Cite as: Philippe Girard and Jean-Louis Donnadieu. “Toussaint Before Louverture: New Archival Findings on the Early Life of Toussaint Louverture,” William and Mary Quarterly 70:1 (January 2013).
Abstract: The early life of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture (ca. 1743–1803) was long shrouded in myth, in part because Toussaint (who did not take the name “Louverture” until the Haitian Revolution) gave an account of his youth that suited his political interests more than historical accuracy. Newly exploited French plantation and notarial records help paint a detailed and nuanced portrait of Toussaint’s prerevolutionary life but also lead to more general conclusions about plantation life, the free population of color in Saint Domingue (Haiti), and the nature of the Haitian Revolution. The article first explores Toussaint’s extended kinship network (which included his African-born parents, his surrogate parents, his first wife, Cécile, and his second wife, Suzanne, and many prominent free blacks) and concludes that the revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines had once been the slave of Toussaint’s son-in-law. The circumstances of Toussaint’s enslavement, his owners’ family, and his manumission suggest that Toussaint’s experience of slavery was less traumatic than others’. Finally, the sources reveal the landholdings acquired by Toussaint during his political ascent to have been extensive but not always profitable. Overall, the formative years of Toussaint’s youth underline the complexity of his relationship with the plantation system and help us better understand his political choices when he later ran Saint Domingue as a governor for life.
Résumé: Cet article présente les dernières découvertes sur la jeunesse de Toussaint Louverture, notamment ses liens avec divers esclaves et libres de couleur, à commencer par Jean-Jacques Dessalines.
Introduction (for the full text of the article, go to the William and Mary Quarterly).
Over
the past two decades, interest in Atlantic History and the African Diaspora has
grown exponentially in the United States ,
bringing increased scholarly attention to the Atlantic society par excellence, Saint-Domingue (Haiti ), the African Diaspora’s shining moment,
the Haitian Revolution, and Haiti ’s
most celebrated revolutionary leader, Toussaint Louverture.[1]
During his years in the public spotlight, Toussaint left behind a large
documentary trail that has allowed historians to retrace much of his official
career from the time he joined the slave revolt in 1791 until his death in
captivity in France
in 1803. The prerevolutionary period, however, is so little known that the most
widely read English-language biography of Toussaint relied on virtually no
archival sources to retrace the first three fourths of his life.[2]
The
problem stems in part from Toussaint’s humble origins. Slaves are largely
absent from the colonial documentary record, except in plantation records that
focus quasi-exclusively on their age, race, occupation, and financial worth.
But Toussaint was also a private man who zealously guarded his privacy or even
purposely obscured his past for political reasons. His official correspondence
with French authorities generally eschewed personal matters and the memoir he
wrote after his downfall in 1802 dealt primarily with his public record as
governor of Saint-Domingue. For a long time, historians thus had to content
themselves with accounts of his life written by contemporaries who had only
known him at his apex, the oral tradition, tainted recollections by his son
Isaac, and a 1799 article in the Parisian daily Moniteur Universel that was more mythmaking than journalism.[3] Drawing
from these sources, the first wave of Toussaint biographies generally portrayed
him as a family man deeply attached to his wife Suzanne, as a slave whose
emancipationist ideals, drawn from the French Enlightenment, had been fulfilled
by the Haitian Revolution, and as a landowner whose wealth was as great as it
was mysterious.[4] These
three facets conveniently fitted the persona most appealing to his U.S.,
British, and French admirers: that of a Western, idealistic, and moderate opponent
of slavery.
Since then, historians have
revisited some of these assumptions. The single most ground-breaking moment was
a 1977 article in which Gabriel Debien, Jean Fouchard, and Marie-Antoinette
Menier showed that Toussaint was already a free man in 1776, long before the
onset of the Haitian Revolution, and that he had owned and rented slaves. A few
articles, notably by David Geggus, have helped flesh out Toussaint’s
background, but the revelations about Toussaint’s slave-owning past continue to
define Louverturian studies, with traditionalists clinging to a vision of
Toussaint as an idealistic emancipator while revisionists like Pierre Pluchon
emphasize his conflicted relationship with the plantation system.[5]
Uncovering more details about
Toussaint’s private life is a difficult but not impossible task. Letters
written by the family that owned him and their plantation managers have
survived in the Archives Départementales de la Gironde in Bordeaux (73J1), the
Archives Départementales de la Loire-Atlantique in Nantes (E691), the Archives
Nationales in Paris (18AP3), and a private collection in Mirande.[6]
Notarial and church records that document baptisms, marriages, deaths, and
sales involving the Louverture family are available at the Archives Nationales
d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence (1DPPC, SUPSDOM, NOTSDOM, and FM/Série E). The
memoirs of Toussaint’s son Isaac, published in 1825, have been widely used, but
one can also tap unpublished recollections of Isaac and his brother Placide at the
University of Puerto Rico (Nemours collection), the Bibliothèque Nationale (NAF
12409), and the Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library (Sc Micro
R1527). Occasional documents pertaining to Toussaint’s land holdings and his
family network can also be gleaned at the Archives Nationales, the Historical
Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the Boston Public Library, and the
Service Historique de la Défense in Vincennes.
