Toussaint Louverture (30 page)

“From the first troubles in Saint Domingue,” Toussaint Louverture liked to say to his guests in 1801,

This self-portrait is touched up here and there, as political self-portraits tend to be. Certainly there are misrepresentations: Toussaint learned how to read and write in childhood, and at the outbreak of the revolution he was worth far more than “a few portugaises.” Finessing the point that in 1791 he was a free, prosperous owner of land and slaves, this description implicitly identifies him with the class of
nouveaux libres,
to whose leadership a force larger than himself had pushed him. In its picture of how Toussaint read and reacted to the situation of the early 1790s, this discourse leaves out more than a little, but is probably accurate as far as it goes.

He refers three times to prophecy and supernatural inspiration, whether “divine portent” or “secret voice.” Phrased in the elaborate French reported by General Pamphile de Lacroix, these references have a Catholic tone to them. Toussaint means to assume the mantle prepared for him by the Abbe Raynal, a Catholic priest. His devotion to the Catholic religion was always a prominent feature of his public life—in spite of the fact that the Church had been banned by the Jacobin government during the middle phase of the French Revolution and especially during the Terror. When he accepted the keys to Ciudad Santo Domingo in 1801, Toussaint ordered aTe Deum to be sung— a reassuring gesture for the Spanish citizens, who had expected to confront not only a savage African but also an envoy of the godless Jacobins. He celebrated most of the key events of his career with similar Catholic ceremonies. In Port-au-Prince he had climbed into the pulpit of the principal church to warn the colored population, ex cathedra, of the dire consequences of rebellion against his rule. Cynics denounce Tous-saint's Catholicism as
tartufferie,
a hypocritical mask for Machiavellian scheming—but he was probably at least as sincere as any of the Borgia popes.

With the help of the Abbe Gregoire in France, Toussaint arranged for four bishoprics to be created in Saint Domingue. Prominent in the French Revolution since 1789, Gregoire had managed to hold on to his prestige through all its various phases, including the most antireligious
ones. He was a longtime abolitionist with a special interest in bringing the blacks of Saint Domingue to full status as French citizens, and reform of the Catholic Church in the colony was one means to that end. New clergy came out from France to take over the new positions, but the old colonial priests (some of whom, like Antheaume, belonged to Toussaint's inner circle) protested vigorously. Toussaint compromised, sending Guillaume Mauviel, the priest who would have become bishop of Le Cap, to a post in the former Spanish Santo Domingo. The Abbe Colin, a veteran of the old colonial clergy, was named to the Le Cap bishopric in his place. At around the same time, Toussaint declared Catholicism to be the sole religion of Saint Domingue.

Complementing his Christian fervor, Toussaint's allusions to a higher power before the 1801 assemblies can be as easily read in a Vodouisant as in a Catholic context, and in that aspect they are quintes-sentially Haitian. Toussaint meant to signal to his listeners that he was invested with a spiritual force, but not necessarily or exclusively a Christian spirit. Officially, his Catholicism was strict and exclusive, but if he gave orders against the practice of Vbdou, that only made him the first of many Haitian heads of state to forbid Vodou publicly while practicing it himself in private. He knew the conspiratorial significance of the ceremony at Bois Caiman, whether or not he had been there in person, and he knew just as well how the flexible network of Vodouisant communities could function as a cellular structure for rebellion and revolution—that was why he had complained to Laveaux about Macaya beating the drum too often.

Toussaint sometimes professed to abhor Vodou, usually when talking to white Europeans, who could be expected to disapprove of and fear such African practices (though some
blancs
colonists dabbled in Vodou themselves). It was a way of renouncing the Devil—and in the religious context of the time, the Devil and his minions were considered to be every bit as real and tangible as God, Christ, and the community of saints. In the eyes of the Church, the pantheon of African spirits appeared as a host of demons. The African slaves of Saint Domingue, meanwhile, combined spirits and saints in unanticipated ways, seeing Legba, the Vodou spirit of gates and crossroads, in the image of Saint Peter with his key, or the warrior spirit Ogoun in the
image of the horseman Saint Jacques le Majeur. The colonial priesthood ‘was an odd bunch, known for the ‘weakness of both its morals and its doctrine (especially after the expulsion of the Jesuits from Santo Domingo). In these circumstances, Catholicism tended to accommodate African beliefs more than a little, sometimes completely unwittingly and sometimes ‘with one eye deliberately closed. To practice Catholicism and Vodou at the same time, to see them as aspects of a single structure of belief, ‘was more the rule than the exception.

Toussaint sometimes said that the nasal tone of his voice was caused by a Vodou curse that had been cast on him. That was a reason for him to dislike Vodou, but it by no means suggested that he didn't believe in it. During the civil war with Rigaud, the
mambo
Mama Boudin and two
houngans
were arrested in Port-au-Prince for conducting a ceremony meant to inspire a violent rebellion. Up till that time, Toussaint had done no more than discourage Vodou assemblies and ceremonies (and that inconsistently, depending on how they might suit his own needs), but now he prohibited them altogether. He did not want the revolutionary spirits called to Bois Caiman—Ogoun Ferraille and Erzulie Dantor—to be summoned to revolts against his own regime. That Vodou cults differed according to tribe was also a factor. Tous-saint's Arada group was a minority in Saint Domingue, and so too were the Arada spirits.

