Toussaint L'Ouverture

 William Wordsworth wrote of Toussaint L'Ouverture:

"There is not a breathing of the common wind that will forget thee;

thou hast great allies;

thy friends are exultation,

agonies and love,

and man's unconquerable mind."

(published in the Morning Post, 2 February 1803)

Pierre Dominique Toussaint L'Ouverture - his surname possibly deriving from his bravery in battle where he once made a breach in the ranks of the enemy, was born a slave on Breda plantation, St. Domingue (Haiti), in 1746. It is said that he came from noble stock, in that he was the grandson of an African king, King Goau-Guinou of the Aradas. He was taught to read and write by Pierre Baptiste, a free black. It would appear that his father was highly regarded by the master of L'Habitation Breda, the Comte de Noé, who, upon his marriage to a slave Pauline, granted him 'liberté de savanne', a partial freedom that allowed the slave, although still the property of his master, freedom within the confines of the estate to live his own life.

"Toussaint's father was also granted a parcel of land and five slaves of his own to work for him," wrote Wenda Parkinson in an account of the life of Toussaint, entitled "The gilded African". There were five children born to the marriage, Pierre, the eldest, became a colonel in the army of the king of Spain; Paul served as a general in the French colonial army, Marie Jean, the only girl, married a colonel. There was a boy who died young named Goau-Guinou after his royal grandfather, and then there was Toussaint.

Philip Sherlock wrote of him:

"Toussaint had a quick mind, he learnt quickly, learnt from his father the use of healing herbs; learnt the ancient stories of his people, and above all learnt to hate the degradation of slavery."

The Comte de Noé was a man of the enlightenment and recognised in this family a natural intelligence. Being kindly, he lent the boys books.

St. Domingue, the futile, prosperous colony that it was, groaned beneath the weight of slavery. Toussaint saw men and women treated not as human beings, but as things. As a youth, tall, thin, a trifle frail, he was called 'fatras baton' - the thrashing stick. He tested his strength swimming the fast-flowing rivers, climbed to the hilltops alone and crawled up the rocky crags on the mountains above Breda. He saw the schooners and sloops setting out from Haitian ports for France, laden with such quantities of sugar, coffee, indigo and cotton that all of Europe marvelled. He saw the production of sugar grow and then grow even more to the stage when Haiti in 1789 was producing one third more sugar than all the British colonies in the Caribbean.

His father, the coachman to the Comte de Noé, would take him along when the Comte attended the affairs of the nobility. He saw the wealth that flowed into the estates, the finery from Paris, the opulence of absolute ownership. He knew that all this power and wealth rested on the basis of plantation slavery and was witness to the appalling cruelty so revolting that it would sicken you if it were to be recalled in detail.

Beneath this power, this wealth, beneath the crushing heel, there was a rising anger, swelling like some vast tide. As an explosion it came in 1791 when 100,000 Africans rose in revolt and swept the north of St. Domingue with fire and sword.

Toussaint joined the rebels. At first, he was suspect. They had won the hard-fought battles; they had put the fire, and they had faced the fire. But his determination was relentless and his skill in war obvious. By sheer power of his leadership he came to be regarded as their best general.

Regiments from France arrived and the colonists by and large refused the moderate terms of peace that were asked by Toussaint and the rebels. The colonists were contemptuous. "Did Toussaint think that they had brought half a million African slaves to the New World to make them French citizens?" they asked.

Now came the heroic moment in Toussaint's life: should he take the easy road and return to Breda, or the difficult road that meant years of war, perhaps even defeat? As a learned man, he may have remembered the words of Pericles, spoken in Athens over the Athenians who had given their lives for their country: "Life was dear, but they held their honour dearer, and so when the hour came it brought not terror but glory."

With that decision, a rebellion without a clear purpose became a war of liberation.

The hounds of war howled over the island and behind came the horsemen of the apocalypse, bringing disease, starvation and death. Toussaint first fought the French, then the Spaniards in the eastern half of the island (now the Dominican Republic). Then he fought against Maitland and his English army. His tattered army victorious, he now ruled all the island which Christopher Columbus had named Hispaniola, both what was once French and what was once Spanish.

