François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture ( ,"Toussaint l'Ouverture". Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Pearson, 2023. ; 20 May 1743 – 7 April 1803), also known as Toussaint L'Ouverture or Toussaint Bréda, was a Haitian general and the most prominent leader of the Haitian Revolution. During his life, Louverture first fought and allied with Spanish forces against Saint-Domingue Royalists, then joined with Republican France, becoming Governor-General-for-life of Saint-Domingue, and lastly fought against Bonaparte's republican troops. As a revolutionary leader, Louverture displayed military and political acumen that helped transform the fledgling slave rebellion into a revolutionary movement. Along with Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Louverture is now known as one of the "Fathers of Haiti" and a figure of Haitian mythology, where he was celebrated as a founder of the black nation.
Toussaint Louverture was born as a slave in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now known as Haiti. He was a devout Catholic, and was manumitted as an affranchi (ex-slave) before the French Revolution, identifying as a Creole for the greater part of his life. During his time as an affranchi, he became a salaried employee, an overseer of his former master's plantation, and became a slave owner himself; Toussaint Louverture owned several coffee plantations at Petit Cormier, Grande Rivière, and Ennery. At the start of the Haitian revolution he was nearly 50 years old and began his military career as a lieutenant to Georges Biassou, a leader of the preliminary 1791 slave revolt. Initially allied with the Spaniards of neighboring Santo Domingo, Louverture switched his allegiance to the French when the new Republican government moved to abolish slavery in its colonies. As leader of the Haitian Revolution, Louverture gradually established control over the whole island and used his political and military influence to gain dominance over his rivals.
Throughout his years in power, he worked to balance the economy and security of Saint-Domingue. Worried about the economy, which had stalled, he restored the plantation system using paid labor; negotiated trade agreements with the United Kingdom and the United States and maintained a large and well-trained army.Cauna, pp. 7–8 Louverture eventually seized power across Saint-Domingue, established his own system of government, and promulgated his own colonial constitution in 1801 that named him as Governor-General for Life, which challenged Napoleon Bonaparte's authority.
In 1802, Louverture was invited to a parley by French Divisional General Jean-Baptiste Brunet, but was arrested upon his arrival. He was deported to France and jailed at the Fort de Joux. He died in 1803. Although Louverture died before the final and most violent stage of the Haitian Revolution, his achievements set the grounds for the Haitian army's final victory. The Haitian Revolution continued under Louverture's lieutenant, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who led the Haitian forces to victory over the French army, which was also being ravaged by yellow fever. The final major battle was fought at the Vertières on 18 November 1803. Saint-Domingue finally declared its independence from France on 1 January 1804, when formerly enslaved Africans established a new sovereign state named Haiti, after the indigenous Taíno name for the western mountainous side of the island "Ayiti". Following the independence from French colonial rule, Haiti was the first independent black republic in the Americas and the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere, after the United States. In 1825, after twenty one years of Haiti's independence, France recognized the Haitian sovereignty, but only after forcing the new nation to agree to pay an indemnity of 150 million gold francs. President Abraham Lincoln officially recognized Haiti in 1862, during the American Civil War; the decision marked a significant reversal of decades of U.S. policy and was connected to the long-term legacy of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution.
Early life Birth, parentage, and childhood Louverture was born into slavery, the eldest son of Hyppolite, an Allada slave from the slave coast of West Africa, and his second wife Pauline, a slave from the Aja ethnic group, and given the name Toussaint at birth. Louverture's son Issac would later name his great-grandfather, Hyppolite's father, as Gaou Guinou and a son of the King of Allada, although there is little extant evidence of this claim. The name Gaou possibly originated in the title deguenon, meaning "old man" or "wise man" in the Allada kingdom, making Gaou Guinou and his son Hyppolite members of the bureaucracy or nobility, but not members of the royal family. In Africa, Hyppolite and his first wife, Catherine, were forced into enslavement due to a series of imperialist wars of expansion by the Kingdom of Dahomey into the Allada territory. In order to remove their political rivals and obtain European trade goods, Dahomean slavers separated the couple and sold them to the crew of the French slave ship Hermione, which then sailed to the French West Indies. The original names of Toussaint's parents are unknown, since the Code Noir mandated that slaves brought to their colonies be made into Catholics, stripped of their African names, and be given more European names in order to assimilate them into the French plantation system. Toussaint's father received the name Hyppolite upon his baptism on Saint-Domingue, as Latin and Greek names were the most fashionable for slaves at this time, followed by French, and Biblical Christian names.
