Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [115]
Julien Raimond, experienced in diplomacy from his service on the various commissions and his long effort lobbying for rights for the gens de couleur, was a member of the assembly, along with two other colored men; the seven whites came from the grand blancs class, chief among them Bernard Borgella, the mayor of Port-au-Prince who had become part of Toussaint's inner circle. By May, the assembly had produced a succinct and lucid document of seventy-seven articles grouped in thirteen sections. The seventy-seventh article authorized Toussaint Louverture to put the constitution into practice right away, pending its approval by the French government.
Article 1, defining the territory of the colony, declares that Saint Domingue is “part of the French empire, but submitted to special laws.”26 The last phrase (aside from its echo of the home government's most recent pronouncement) had a disagreeable resonance; “special laws” in the past had permitted slavery as an exception to the Rights of Man. But Article 3 puts it very plainly: “Slaves cannot exist on this territory; servitude is abolished forever. All men are born, live and die free and French.” The article goes on to outlaw racial discrimination of any kind, in terms of employment and under the law. Article 6 declared the “Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion” to be the only faith recognized in Saint Domingue.
There follow several sections on morals and property rights, and a firm restatement of Toussaint's labor policy. Article 17 states, somewhat euphemistically: “The introduction of cultivators, indispensable to the reestablishment and growth of agriculture, will take place in Saint Domingue; the Constitution charges the governor to take appropriate measures to encourage and favor this augmentation of arms, to stipulate and balance the different interests, to assure and guarantee the respective engagements resulting from this introduction.”27 What “the introduction of cultivators” boiled down to was the importation of slaves. By the terms of Article 3, such arrivals would have to be freed as soon as they reached the colony, but the cloudy language about “engagements” suggests that some form of indentured servitude was being contemplated. Like the early rulers of Haiti who followed him, Toussaint was willing to participate in a one-way version of the slave trade in order to increase his workforce and his army. Perhaps he justified this dubious idea on the grounds that all slaves imported to Saint Domingue would, constitutionally, be freed there. Bunel was dispatched to Jamaica to purchase ten thousand slaves from the English (at the same time that he made sure that the constitution would not disturb To ussaint's arrangements with Maitland), and Corbett, the British agent at Port-au-Prince, was also discussing the importation of slaves with Toussaint.
In Article 28: “The Constitution names as Governor the citizen Toussaint Louverture, General in Chief of the Army of Saint Domingue, and in consideration of the important service he has rendered to the colony in the most critical circumstances of the Revolution, and by the wish of the grateful inhabitants, the reins of government are confided to him for the rest of his glorious life.”28 Article 29 says that future governors would be limited to a five-year term, renewable “by reason of his good administration,” but Article 30 awards Toussaint the right to name his successor—in a secret document to be unsealed only “at the unhappy event of his death.”29 This clause looked a lot like a recipe for the foundation of a dynasty, but (since Toussaint's legitimate sons were young and inexperienced, and the older two were hostages in France) it functioned more as an apple of discord among the black officer