In France, the French Revolution had swept the monarchy from the throne and had beheaded the aristocracy. Out of that new reality came Napoleon Bonaparte. The shadow of the Corsican dictator fell over all Europe. In Haiti, Toussaint strove to create a free African state. Napoleon saw quite clearly the real meaning of the Haitian revolution. He knew that the successful slave revolt in that island was a turning point in the history of the New World. He himself told his minister Talleyrand to inform England that "the freedom of the Negroes, if recognised in St. Domingue and legalised by France, would at all times be a rallying point for freedom-seekers of the New World".

Napoleon sent an armada of 46 ships to Haiti's harbours, carrying an army of 46,000 men to subdue Toussaint and his people. At first, the Haitian was overwhelmed and dismayed at the vastness of Napoleon's army. Turning of a strategy of "burnt earth", he summoned his best general Jean-Jacques Dessalines and instructed him:

"Remember that this soil nourished on our blood and sweat must not yield a crumb of food to our enemies. Keep all roads under constant fire. Throw the bodies of horses and men into all wells and springs, destroy everything, burn everything."

The three terrible allies Toussaint, yellow fever and dysentery reduced Napoleon's army to a shambles. In the end, having lost 60,000 men, Napoleon withdrew from the New World and gave up his designs on Haiti and Louisiana.

Toussaint had secured the freedom of Haiti. His actions were of direct benefit to the infant Federation of the United States, to whom Napoleon sold Louisiana. Toussaint, however, did not see the end. Betrayed by one of his friends, French General Brunet, he was kidnapped and taken to France. As the ship sailed into the rolling Atlantic swells, Haiti hardly more than a memory hovering on the horizon, Toussaint said:

"In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Haiti only the trunk of the tree of liberty. It will spring up again by the roots, for they are numerous and deep."

Toussaint L'Ouverture died ten months later in a fortress in the bleak and wintry Jura mountains, but the roots of the tree sprouted again and in 1804 Haiti was finally free.

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Lopinot and the Haitian Revolution

There are few occasions in a person's lifetime that possess a sense-alteration to the degree of conveying the impression of being outside of the events taking place. The cusp of epochs; a common version may be the death of a parent or the collapse of a career.

To better grasp the scale of the Haitian Revolution, the events can only be perceived via such terms as Holocaust, mass murder, the liberation of a people, the birth of a nation, genocide, and even these, muttered out of context, lose their importance. Seeing is believing.

She was undoubtedly a woman of great strength of character and personal courage, exceptionally brave or perhaps simply possessed by the incipient stupidity that overbreeding sometimes brings to the upper classes.

She was completely aware of the whole scale destruction and mass murders being undertaken by the slaves. On the plantation La Resource she was not alone. The house slaves, still faithful to the memory of her parents, hovered breathlessly on the borders of their serfdom. She herself had but one clear intention, that was, to save the life of Charles Joseph Count Loppinot de la Fresillière, who had come into her pallid life two years before.

She was a Creole of this island and had known only the odour of the negroes, the aroma of burnt cane, the smell of molasses, of sawdust and of perfumes imported from abroad and as such, had lost their delicacy in the furnace holds of ships becalmed in the wide Sargasso Sea.

She knew well the fragrance of exotic tropical blooms carried on a warm wind when one sat dozing in the side gallery, the slave girl in spotless white, fanning her bare feet. She had been unprepared for the fresh crispness of his appearance, the originality of his clothing, and a sense about him that she could only compare to freshly baked bread or if you could imagine the smell of sunshine.

All her life, she had a highly developed olfactory faculty. They were never  lovers. He had arrived on the island aboard a 78 gun ship of the line in the company of the exalted. After having lived in Louisiana as an officer in the militia, he was now at St. Domingue where he was appointed Lieutenant de Roi par interim at Port au Prince. He became Major Commandante pour Roi at Jerome in 1784 and Commandante particulier at Port au Prince in 1787.

He occupied large estates in the colony. He married Catherine Fabre d'Auray by whom he had four sons. He was her neighbour. From the hilltop upon which her mansion had been built, she could see the burning cane fields. Macaque, her father's valet, so named in a moment of levity in what now seemed to be a thousand years ago, approached her with much gentility, smiled through his chattering teeth and told her in courtly French that the wagon was prepared and that the Monsieur had consented to enter the hogshead that had been provided for their escape and that he had requested her to join him. This she declined in as much as she had already decided to die in the house her father had built, overlooking the deep bay at Moucound.

