Toussaint L’Ouverture: the Black Napoleon who Freed Haiti’s Slaves

Here’s a sanitized version of the transcript, with inappropriate language and sensitive content removed or modified for clarity:

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Just before we get started, I want to mention that there will be some French pronunciations. I am not a French speaker, but I will do my best.

George Washington, Simón Bolívar, and even Pancho Villa—the names of the great North and South American revolutionaries remain globally famous centuries on. However, there is one great New World rebel that many have forgotten. He was a nobody who became a somebody only after 50 years of obscurity: a freed slave who led the only successful large-scale slave revolt in history. The general who made Haiti the second free colony in the Americas—his name was Toussaint Louverture, also known as the Black Napoleon.

Born into slavery, Louverture’s early life was an inspiring tale of overcoming a racist system to live as a free man. But it was his later years that were truly remarkable as he rose to become the ruler of the society that had enslaved him. An enlightened thinker, a prescient philosopher, and a brilliant general, Louverture was also a man who dared to dream of freedom, even if he wouldn’t live to see those dreams fulfilled. This is the story of the greatest Black revolutionary who ever lived.

Imagine history as a vast cave swirling with shadows, and each person’s life is a distant torch. Some of those lives, like Napoleon’s, are gigantic pyres burning so brightly that you can’t possibly miss them. But others, most of them, are little more than matchsticks—almost invisible. It’s into this category that the early life of Toussaint Louverture falls. Remarkably, for a man who would go on to liberate an entire nation, we know almost nothing about him.

We can say for certain that he was born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now known as Haiti, in 1741 to slave parents. His original name was Toussaint Breda, after his plantation. But beyond that, everything is myth and shadow. The life of a slave in Saint-Domingue was not pretty; ninety percent of the population lived in shackles while a few tens of thousands of whites and freed people of color existed in a state of luxury. The average slave life expectancy was only 21 years. Those who resisted or ran away could expect severe punishment.

Yet Toussaint was fortunate. One of the consistent themes in the conflicting accounts of his early years is that he was born onto the plantation of a relatively enlightened master. The man who owned Toussaint taught him French, allowed him to gain some medical knowledge, and promoted him to a job as a horse trainer. In 1776, he even granted Toussaint his freedom.

At this point, Toussaint briefly returns to the historical record. He married, had two children, and remarkably, he even owned a slave of his own. After this, 15 more years passed in which Toussaint left not even the slightest footprint on history. By the time 1791 rolled around, he was 50—an age at which most normal biographies are starting to wind down. By 50, Napoleon had already conquered half of Europe, been defeated at Waterloo, and been sent into exile. By comparison, Toussaint was a small-time farmer, a mere ember in that dark cave of history. That summer, Toussaint had every reason to believe he was going to die in nothing but obscurity.

Thankfully for our story, winds of change were starting to blow in Europe. In 1789, a group of French radicals unknowingly lit the fuse on a gigantic pile of dynamite marked by the French Revolution. The ensuing explosion would shake up human history. In most cases, the effects wouldn’t be felt until a few years down the line, but Saint-Domingue wasn’t like most cases. It was a radical tinderbox barely kept in check by faraway Paris. Almost as soon as the French Revolution sparked, the entire country went up in flames.

By mid-1791, everyone in Saint-Domingue was aware of the storming of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. This was a problem because the Declaration was pretty clear that the rights of men were universal, which in Saint-Domingue they clearly were not. The system was designed as a pyramid of exploitation. If everyone was suddenly equal, Saint-Domingue would cease to exist for whites. The French Revolution represented both a threat and a chance for the coloreds to finally knock the whites down a peg or two.

That year, the two sides were almost openly plotting revolt. In doing so, they failed to realize that a much larger group had seen in the revolution an even bigger chance than they did. Out on the plantations and in the darkness of the forests, Black slaves had begun whispering to one another. By the summer, the whispers had turned into an idea, which in turn became a plan. Finally, on the night of August 14, 1791, a group of slaves met outside the capital of Le Cap and performed a secret ceremony. There, under the stars, they swore by blood to do the unthinkable—they agreed to revolt.

If the French Revolution started small before snowballing into an unstoppable avalanche, the Haitian Revolution went straight to the annihilating wall of ice and fury. On August 21, thousands of white plantation owners were woken by gangs of slaves dragging them from their beds, stabbing them, shooting them, and beating them to death. Fires were started, and entire plantations burned to the ground. The horizon turned an apocalyptic red. The bloodshed was nearly worse. The freed slaves in the countryside and the house slaves in the towns had intended to coordinate the uprising, but the field slaves jumped the gun, and the whites and coloreds were able to round up and massacre the town slaves. But it only postponed the inevitable. By late September, over one hundred thousand slaves were in revolt, and Le Cap was flooded with refugees carrying horror stories.

So where was Toussaint in all of this? He was lying low, refusing to either join the uprising or condemn it. He was simply waiting to see if the revolt was going to burn out. Others think he was keeping his distance in case of white reprisals. Whatever the reason, as September turned into October and the fires grew, Toussaint finally made his choice. First, he shipped his wife and children off to Santo Domingo, the Spanish colony occupying the other half of the island, today known as the Dominican Republic. Then he quietly smuggled his old white master and his family onto a boat headed for the U.S. At last, with no one left to care for, he freed his slave, abandoned his farm, and disappeared into the forest.

