The Opening

By Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (May 15th 2017)

Gifted

Toussaint Bréda was born a slave in 1743. He had a liberal master who allowed him to learn to read and write. He was influenced by the Enlightenment philosophers. He became a Black Jacobin. But Toussaint had a ‘privieged’ life. He was trained to be a house servant  – still a slave, although he did not experience the full horrors of the bestial regime employed in Saint-Domingue.

Toussaint was devoured by these contradictions. It made him the gifted leader that he became – an adept military commander – but one whose reluctance to take the final step to independence ultimately cost him, but not the Revolution he symbolised so dear. Toussaint did not join that Revolution immediately. He waited until November 1791.

The Best of Enemies

Militarily, Toussaint was undoubtedly a gifted commander. He defeated all comers. First he sided with the Spanish against France because the moderate French Revolutionaries failed to apply the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity to all. Not only did they refuse to abolish slavery, but at the instigation of slave-owning plantation owners, the reneged on a commitment to give rights to free blacks and Mulattos. Toussaint and the Haitian Revolutionaries switched sides in 1793 when the Jacobins came to power in France, and Terror or not, they abolished slavery. So Toussaint fought and defeated the British and Spanish. Still peace was elusive. The Mulatto leader General André Rigaud and Toussaint were both gifted leaders who had fought together in the same cause, but both fell victim to classic divide and rule tactics, which preyed upon the simmering mistrust between blacks and Mulattos. The vicious War of Knives began in 1799, ending the following year in the defeat of the Mulattos, but Rigaud, Alexandre Pétion, Jean-Pierre Boyer and others fleeing to France. They would return with a vengeance in 1802.

Rebuilt

Toussaint Bréda, now known as Louverture, led the Haitian Revolution to the brink of independence, but Toussaint wanted Haiti to be an overseas department of France. It was his misfortune that by the time he administered Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was known then, it was too late. He had restored the economy to prosperity – two thirds of the pre-Revolution level. However, Napoléon had no intention of tolerating any kind of black rule in Saint-Domingue – he wanted nothing less than slavery restored.

During Toussaint’s leadership, an army of self-liberated slaves took on and defeated Britain and Spain and also won a vicious civil war as the revolutionaries split on racial lines – the tensions between black former slaves and the more privileged Mulattos simmered beneath the surface until 1799. The War of Knives was brutal and resulted in the defeat and evacuation of the Mulatto leaders to France, but they were duped into returning to serve a hidden agenda.

Even before the Revolutionaries turned on each other, it was already an incredible achievement, but its enemies were constantly probing for weaknesses, ready to pounce.

Pitt’s Hypocritical Opportunism

Toussaint adeptly played the colonial superpowers, France, Britain and Spain against each other, seeking the best arrangement, but his belief that independence was unnecessary ultimately cost him dear. Early in the Revolution, British Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, tried to exploit France’s difficulties by proposing to abolish slavery, but William Wilburforce was soon stopped in his tracks as Pitt saw an opportunity to seize Haiti for Britain and deal a blow to France in the process.

Who cared if that would cost slaves their liberty for another 45 years? Pitt certainly didn’t. Slavery certainly wasn’t abolished in Britain and her empire by his government – nor was the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Pitt died a year before the slave trade was abolished. Baron William Grenville succeeded Pitt and was the Prime Minister when the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act was passed on March 25th 1807.

Instead of abolishing slavery, Pitt decided to try to seize Saint-Domingue for Britain – it was after all, a very coveted possession. Less than a decade earlier it had been the most productive colony France ever had. Why wouldn’t Pitt covet it? But his greed cost Britain dear, culminating in a military disaster. Meanwhile, Toussaint got the offer he wanted – Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, the revolutionary French Governor of Saint-Domingue, as it then was, abolished slavery in 1793 and Toussaint abandoned his Spanish ‘allies’ and threw his lot in with revolutionary France.

Disaster

Pitt shelved plans to abolish slavery and authorised a dastardly plan instead – invade and seize the French colony instead. It proved to be the worst military disaster in British history, costing huge resources, ships and men. It began in 1793 when France declared war on Britain and ended in September 1798 after the invasion force had been decimated by guerrilla warfare and Yellow Fever. It is hardly ever mentioned by historians.

A force of 20000 men, mainly mercenaries, added to by 7000 slaves failed to make headway against the armies led by Toussaint Louverture and his equal among Mulattos, General André Rigaud. Two years before they ended the fiasco, Britain had accepted that they could not win, but carried on through fear of the effect on other nearby colonies. It remains a very costly military fiasco. The evacuation by the British coincided with Toussaint, then Colonial Governor, granting protection to colonists who had aided the British if they remained in Saint-Domingue. The disaster could have been even more costly.

The weather caused turbulent waters on route to Ireland and that wrecked French plans for Irish ‘independence’ by blowing supplies for Wolfe Tone’s rebellion off course – the same problems that almost scuppered William of Normandy’s invasion in 1066 and Julius Cæsar’s too. Pitt’s folly almost resulted in Ireland’s independence. It could have cost him even more dearly, and would have done too had it not been for an even greater folly committed by Napoléon Bonaparte.

War and More War

A year after Pitt abandoned hopes of seizing Saint-Domingue, two major events occurred. The uneasy alliance between blacks and Mulattos ended and Bonaparte’s coup brought Napoléon to power.

The War of Knives ended in the siege of the southern port of Jacmel, which fell to Jean-Jacques Dessalines in March 1800. That led to the Mulatto leaders Rigaud,  They would return in 1802, having been duped into a shameful plot.

The other event of 1799 was the end of the French Revolution. Napoléon seized power from the Thermidor government and set the world on a descent to war and tyranny. Haiti was a major part of his plans and so were the Mulatto leaders. They returned in 1802 under the command of Napoléon’s brother-in-law Charles Leclerc, but they had been tricked – the French invasion had no intention of including the Mulattos in a post-revolutionary government. They would be cowed into submission too by the fate of the revolutionaries.

Errors of Judgement

They thought that they were returning to govern Saint-Domingue and that the French government recognised that, but that was not Bonaparte’s intention at all. He planned to restore slavery – a plan approved of by Britain and the USA – and regain the most productive colony France had ever had. Toussaint, too, was misguided. He believed in France and in Napoléon and used the lull in hostilities to act against more radical revolutionaries.

It backfired against him, and almost against the revolutionaries. Among the casualties – executed on Toussaint’s orders – was the popular and courageous General Moïse his own nephew. Moïse never trusted French colonial intentions and sided with former slaves keen to defend their gains against any who would re-enslave them, including the French. Toussaint soon had cause to regret executing Moïse.