Six of her strongest houseboys rolled the heavy oaken barrel in which the Count, wrapped in blankets against the inevitable collisions lay in hiding. This was heaved onto the waiting oxcart. Later they would roll it on to a careened longboat leaning on the waters edge in the bay. This in turn would be hauled aboard the British frigate "Arethusa" that would eventually take him and his family, also hidden in rum barrels, to Jamaica and safety. He would, however, return with the British expedition.

That evening, with her delicate profile turned slightly windward, she could smell them coming long before she heard them in the bottom of the garden near to the fountain dedicated to the Three Graces, built by her father in the year that she was born.

Five years later, between the execution of Louis XVI on the 21st of January 1793 and that of Marie Antoinette on the 16th October, at the promting of Loppinot himself, the future Louis XVIII - the Dauphin Louis XVII still being alive - then Compte de Provence, conferred on Loppinot the powers of Governor General of St. Domingue and Commissioner of all the Windward and Leeward Islands of America by a commission signed in Hamm in Westphalia on the 24th August 1793. This was to commence when "... His Majesty would only be able to decide further useful directions on the restoration of the monarchy, only then would he send his orders."

In as much as his lands had been lost in St. Domingue and in return for his service with the British expedition, the Secretary of State decided that a suitable grant of land would be made to him in Trinidad.

Col. Thomas Picton was a large, red-faced Welshman who drank more than he should and kept a notoriously common woman of an indeterminable racial background as a mistress. He tended to run the colony in much the same manner as he did his regiment. He was sitting in a warm rummy vapour which emanated from his person, when the Count was announced by the German sentry belonging to the 3rd Hompesch's regiment of German "Jägers" left behind so as to maintain order in the freshly captured island.

Picton could not stand the idea of meeting and dealing with yet another overly brought up, dandified ex-courtier of a now extinct kingdom. Frenchies made him sick. With elaborate resignation he listened as the Count Loppinot went through lengthy formalities, finally arriving at the point: land. Sorry, Picton had not heard a word from the Secretary of State and as such had no authority to make a grant. Undeterred, the Count borrowed money on mortgage. He attempted to utilise his slaves by purchasing a half share in a sugar estate at Tacarigua. But the depressed sugar market at the time, so different from the prosperous revolutionary days in St. Domingue, resulted in heavy losses for him.

In Trinidad, his rank and military experience earned Loppinot the confidence of the military governors of the island who succeeded Col. Picton. Brigadier General Thomas Hislop appointed him a brigadier-general in the militia. It was during the latter's governorship that the Count again applied for a grant of land in a mountain valley above Tacarigua. This time he was successful, and the area of his cocoa plantation is still bearing his name to date.

Under Hislop's successor, Major-General W. Monroe, during a period when the wars for the liberation of South America was being conducted by a young mestizo revolutionary called Simon Bolivar, Loppinot was sent with troops to flush out a revolutionary cell that had been built up under the aegis of one Geraldine Carry on Carry's island in the Dragon's Mouth, Chacachacare.

The insurgents, comprised mainly of members of the local Masonic Lodge, had already left for Guiria on the mainland. Taking the town, they were successful in the recommencing of the revolution, which had petered out. They were later known as the "Immortal 45" and were with Bolivar at the capture of Caracas.

Sir Ralph Woodford, the island's first civil governor who succeeded Munro in 1813, dismissed the old Council of Advice of previous administrators and appointed a new Council of Three, one of whom was the Count.

In 1814, the year after Woodford's arrival, the news of the fall of Napoleon came. The Count lost no time in suggesting means of winning back St. Domingue. In elaborate terms he addressed the Comte d'Artois. He commenced:

"Monsignor, we have heard the most memorable, the most happy and the most cheering event for the spirit of Frenchmen. The monstrous idol, that fantasy of ambition and error raised up is finally cast down to leave only the bitter memory of the most painful screams..."