It was the start of what would become a remarkable career, but not straight away. Because of his medical knowledge, Toussaint’s first posting was less Black Napoleon and more male Florence Nightingale—a doctor for Georges Bessel’s slave army. He kept out of the thick of the fighting as 1791 raged on and the bodies began to pile high. By the year’s end, some four thousand whites and fifteen thousand Blacks were dead, the economy was in ruins, and a third of Saint-Domingue was in the hands of the rebellious slaves.

By the time 1792 dawned, Toussaint was finally beginning to show his promise. Given 600 men to command, he quickly proved such an effective fighter that his ranks ballooned to four thousand. Although he was still answering to Bessel, he now effectively had his own army. Among their number was Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a runaway slave who would become Toussaint’s right-hand man. While Toussaint’s army gained fame for showing clemency to any whites they captured, Dessalines went in the opposite direction, inflicting brutal punishments on his captives.

Yet it would be wrong to call Dessalines merely a psychopath. Everything he did to his white captives had been done by whites to slaves countless times before. With Dessalines’ help, Toussaint was able to capture a huge swath of the country’s north. As 1793 began, their partnership had turned Toussaint’s fighters into perhaps the most effective slave army in Saint-Domingue. It was at this time that he changed his name to Louverture, which can be read as “opening the way,” a possible reference to his military victories.

But the war in Saint-Domingue had reached a kind of stalemate. Whites were holed up in their cities, the coloreds were attempting to establish a separate state in the south, and the other slave army commanders were just as powerful as Toussaint. What the commander needed was an outside force that would come and give the entire war a gigantic shove. Luckily, that was about to happen.

1793 was the year both Spain and Britain decided to invade Saint-Domingue. It was the chaos in metropolitan mainland France that allowed the two superpowers to act with impunity. 1793 was the year of the Reign of Terror, and in the anarchy the revolution had unleashed, no one had time to care about what was happening in the colonies. Saint-Domingue had long been prized by other Caribbean powers, and both London and Madrid wanted to take it. While the British just straight-up invaded, the Spaniards arrived with a plan. Their colonists in Santo Domingo opened communication channels with the slave army leaders, promising to respect their freedom if they fought for the Spanish crown. It was a political masterstroke. Most of the slave leaders signed up to fight for Madrid, including Louverture, who was tired of France and saw nothing new under a British regime except a change of language.

However, there were good reasons for thinking Louverture wasn’t exactly down with this pledge of allegiance to Spain. As summer approached, the remaining French troops in Saint-Domingue were in a desperate position, but their fortunes were about to change. The chaos in Paris had briefly calmed down enough for the new revolutionary government to send out a delegation led by the abolitionist Léger-Félicité Sonthonax. Arriving in Haiti, Sonthonax quickly divined that there was only one way to save the colony from implosion and conquest, and it just so happened to align perfectly with his own beliefs. On August 29, 1793, he did the unthinkable: he unilaterally freed all the slaves.

At first, Louverture didn’t believe him, but as 1794 approached, it became clear that not only did Sonthonax mean to keep the slaves free, but the government in Paris actually backed him. It was at this point that Louverture made the decision that would catapult him to greatness. Louverture’s army had taken control of the mountains, giving them a naturally easily defended base. Louverture knew that he was in a position of strength when he announced that he was defecting from the Spanish. From now on, he would be fighting for the French.

The decision changed the course of the war. Louverture’s army marched down from the mountains and decimated the Spanish forces and their Black allies. Generals who had nominally been Louverture’s superiors only days before found themselves forced into retreat into Santo Domingo. As Louverture kept driving forward, the Spanish eventually capitulated. Having just lost a separate war to France in Europe, they agreed to give up Santo Domingo and their vanquished Black allies, who were sent into exile.

But Louverture wasn’t done yet. Pivoting his army around, he launched his full force against the coastal cities occupied by the British. Although the British would cling on to their Saint-Domingue enclaves for a few more years, the game was up. Under Louverture’s onslaught, they were beaten down until the general was able to make peace on his own terms. The deal allowed Britain to restart trading with Saint-Domingue on the sole condition that Louverture refrained from fomenting slave rebellion in Jamaica. Louverture knew that British trade would be key to rebuilding the war-shattered economy. This was a win-win: he got everything he wanted, and the British got to back out with a shred of their dignity still intact.

As the British slowly packed up and left, Louverture turned his attention to the difficult problem of peace for the remaining whites and coloreds. This would have been a time of paralyzing fear. The slave armies were notorious for their massacres, and life under a former slave must have been a terrifying prospect. They had not counted on Louverture’s greatness. Rather than reprisals, Louverture pursued a policy of reconciliation. He forgave war crimes committed by whites, invited the plantation owners back, and offered them the same plantations they had owned before, along with the chance to make their money back. He instituted a policy of colorblindness—everyone would be equal, and no white would persecute any Black, just as no Black would take vengeance upon any white.

