Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [11]
No one has ever been able to say for certain just where Toussaint Breda was during this initial tumult. If he did have a hand in the August insurrection, he kept it very well hidden. In the midst of the bloody, fiery vengeance that the rebel slaves were taking on their masters, some slaves remained loyally on their plantations and did their best to protect the white families there. Apparently Toussaint remained quietly at Breda Plantation for at least one month after the rebellion first erupted in late August. Curiously, the river of fire and blood flowing over the Northern Plain to lap against the hastily bolstered fortifications of Le Cap seems to have parted around Breda, leaving it more or less intact. Still more curiously, only 22 of Bredas 318 slaves decamped in the early days of the rebellion. The rest stayed—with Toussaint—to protect the plantation and its white mistress, Madame de Libertat.
In 1799 a letter appeared in the French newspaper Le Moniteur, describing Toussaint's conduct during the turbulence of 1791. Though unsigned, it could hardly have been written by anyone other than Breda's manager, Bayon de Libertat.
Eight days before the insurrection on the Le Cap plain, some blacks of the neighboring plantation set fire to four fields of cane … I was at that moment on my plantation seven leagues distant from Le Cap; Toussaint and the commandeur Bruno, invariably attached to the interests of their masters, succeeded in stopping the fire without any other help than that of the blacks of the plantation. When I arrived the next evening, all the scorched cane had been cut and pressed, and they were just finishing cooking the sugar which had been extracted from it. Toussaint came before me with a pained expression and said, “We have had an accident, but don't alarm yourself, the loss is not serious; I wanted to spare you the sight of it when you arrived, but you have come too soon.” I leave it to the reader to weigh these words.
Toussaint displayed an inexpressible joy to see me constantly in the midst of the blacks, giving them my orders to arouse their vigilance and their courage—and this at a time when it was enough to be white to be massacred.2
Toussaint's ability to keep order and conduct business as usual, in the midst of the anarchy that had engulfed the surrounding region, seems altogether extraordinary. But sometime in the fall of 1791, he left Breda, crossed the ash-strewn ruins of the Northern Plain, and went up into the mountains of Grande Riviere, where he joined a band of rebel slaves led by Biassou. At first he served Biassou as a secretary; later he was given the title of medecin general, or general doctor. At Breda Plantation and the surrounding area, Toussaint had the reputation of an excellent veterinarian, especially for horses, and he was also recognized as a doktefey—literally “leaf doctor.” Along with substantial skill in African/Creole herbal medicine, he seems to have had some instruction in European doctoring.
If Toussaint did any fighting when he first joined Biassou, he was not much noticed as a leader; no white observers picked him out of the fray. However, a couple of his surviving letters suggest that he already had more authority among the rebels than he wanted to be known outside that group. To Biassou he writes on October 4,1791:
My dear friend,
I have received your letter with pleasure; I cannot agree to your rendezvous; we are not able to leave our camp, for both of