Toussaint Louverture

Early life

Toussaint was born enslaved on the Bréda plantation at Haut de Cap in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. His birth year is uncertain; the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture places it between about 1739 and 1746 and uses c. 1743. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation records that his father was an African prisoner of war sold into slavery. Toussaint was freed in 1776, married Suzanne Simone Baptiste the following year, and stayed near Bréda, where he leased land and labour for coffee growing.

Revolution

The great uprising of the enslaved began in August 1791, opened, according to the NMAAHC, by a Vodou ceremony. Toussaint was at first hesitant but joined the forces of Georges Biassou, which were allied with Spain, and took on a leadership role. In the early 1790s he adopted the name Louverture and pressed for the full abolition of slavery.

After the French Republic abolished slavery in 1794, he changed sides and fought for France, turning back Spanish and British attempts to take the colony. He was named General-in-Chief and later Governor-General, and by 1797 was the colony's highest-ranking officer. By 1801 he controlled the whole island and had extended abolition into Spanish Santo Domingo.

Governing Saint-Domingue

A constitution dated July 8, 1801, made Toussaint governor for life of an autonomous Saint-Domingue. His rule is debated. Historian Laurent Dubois describes how he kept formerly enslaved people bound to plantations as paid cultivateurs, sharing a portion of the harvest. Toussaint argued the colony had to stay productive to fund its defence and to prove that freedom could pay, but many workers held a different idea of liberty and resisted. His defence of abolition against the imperial powers is widely honored, while accounts such as Dubois's also show the limits his labour system placed on that freedom.

Arrest and death

Napoleon Bonaparte saw the constitution as a challenge. A French army under General Charles Leclerc arrived, and after weeks of fighting Toussaint was placed under house arrest in May 1802 and seized on June 7, 1802. He was shipped to France and imprisoned at the Fort de Joux in eastern France, where he died on April 7, 1803. In 1802 Napoleon had also moved to restore slavery in France's American colonies.

Legacy

Toussaint did not live to see independence. His former lieutenant Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti independent in January 1804, after Toussaint's death. The University of Bristol describes the Haitian Revolution as the only known slave uprising that produced a fully free and independent state, and Toussaint remains its best-known leader.