30090: From Paul - News - The Black Napoleon (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

> From Paultrouillot@hotmail.com

The Black Napoleon
TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE
A Biography.
By Madison Smartt Bell.

By ADAM HOCHSCHILD - New York Times
Published: February 25, 2007

Quick, what was the second country in the New World to win full independence 
from its colonial masters in the Old? Mexico? Brazil? Some place liberated by 
Bolívar?
The answer, Madison Smartt Bell reminds us, is Haiti — which actually gave 
Bolívar some help.

The years of horrendous warfare that culminated in Haiti’s birth in 1804 is one 
of the most inspiring and tragic chapters in the story of the Americas. For one 
thing, it was history’s only successful large-scale slave revolt. The roughly 
half a million slaves who labored on the plantations of what was then the 
French territory of St. Domingue had made it the most lucrative colony anywhere 
in the world. Its rich, well irrigated soil, not yet overworked and eroded, 
produced more than 30 percent of the world’s sugar, more than half its coffee 
and a cornucopia of other crops.

When the slaves there rose up in 1791, they sent shock waves throughout the 
Atlantic world. But the rebels did more than win. In five years of fighting, 
they also inflicted a humiliating defeat on a large invasion force from 
Britain, which, at war with France, wanted to seize this profitable territory 
for itself. And later they did the same to a vast military expedition sent by 
Napoleon, who vainly tried to recapture the colony and restore slavery. The 
long years of race-based mass murder (which included a civil war between blacks 
and gens de couleur, as those of mixed race were known) left more than half the 
population dead or exiled, and Haiti lives with that legacy of violence still. 
Seldom have people anywhere fought so hard for their freedom.

Seldom, too, have they so much owed success to one extraordinary man. Toussaint 
Louverture, a short, wiry coachman skilled in veterinary medicine, had been 
freed some years before the upheaval. About 50 when the revolt began, he was 
one of those rare figures — Trotsky is the only other who comes to mind — who 
in midlife suddenly became a self-taught military genius. He welded the rebel 
slaves into disciplined units, got French deserters to train them, incorporated 
revolution-minded whites and gens de couleur into his army and used his 
legendary horsemanship to rush from one corner of the colony to another, 
cajoling, threatening, making and breaking alliances with a bewildering array 
of factions and warlords, and commanding his troops in one brilliant assault, 
feint or ambush after another. Finally lured into negotiations with one of 
Napoleon’s generals in 1802, he was captured and swiftly whisked off to France. 
Deliberately kept alone, cold and underfed deep inside a fortress in the Jura 
mountains, he died in April 1803.

Toussaint’s is an epic story, and it lies at the heart of a much praised 
trilogy by Bell, the prolific American novelist. Bell’s new biography, 
“Toussaint Louverture,” is resolutely nonfiction, however. And welcome it is, 
for the existing biographies, from Ralph Korngold’s 1944 effort (dated, 
uncritical and unsourced) to Pierre Pluchon’s 1989 book (quirky, negative and 
only in French) are mostly unsatisfactory. Bell knows the primary and scholarly 
literature well, carefully sifts fact from myth and generally maintains a sober 
and responsible understated tone.

Maybe a little too sober and understated. I can’t help wondering whether Bell, 
so well known for his novels of Haiti, is bending over backward to show that as 
a biographer he is not making anything up. I wish he had given more rein to his 
novelist’s skills — not by inventing things, but by making more narrative use 
of the wealth of detail there is about this time and place. Part of the problem 
is that almost none of that detail has to do with the life of Toussaint 
himself, about whose first 50 years we know next to nothing. Bell points this 
out, and so the sources he quotes are almost entirely from after Toussaint’s 
sudden emergence as a leader: his letters and proclamations, and the relatively 
few eyewitness accounts of him.

But this largely leaves out the rich array of documentary testimony we have 
about life in brutal, high-living colonial St. Domingue, about people ranging 
from the planter Jean-Baptiste de Caradeux, who entertained his guests by 
seeing who could knock an orange off a slave’s head with a pistol shot at 30 
paces, to the French prostitute who came to the colony looking for wealthy 
white clients and then complained to a newspaper that she found too much 
competition. And both British and French officers left diaries and memoirs 
about fighting the unexpectedly skilled rebel slaves — accounts as searing and 
vivid in their frustration as those by American soldiers blogging from Iraq.

Such things are not precisely about Toussaint, but they flesh out the world in 
which he lived and fought, and American readers unfamiliar with the intricacies 
of Haitian history need all the help they can get.

Still, this is the best biography of Toussaint yet, in large part because Bell 
does not shy away from the man’s contradictions. Although a former slave, he 
had owned slaves himself. Although he led a great slave revolt, he was 
desperate to trade export crops for defense supplies and so imposed a 
militarized forced labor system that was slavery in all but name. He was 
simultaneously a devout Catholic, a Freemason and a secret practitioner of 
voodoo. And although the monarchs of Europe regarded him with unalloyed horror, 
he in effect turned himself into one of them by fashioning a constitution 
making himself his country’s dictator for life, with the right to name his 
successor.

“Within Haitian culture,” Bell writes, “there are no such contradictions, but 
simply the actions of different spirits which may possess one’s being under 
different circumstances and in response to vastly different needs. There is no 
doubt that from time to time Toussaint Louverture made room in himself for 
angry, vengeful spirits, as well as the more beneficent” ones. Of such 
contradictions are great figures made; just think of our own Thomas Jefferson — 
who, incidentally, ordered money and muskets sent to his fellow slave owners to 
suppress Toussaint’s drive for freedom, saying of it, “Never was so deep a 
tragedy presented to the feelings of man.”

Adam Hochschild’s most recent book is “Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in 
the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves.”

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