For the slaves, he maintained their freedom. They would have to return to their old plantations and work for two years, but they would receive wages, and corporal punishment would be banned. After their two years were up, they’d be free to go wherever they pleased. It’s moments such as these that show why Toussaint Louverture remains a fascinating figure. Here was a man who had just spent five years fighting a brutal race war, and now he was extending the hand of friendship to the very people who tried to kill him. More than just a general, Louverture was capable of being a statesman whose pragmatism could rival Washington’s.

But there was still a dark side to Louverture, and it went by the name of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. In the carnage of the civil war, the coloreds had succeeded in carving out a small state in the south under the command of André Rigaud. In 1799, Louverture sent Dessalines down to terminate the outpost, which Dessalines did with extreme prejudice. The War of Knives was brutal; Dessalines slaughtered anyone who could even conceivably be a supporter of Rigaud, leaving a trail of death in his wake. While Louverture was busy consolidating power in the north by exiling Sonthonax and other French authorities, Dessalines turned the south into such a wasteland that reconciliation with the coloreds became impossible.

Bloody as it was, the War of Knives did succeed in reunifying Saint-Domingue. For the first time since 1791, the entire country was under the control of one man, and that man was Louverture. As the clock ticked over and the 19th century began, Louverture was slowly rebuilding the economy, re-establishing race relations between Blacks, coloreds, and whites, and making plans to eliminate slavery in Santo Domingo. In short, this extraordinary man was at the peak of his career.

It would take the arrival on the world stage of a man even more extraordinary than Louverture to stop him. Unfortunately for the population of Saint-Domingue, that man was already waiting in the wings. Just as the Black Napoleon was consolidating his control over Saint-Domingue, in Europe, the real Napoleon was doing the same thing with France. 1799 saw Napoleon Bonaparte go from being a general in the revolutionary army to First Consul of France. As it is with many great men, one world stage simply wasn’t big enough for both of them.

One of Napoleon’s first acts was to declare that the French colonies would be governed by special rules, meaning the Declaration of the Rights of Man would not apply. Since Louverture had not actually declared independence from France, instead insisting that he was ruling on behalf of Paris, this was a problem. Everyone knew that a slave economy could not be ruled by a former slave. Not that things went immediately south, though. Louverture publicly praised Napoleon, recognizing him as the new leader of France, and he swore his loyalty to him. His actions seemed to mollify Napoleon, and the First Consul confirmed Louverture as the legitimate leader of the colony of Saint-Domingue. But he also issued him a warning: Louverture was not under any circumstances to invade Santo Domingo.

So now, can you guess what Louverture did next? At the time, Santo Domingo was a vassal state technically ruled by France but still in the hands of Spanish administrators. It also continued to practice slavery—something Louverture couldn’t tolerate on his doorstep. In 1801, he marched in, seized the country, and declared slavery abolished. Back in France, the government was incensed by Louverture’s actions and demanded something be done. Napoleon himself equivocated; he had a vague plan to invade America and recognized that Saint-Domingue’s slave armies could help make that dream a reality. But his wounded ego eventually got the better of him.

At the end of 1801, the First Consul dispatched a military expedition under the control of Charles Leclerc to retake Saint-Domingue. Not long after, he passed the Law of May 20, bringing slavery back to the colonies. It was the beginning of the end for both Toussaint Louverture and French control of Saint-Domingue. On paper, Louverture should have been able to rally popular support in the face of a French invasion. Sadly, in reality, his new equal society was not very popular. The economy was still a shambles, and the returned whites resented the empowered Blacks. The coloreds still remembered Dessalines’ atrocities, and the Blacks, while technically free, were still stuck on their plantations.

Of the three major demographics in Saint-Domingue, not one felt comfortable with Louverture’s failing state. As Leclerc made landfall, first the whites flocked to his side, then the coloreds, and finally, many of the slaves. Even Jean-Jacques Dessalines turned on his old friend and threw his lot in with the French. This was the end for Louverture. After a few months of token resistance, Louverture contacted Leclerc and promised to lay down his arms in exchange for a guarantee that the French would not reimpose slavery. Leclerc agreed, and Toussaint suspended military operations, retiring to his old farm.

He was surprised with an invitation to meet a French general at an out-of-the-way plantation. It was clearly a trap, but Louverture was perhaps too tired by his sudden fall from power. Whatever the reason, he accepted. As he arrived at the meeting spot, he was arrested under the orders of Napoleon himself and deported to France. Toussaint Louverture, the man who had freed the slaves and ruled Saint-Domingue for one brief shining moment, would never see his home again. Sent to the Jura Mountains in southern France, he spent the next year being beaten, neglected, and left to rot. He wrote a bit, likely dreamed a lot, but in the cold mountain air, his health collapsed. By this point, a man in his sixties, Louverture’s body soon failed him. He succumbed to repeated infections before finally slipping away on April 7, 1803.

Like his white counterpart would in 20 years, the Black Napoleon died alone, unloved, and in exile, his achievements seemingly forgotten. Before he went, though, Louverture did have time to write his thoughts down on Saint-Domingue’s future.