Louverture is thought to have been born on the in Saint-Domingue, where his parents were enslaved and where he would spend the majority of his life before the revolution.Bell (2008) , pp. 59–60, 62.Forsdick & Høgsbjerg (2017), p. 14. His parents would go on to have several children after him, with five surviving infancy: Marie-Jean, Paul, Pierre, Jean, and Gaou, named for his grandfather. Louverture would grow closest to his younger brother Paul, who along with his other siblings were baptized into the Catholic Church by the local Jesuit Order. Pierre-Baptiste Simon, a carpenter and gatekeeper on the Bréda plantation, is considered to have been Louverture's godfather and went on to become a parental figure to Louverture's family, along with his foster mother Pelage, after the death of Toussaint's parents.Korngold, Ralph , 1979. Citizen Toussaint. Greenwood Press. . Growing up, Toussaint first learned to speak the African Fon language of the Allada slaves on the plantation, then the Creole French of the greater colony, and eventually the Standard French of the elite class (grands blancs) during the revolution.
Although he would later become known for his stamina and riding prowess, Louverture earned the nickname Fatras-Bâton ("sickly stick"), in reference to his small thin stature in his youth.Bell (2008) , pp. 60, 62.Beard, John Relly. 2001. Toussaint L'Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography (online ed.). Boston: James Redpath. Toussaint and his siblings were trained to be domestic servants with Louverture being trained as an equestrian and coachmen after showing a talent for handling the horses and oxen on the plantation. This allowed the siblings to work in the manor house and stables, away from the grueling physical labor and deadly corporal punishment meted out in the sugar-cane fields. In spite of this relative privilege, there is evidence that even in his youth Louverture's pride pushed him to engage in fights with members of the Petits-blancs (white commoner) community, who worked on the plantation as hired help. There is a record that Louverture beat a young petit blanc named Ferere, but was able to escape punishment after being protected by the new plantation overseer, François Antoine Bayon de Libertat. De Libertat had become steward of the Bréda property after it was inherited by Pantaléon de Bréda Jr., a grand blanc (white nobleman), and managed by Bréda's nephew the Count of Noah.Bell (2008) , pp. 66, 70, 72. In spite or perhaps because of this protection, Louverture went on to engage in other fights. On one occasion, he threw the plantation attorney Bergé off a horse belonging to the Bréda plantation, when he attempted to take it outside the bounds of the property without permission.
First marriage and manumission Until 1938, historians believed that Louverture had been a slave until the start of the revolution. In the later 20th century, discovery of a personal marriage certificate and baptismal record dated between 1776 and 1777 documented that Louverture was a freeman, meaning that he had been manumitted sometime between 1772 and 1776, the time de Libertat had become overseer. This finding retrospectively clarified a private letter that Louverture sent to the French government in 1797, in which he mentioned he had been free for more than twenty years.de Cauna, Jacques. 2004. Toussaint L'Ouverture et l'indépendance d'Haïti: Témoignages pour une commémoration. Paris: Ed. Karthala.
Upon being freed, Toussaint took up the name of Toussaint de Bréda (Toussaint of Bréda), or more simply Toussaint Bréda, in reference to the plantation where he grew up. Toussaint went from being a slave of the Bréda plantation to becoming a member of the greater community of gens de couleur libres (free people of color). This was a diverse group of Affranchis (freed slaves), free blacks of full or majority African ancestry, and Mulattos (mixed-race peoples), which included the children of French planters and their African slaves, as well as distinct multiracial families who had multi-generational mixed ancestries from the varying different populations on the island. The gens de couleur libres strongly identified with Saint-Domingue, with a popular slogan being that while the French felt at home in France, and the slaves felt at home in Africa, they felt at home on the island. Now enjoying a greater degree of relative freedom, Louverture dedicated himself to building wealth and gaining further social mobility through emulating the model of the grands blancs and rich gens de couleur libres by becoming a planter. He began by renting a small coffee plantation, along with its 13 slaves, from his future son-in-law.Cauna, pp. 63–65. One of the slaves Louverture owned at this time is believed to have been Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who would go onto become one of Louverture's most loyal lieutenants and a member of his personal guard during the Haitian Revolution.
Between 1761 and 1777, Louverture met and married his first wife, Cécile, a free woman, in a Catholic ceremony. The couple went on to have two sons, Toussaint Jr. and Gabrielle-Toussaint, and a daughter, Marie-Marthe. During this time, Louverture bought several slaves; although this was a means to grow a greater pool of exploitable labor, this was one of the few legal methods available to free the remaining members of a former slave's extended family and social circle. Louverture eventually bought the freedom of his sister Marie-Jean, his wife's siblings, and a slave named Jean-Baptist, freeing him so that he could legally marry. Louverture's own marriage, however, soon became strained and eventually broke down, as his coffee plantation failed to make adequate returns. A few years later, the newly freed Cécile left Louverture for a wealthy Creole planter, while Louverture had begun a relationship with a woman named Suzanne, who is believed to have gone on to become his second wife. There is little evidence that any formal divorce occurred, as that was illegal at the time. Louverture, in fact, would go on to completely excise his first marriage from his recollections of his pre-revolutionary life, to the extent that, until recent documents uncovered the marriage, few researchers were aware of the existence of Cécile and her children with Louverture.
Second marriage