These sources remain fragmentary and
often biased, but they allow us to fill some gaps in three crucial areas. Newly
uncovered documents reveal important aspects of Toussaint’s family life,
including the death of his parents, a first marriage that produced three
children, the lineage of his son Placide, the extended kinship network that
would later form the backbone of his regime, and a surprising connection
between Toussaint and his successor Jean-Jacques Dessalines: Dessalines was
likely the former slave of Toussaint’s son-in-law. The second lesson pertains
to Toussaint’s enslavement. Documents confirm that he was an exceptional slave
who was unusually close to his plantation manager, but also correct some
unfounded assumptions about the person who “owned” him and provide some
background on the circumstances of his emancipation and on plantation life in
Saint-Domingue. Finally, documents allow us to clarify the mystery surrounding
Toussaint’s land holdings, which were numerous but not as financially rewarding
as contemporaries assumed, thus putting into question the recovery of Saint-Domingue’s
plantations under Toussaint’s governorship. These various revelations do not
fundamentally alter our vision of Toussaint as a unique individual, but they
have wider implications beyond the field of Haitian history. They underscore that
he and many other revolutionaries were a “band of brothers” and that we should
approach the revolutionary era from the bottom up.[7]
They expose scholars specializing in other slave systems where racial
boundaries were more hermetic and free people of color less prominent (the
United States in particular) to a plantation system that, however oppressive,
allowed for some degree of social mobility and racial mingling. Finally, they
inform the broader debate about the transition from slave to free labor in the
New World.
These discoveries help lift the veil of secrecy surrounding Toussaint’s
private life, but they also raise a new and perplexing question: what prompted
Toussaint to hide so much about his past? The answer itself—he only presented
the evidence that suited his political agenda—provides additional layers of
information by revealing how Toussaint wanted to be perceived by his
contemporaries and underlining his mastery of the public sphere. More
generally, this attempt to reconstruct a slave’s life from an incomplete
documentary record, the use of oral traditions, and the necessity to filter all
available evidence for potential bias will offer to all scholars a case study
in, to paraphrase Marc Bloch and Michel Foucault, the use of the “historian’s
craft” to retrace the “archeology of knowledge.”
[1] As a slave and a
freedman, Toussaint Louverture was officially known as Toussaint Bréda (after
the plantation on which he was enslaved). He only became known as “Louverture”
during the Haitian Revolution, so this article, which focuses on his early
life, will refer to him simply as “Toussaint.” Studies
of the Haitian Revolution published in the past two decades include Carolyn
E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint
Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1990); Michel
Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past:
Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); David P.
Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian
Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 2001); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of
the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2004); John D. Garrigus, Before
Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave,
2006); Jeremy
Popkin, You Are All Free (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010); Philippe Girard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoléon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian
War of Independence (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2011).
[2] For the biography, see Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007).
[3]
For the main sources, see Moniteur
Universel (9 Jan. 1799); François-Marie Périchou de Kerversau, “Rapport sur
la partie française de Saint-Domingue” (1 Germ. 9 [22 March 1801]), Box 2/66,
Rochambeau Papers, University of Florida in Gainesville (hereafter RP-UF);
Antoine Métral, Histoire de l’expédition
des Français à Saint-Domingue sous le consulat de Napoléon Bonaparte
(1802-1803), suivie des mémoires et notes d’Isaac l’Ouverture (1825;
reprint: Paris, Karthala, 1985); Philippe Girard, ed., The Memoir(s) of Toussaint Louverture (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
[5] For
notable articles, see Gabriel Debien, Jean Fouchard, and Marie-Antoinette
Menier, “Toussaint Louverture avant 1789. Légendes et réalités,” Conjonction no. 134 (1977), 65-80; David
Geggus, “Toussaint Louverture and the slaves of the Bréda plantation,” Journal of Caribbean History no. 20.1
(1985-1986), 30-48; Geggus, “Les débuts de Toussaint Louverture,” Généalogie et histoire de la Caraïbe no.
170 (May 2004), 4173-4174; Geggus, “La
famille de Toussaint Louverture,” Généalogie
et Histoire de la Caraïbe 174 (Oct. 2004), 4318-4319; Geggus, “Toussaint
Louverture avant et après le soulèvement de 1791,” in Franklin Midy,
ed., Mémoire de révolution
d'esclaves à Saint-Domingue (2006; reprint, Montréal: CIDHICA, 2007),
112-132; Geggus, “Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution,” in R.
William Weisberger et al., eds., Profiles
of Revolutionaries in Atlantic History, 1750-1850 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 115-135. Thanks to David Geggus
for providing a complete list of his writings. On Toussaint as an emancipator, see Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: La révolution française et le problème colonial (Paris:
Présence Africaine, 1981); Alain Foix, Toussaint
Louverture (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). On Toussaint’s conservative side, see
Pierre Pluchon, Toussaint Louverture (Paris:
Fayard, 1989); Jacques de Cauna, Toussaint
Louverture, le Grand Précurseur (Bordeaux: Sud Ouest, 2012).
[6] The private collection’s letters have been
published in Jean-Louis Donnadieu, Entre
Gascogne et Saint-Domingue : le comte Louis-Pantaléon de Noé, grand propriétaire
créole et aristocrate gascon, 1728-1816 (Ph.D.
dissertation, Université de
Pau et des Pays de l'Adour, 2006), 353-393. A 1786 inventory mentions
other letters, but their current location is unknown. See “Inventaire
après le décès de M. le Chevalier de Breda” (20 July 1786), Minutier central,
et/LXXXVI/847, Archives Nationales, Paris (hereafter AN).
[7]
On ties between revolutionaries, see also Joseph J.
Ellis, Founding Brothers: The
Revolutionary Generation (New York: Knopf, 2000).
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