He was reminding the Comte d'Artois of his position and rank and proposed a commission for himself as Governor General, not in name but in fact. He wrote dozens of letters outlining various schemes and plans to retake St. Domingue, now Haiti. They all came to nothing. The most wealthy, the most splendid, the most fantastic colony France had ever possessed was now on the road to its own destiny. The last of the house of Bourbon to sit upon the throne of France were reactionary relics of the ancient regime, best remembered by the saying that they learned nothing and forgot nothing. In his closing of one of his last letters to the king a disappointed Loppinot writes:

"Since the happy events which restored His Majesty to the throne, I have not received a single instruction..."

Loppinot lived out his last years in his mountain retreat as one of the most respected and prominent inhabitants of the British colony of Trinidad. When he died in 1817, he was buried on his estate, as were his wife and a son. Well beloved by his slaves, there was never a hanging in Loppinot. The family and title exist to this day in France.

Haiti

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Trinidadians today descend from Haitians both black and white who fled the bloody revolution in Haiti in the late 18th century.

The popular refrain goes: “Haiti, I’m sorry.” To try to grasp the heroism and the calamity of Haity in the 1780s is difficult in terms of personal heroism, the defining of one’s humanity despite other people’s realities, the willingness to fight for it while paying the price for it. This revolutionary period left several hundred thousand people dead in Haiti in a twenty-year period. Those who experienced human trauma on such a scale could only survive with the creation of profound new realities in truth.

Haiti’s trauma is universal, particularly in terms of calamities. The calamity of slavery on the whole from the 16th to the 19th century, the calamity of Adolf Hitler’s holocaust of the 1940s, of Joseph Stalin’s mass murder on an even greater scale than Hitler’s in the same period on the same continent - those took place in the living memory of a large percentage of the population of the world today.

Historian Philip Roshford once said to me: “Experience is not what happens to a person, it’s what a person does with what happens to him or her.” So before we feel sorry for Haiti, let us try and understand what happened when and to whom.

Charles Dickens’ ‘Tale of Two Cities’ commences with the words: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,”, referring to the French Revolution of 1789, an event that changed the order of things in Europe and the western world forever. The divine right of kings, both as idea and ideal, lost its meaning the moment a Corsican gentleman soldier, Napoleon Bonaparte, declared himself emperor in 1804 and nominated his immediate family to European thrones, thrones that had previously traced their pedigrees back more than 2000 years to antique chieftains who were called names like Thorbald the Clatterer and Eystein the Fart. The world order in the western world had changed.

In the 18th century, France’s best money produced was the island of St. Domingue, Haiti. It was also where France lived out its most macabre ‘alter ego’. Millions of people from the African continent, varieties of tribes, peoples, religions and cultures, arrived at a place after a horrendous journey and proceeded to experience conditions so terrifying that to attempt to describe them would be distracting. The Africans took what happened to them and out of those experiences they produced their own cultural syncretisms, parodies of the dominant European culture in conjunction with their own common African past. Because of the importation of new slaves, this syncretism was always added to - Haiti was the first real melting pot in the Caribbean.

Life’s parameters in Haiti in those days were determined by skin colour, the command of wealth and the displays of barbarity and debauchery. To make it in Haiti you had to be rich, white and very weird in an 18th century style. As a slave island, it operated on a large scale: hundreds of thousands of acres were under sugar cultivation. To make sugar viable, this required a workforce of slaves shipped from Africa at the rate of thousands every decade. This system was bound to collapse; it could not be maintained forever.

The situation, driven by greed, produced a variety of racial types the world had never seen before. Laws were made to stop African slave women from being given property by French men in love with them. The thus deprived offspring of such relationships was excluded from both worlds, despising their mothers and wanting to be a part of their father’s society.

The Haitian plantocracy lived in fear in the midst of sumptuous wealth. The slaves, on the other hand, lived in fear, anger and hope of revenge.

In Europe’s rigid society, Haiti began as an oddity. In the 17th century, low-class adventurers left France for Haiti to be planters, pirates, opportunists and slavemasters. They soom became rich with big sugar estates. Their descendants at the time of the French Revolution were the rich and affected ‘petit blancs’. Elements of the provincial nobility also came to Haiti, bourgeois businessmen, administrators, soldiers, a whole system to organise and produce sugar. Three main classes emerged in the colony, each rigidly segregated, producing bitter divisions and laying down the conditions of what was to come. By the 1780s, the classes consisted of at the top the senior government and army from France, the planters and wealthy merchants; in the middle, the ‘petits blancs’, the non-whites, mulattoes, quadroons and freed blacks; and at the bottom, the great number os slaves. The first looked down upon the second, who in turn envied and resented the former, while both classes of European descendants considered themselves a world apart from all non-whites, not to mention the slaves.

