Haiti News
Surprising Sides to Haiti’s Slave Liberator
It is a little shocking to learn from Girard that at an early point in the revolution, when the antislavery cause seemed on the verge of collapse, L’Ouverture broached the idea of betraying his own emancipated followers by leading them back into bondage, in the hope of getting official protection for himself and one of his comrades. Ultimately he restored the slave trade in Saint-Domingue, after having abolished it — restored it because the plantations needed laborers, though he intended to free the newly purchased Africans after they had toiled for a number of years. Meanwhile he promulgated a labor code that in practice was only marginally better than slavery, even if it maintained the principle of emancipation.
L’Ouverture was not, in short, an “abolitionist saint.” He was a man of his time. L’Ouverture’s “equivocation was representative of an age that had to reconcile Enlightenment principles and the labor requirements of plantations. Like three other great figures of the Age of Revolutions — Thomas Jefferson, Simón Bolívar and Napoleon — he had conflicted views on the delicate matter of human bondage.” At least L’Ouverture brought a greater lucidity to his conflicted views than did Jefferson or Napoleon. He knew that his goal was double: to preserve Saint-Domingue’s prospects for wealth, and, even so, to uphold the abolitionist idea.
He wanted the emancipated slaves to be able to profit in the future from the achievements of the advanced French civilization. With that purpose in mind, he intimated that, under his leadership, revolutionary Saint-Domingue was going to remain formally attached to metropolitan France. He also wanted to ensure that metropolitan France would never be able to reinstate slavery. And with that additional purpose in mind, he stipulated that formal attachment should allow for a considerable autonomy. To benefit from Europe without risking destruction at the hands of the Europeans — that was his idea.
He built the first Western-style modern black army in order to achieve this attractive and nuanced goal. His army defeated or fended off one adversary after another — the sometimes genocidal-minded white planters, the Saint-Domingue mulattoes, various black insurgents, the Spanish Empire and the British imperialists. Napoleon dispatched two-thirds of the French Navy with a large army to crush the revolution, and L’Ouverture set the stage for the defeat of that army too. Only, in the course of doing so, he ended up under arrest. Napoleon sent him to his death in a French prison, which led the freedmen of Saint-Domingue to do what L’Ouverture had always warned them against, namely, to initiate a general massacre of the whites and to declare a total rupture with France: tragic misfortunes for the future of Haiti.
L’Ouverture’s triumphs proved to be in these ways less than total. And yet what hero in history has ever achieved everything? Napoleon, his archenemy, declined to grant him even a modicum of respect. Jefferson slighted him. L’Ouverture nonetheless showed himself to be those men’s superior, philosophically, politically and militarily — a point made by C.L.R. James that survives mostly intact in Philippe Girard’s sophisticated and anti-mythological biography.