following year, seeing an advantage for himself and his troops, Louverture defected to the French army. Within a year, he and his men, now five thousand strong, had retaken almost all of the French towns he had just conquered for Spain, and subdued several rebel groups still allied with the Spanish. These victories, in concert with military setbacks in Europe, forced Spain to sue for peace. Louverture had defeated his first European superpower.
Next he faced the British, who had sent two large battalions to Saint-Domingue. Unprepared to tackle a large professional army, Louverture began retreating in 1795 and maintained a defensive posture for two years, even as the remaining blacks on the island, some 500,000 men in all, joined his side. Time, guerrilla skirmishing, and yellow fever wore down Louverture’s foes. Twelve thousand of the twenty thousand British soldiers who arrived on the island were buried there, and in 1798 Louverture negotiated the departure of their remaining forces. He had defeated his second European superpower.
In 1801 he invaded Santo Domingo, the Spanish part of the island that is now the Dominican Republic, and defeated the Spanish for good. On July 7, 1801, he became governor of the entire island where he had once been a slave. He promptly published a new constitution. Saint-Domingue would still be a French colony, in name, but the constitution abolished slavery, opened all jobs to all races, and made the territory functionally independent. In just ten years Louverture and his army had accomplished the unimaginable.
HOW LOUVERTURE REPROGRAMMED SLAVE CULTURE
In 1797, in the midst of the long revolt, Louverture demonstrated that he could not only lead troops, but also persuade and inspire civilians with his vision for a new way of life. Vincent de Vaublanc, a white deputy from Saint-Domingue, warned the French Parliament that the colony had fallen under the control of “ignorant and brutish negroes.” Vaublanc’s speech had a tremendous impact, and there were rumors of a counterrevolution being plotted in Paris.
Louverture’s response was to publish a justification of the Haitian Revolution that laid out his theory of race and culture. As Philippe Girard wrote, “One by one he listed Vaublanc’s accusations; one by one he took them apart. Blacks were not lazy and ignorant savages: slavery had made them so. Some violence had indeed taken place in the Haitian Revolution, but violence had also taken place in the French Revolution, he reminded his readers; the slaves had in fact proved remarkably merciful toward the planters who had so cruelly oppressed them.” Louverture demonstrated that these former slaves had elevated their culture to a point where he could in justice close the letter by reaffirming black freedmen’s “right to be called French Citizens.”
In 1798, after Louverture negotiated peace and a diplomatic relationship with the British, the London Gazette wrote:
Toussaint L’Ouverture is a negro and in the jargon of war has been called a brigand. But according to all accounts, he is a negro born to vindicate the claims of this species and to show that the character of men is independent of exterior color.
This newspaper, in a nation that traded more African slaves than any other, published that encomium thirty-five years before Britain abolished slavery. As Louverture had envisioned, Europeans were beginning to see that it was the culture of slavery rather than the nature of the slaves themselves that shaped their behavior.
Some Americans began to see it that way, too. In 1798, during a rift with France, the U.S. Congress banned all trade with France and its colonies. Commerce to and from Saint-Domingue came to a standstill. Louverture sent