Another spin was put on it by the ongoing marriages of impecunious nobility with rich petit blancs and the great-granddaughters of slaves who now looked like European women and lived in palatial plantation houses. During the years of the French Revolution from 1789 and the triumph of the slave population in 1803, several factions fought each other with unbelievable ferocity. There were horrific massacres of Europeans, 30,000 in Cap Francis alone, in revenge of the sad depredations of the Africans with medieval tortures hatched in a barbaric time.

At least three men gave themselves the name or Macandal Daaga. He was a poisoner, a science man, a loup garou. A wild man, he lived alone and perfected poisons. Wenda Parkinson in her book ‘This gilded African’ remarks that nobody will ever know how many people he killed, both black and white. The sheer name of Daaga spread terror into the hearts of Haitians. Eventually, the man was caught, tied to a stake and burnt alive.  Miraculously, he escaped the flames, his body on fire. For a long time after, people said that Daaga could not die.

In 1789, a sailor boy jumped onto the jetty from a merchant ship and went into the town shouting: ‘Liberté, liberté! The bastide has fallen!” With the French Revolution having begun, Haiti fell into total anarchy. Similar to the situation in France, everybody who had hated everybody now started killing everybody.

In Paris, Maximiliene Marie Isidore de Robespierre (1758 - 1794), the man who was running the revolution in France, was told of the destruction of property and of the colonists. Advised that he should intervene, Robespierre declared: “Perish the colonies rather than sacrifice on tenth of our principles”.

Out of the chaos and destruction of the whites, of their plantations and their economy, a strong man began to emerge. He fought the royalists, the mulattoes and even the blacks. He imposed order ... as best he could. Toussaint L’Ouverture, an African of princely descent, grew up on a huge estate owned by a count who had recognised in Toussaint’s father a remarkable intellect and strength of character. They could not become friends under the circumstances. Toussaint’s father was a slave, however, he had his house on the estate, was his master’s driver and traveling companion and most importantly of all, possessed a treasure beyond imagination: he was able to read. The boy Toussaint grew like a cobweb broom: reedy, bright-eyed, quick in both French and Patois. His manners were elegant. Years later, he surprised the bigots who had been sent to his country by his style, generosity and charm, and most of all the principles of the Englightenment and the rights of man he had ingrained. The count and his father had done a good job.

L’Ouverture, soldier, statesman, revolutionary, was a significant man of his times. To get the big picture, he has to be placed alongside George Washington and Simon Bolivar.

In Haiti, blood flowed and plantations burned. There are fantastic stories of heroism and of love by black people for the people who once owned them. Some people who live in Trinidad today, were saved by former Haitian slaves during the revolution. They have this story:

The house was on fire, blazing in the night, bright yellow behind the lace courtains. The old man was dead, his sons too. Their wives were already burning upstairs. The slaves are rioting outside. Down the frontsteps comes the Da, the black nanny. She has madam’s jewel box tight against her chest. A man, blood streaming down the arm that is holding a cutlass, rushes past, snatches the jewel case and runs screaming into the night. She walks fast into the ruined garden. The planter’s little boy and his sister are running too, stooping under their nanny’s wide skirts. She saves the children she has taken care of  and breast-fed herself, puts them on a boat bound for Trinidad.

Similarly, the Count of Loppinot escaped inside of a wooden barrel into which some loyal slaves of his had put him, and many others who came to Trinidad. Many came with gold and jewellery, emeralds and rubies - they were once very rich. This is how they started back again in Trinidad.

Toussaint L’Ouverture himself knew that the Haitian economy was ultimately linked to France. The vested interest in France, the merchants, importers and exporters, sought inspite of Robespierre’s sentiment an accommodation between the two revolutions, one European and one Caribbean.

Philip Rose Roume de St. Laurent

During this period, a Grenada-born man named Philipe Rose Roume de St. Laurent had been appointed ordinator (judge) in Tobago under the administration of Arthur Count Dillon. Because of his experience in the West Indies, Roume de St. Laurent was one of three men chosen to be France’s commissioners to Haiti to facilitate affairs with all the parties concerned.