The apparent contradictions of Toussaint's personality—the extremes of ruthlessness or beneficence he displayed on different occasions and under different circumstances—are most easily resolved in the terms of Vodou, ‘where the individual ego can disappear altogether, ceding control of the person and his actions to an angry or a gentle spirit. Toussaint's “secret voice” had something of this quality, and probably there was more than one such voice. Despite a certain grandiosity in this discourse, he knew the spirit he incarnated was something larger than himself. He would invoke it one last time, ‘when he had personally been overthrown, as the spirit of the revolution he had carried well past the point of no return.

In the first months of 1801, Toussaint Louverture was at the apogee of his military and political success; he looked to be invincible. He had, as
Pamphile de Lacroix put it, “the aura of a prince.”
²
He held a kind of court in the government buildings of Cap Francais and Port-au-Prince, but though his staff, guests, and courtiers wore the most elaborately formal garb, Toussaint himself preferred “simple dress in the midst of brilliant surroundings,” either a plain field uniform of his general's rank, or the clothing of a planter at home on his property, “that is to say, ‘white trousers and a ‘white vest of very fine fabric, with a madras around his head.”
³
On the other hand, he was usually attended by officers of his honor guard, a group which grew to eighteen hundred strong and was mounted on the colony's best horses. The guardsmen wore silver helmets with an engraved French motto and red crests; Toussaint's formal arrivals were preceded by trumpets. Chosen for their height and good looks among other qualities, this troop included “names distinguished during the ancien regime”
⁴
—implying that Toussaint trusted some white citizens of his new polity enough to place them in his bodyguard.

Yet he remained extremely cautious, even or especially at this height of his powers. After all, he had narrowly escaped several assassination attempts by ambush within the last year. He continued to ride all over the colony (on a splendid white stallion named Bel Argent) ‘with the speed of a thunderbolt,” making a mystery of his movements, arriving ‘where he was least expected, and “seeing everything for himself.”
⁵
During this period he was constantly purchasing arms from abroad and caching them all over the country. The English had left him nearly sixty thousand muskets. Sonthonax had distributed fifty thousand guns to the
nouveaux libres
and Toussaint imported at least thirty thousand from the United States. Many of his arms deals were kept secret from his own administrators, but he liked to conduct frequent reviews in which the guns and ammunition were produced and inspected, and he liked to brandish a musket before an audience of field hands, exclaiming, “This is your liberty!”
⁶

Toussaint slept for no more than two hours a night, and his endurance, both in the saddle and in the office, was astounding to all who encountered it. He exhausted phalanxes of secretaries in dictating replies to as many as three hundred letters a day, ‘with every appearance of enjoyment. “He planned his future actions and reflected on them
while he galloped; he reflected still more when he pretended devoutly to pray”
⁷

Toussaint understood the dramatic effect of presenting his personal austerity in the midst of turn-of-the-century splendor; he also found his austerity practical. His self-control was absolute, and “he often pushed his sobriety to the point of abstinence.”
⁸
His eating habits were governed in part by his not unreasonable fear of poison. He kept an “old negress” in each of the colony's important towns, whom he trusted to prepare stews for him and to serve him wine, which he would consume in private. Otherwise he could go for twenty-four hours on a glass of water and a cassava pancake, “or if there was no pancake, on one or two bananas, or two or three potatoes.”
⁹

His standards of decorum were strict to the point of prudery. He liked his lady guests to be dressed as if for church, and on one occasion is supposed to have covered the decolletage of a young beauty with his own handkerchief, rebuking her mother by saying, “Modesty should be the endowment of your sex.”
¹⁰
He also forbade the easy extramarital relations that had been so common in the colony—between white men and
femmes de couleur
until 1791 and between the black and colored officers and concubines of all descriptions afterward—a measure that resulted in a number of hasty marriages. It was under this pressure that Agent Roume abruptly divorced his wife, Françoise Guillemine Lambert, who was then living apart from him on the island of Trinite; married his long-term mistress, a colored woman named Mariane Elizabeth Rochard; and formally acknowledged his paternity of their ten-year-old son. Idlinger, who upon the death of Julien Raimond had been appointed general administrator of the national domains, divorced his wife to marry Marthe, a
“fille de plaisir
celebrated in Cap,”
¹¹
one of the colored courtesans who had been mistress to several Frenchmen before moving on to Villatte at the period of his greatest influence. When Villatte fell from power, Marthe had taken up with the pirate Moline, and cynics believed that Idlinger (renowned for his corruption) was as much interested in the pirate's gold as in the charms of his new bride.

In his own case, Toussaint made a few exceptions to this policy of strict marital fidelity. When at home, he followed his own rules. During
this same period he created a new department in the colony, called the Canton Louverture, which included his and his wife's large plantations in the area of Ennery the towns of Hinche and Banica on the Central Plateau, and the port of Gona'ives on the west coast. Of course this chunk of territory also embraced all the posts in the mountains of the Cordon de l'Ouest, Toussaint's original power base, now anchored more firmly than ever by permanent access to livestock and supplies from the grasslands of the Central Plateau. At the other end of this line, Gona'ives was being rebuilt and expanded to rival the splendor of Cap Francais; Toussaint intended this town to be his capital.

His wife, Suzanne, was not an especially worldly woman, though she did know how to read and write. The high society in which Toussaint had become a central figure did not much appeal to her. She did make visits to Le Cap sometimes (where she had friends and family), but usually preferred to remain at home in Ennery, where she not only took care of the housekeeping but also managed the coffee plantation, sometimes working alongside her hired hands. A Frenchman who visited her at home described her as the fattest woman he had ever seen, yet not at all bad-looking. Her whole establishment “breathed order and decency,” while personally “she seemed to have the modesty of a girl of twenty”
¹²