In Trinidad, he is remembered as the originator of the French Creole presence here. This memory was of no use to the British who took the island in 1797. He was written out of colonial history. At Trinidad’s independence, under the banner ‘Massa Day Done’ the French Creoles were put into approbrium by the political party that had come into power in Trinidad. Roume de St. Laurent was forgotten for a second time. In fact, however, he was a very significant Caribbean man. He is not obscure, and his descendants and perhaps hundreds of his immediate relatives live here in Trinidad.

Roume de St. Laurent was born on the 13th October, 1743. His mother was a de Gannes. Educated in Grenada, Philip was brought up as a gentleman. He was one of those people who had the ‘common touch’, but he was also able to talk to kings without being in awe. Slim, of medium height, a little too good-looking perhaps, he turned out to be possessed of vision. He understood the revolution and worked to serve the interestof French people in the Caribbean, which did not exclude mulattoes and free blacks.

Roume de St. Laurent arranged for these same people to come to Trinidad before the French Revolution. His foresight created the precedent of the Cedula of Population that was the legal framework for the French to keep coming even during the revolutions in Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, St. Lucia, Dominica and Grenada. Black, white and coloured, free and enslaved, they came, were allotted the land and worked on their plantations: their descendants in their hundreds of thousands are Trinidadians now.

This is why both the British colonial and the post-independence educators swept him under the carpet: he might have stolen the thunder of British administrators and nation-building politicians. As a national figure, to evoke his memory would have put a stop to divisive politics by providing a hero in whom so many of us would have a vested interest, a common origin. And this is why history is so important: it informs choice.

Roume de St. Laurent made Caribbean politics his career. He brokered with the King of Spain for French-speaking people from all over the Caribbean to come here. He and his mother owned estates in Maraval, Ariapita and Diego Martin. He himself never lived here, however, his relatives did.

Serving the Bourbon kings both in France and in Spain, he made money from revolutionary politics.  At that time, he added the aristocratic ‘de St. Laurent’ to his name. Michael Pocock in his authoritative essay on Roume did not think he was a nobleman, although his lineage was ancient. Pierre Gustave Louis Borde described him as a chevalier.

In Haiti, after his posting as judge in Tobago, he was once more just ‘Citizen Roume’. HIs tasks became more complicated with Napoleon becoming emperor. Roume’s role changed, evolving from monarchist to revolutionary to imperial commissioner. His situation was precarious in terms of life and teath. Both his bosses, Napoleon and Toussaint L’Ouverture, were dangerous men. By this time, various life crises had overtaken him and he divorced his English wife. She was the daughter of a general, and he was now looking for other alliances.

The revolution in the Caribbean was about slaves and people of African descent. Simon Bolivar in South America had the blod of slaves in his veins; Fedon in Grenada was a free coloured; Victor Hugues, the terror of the revolution in the Caribbean, was a mulatto; Toussaint L’Ouverture a ‘gilded African’.

Miriam Rochard is remembered by those of her sister’s descendants who still had the story and sho lived in Woodbrook up to a few years ago as a very goodlooking woman with red auburn hair and green eyes. She was the natural daughter of Thmas Danier Rochard Lepine and Genevieve ..., a free woman of colour. They lived both in Tobago and Grenada, and they had money. Roume de St. Laurent also lived with her in Tobago. He married Miriam in Port Republicain, now Port-au-Prince, in 1799 in the presence of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Louis Beauvais and Paul L’Ouverture. He was 56, she 38. They had a daughter. Citizen Roume put his European place in society where his mouth was - where he said his heart was. It was to cost him, however.

Roume worked with Toussaint. Other commissioners came and went; battles were fought, won and lost; treachery existed on every level and of course the inevitable ‘tropical rot’ that affects all imports, human or otherwise, set in.

In the end, they were compromised and lost everything. Toussaint died in the gaol; Roume died in poverty. Napoleon grudgingly gave Miriam a pittance of a pension - she was black, he said. And even the emperor himself died in obscurity on the island of St. Helena in the Atlantic.

Haiti became the first republic in the Caribbean. The country continued to experience terrible times and has never recovered to this day.

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