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By Root 783 0

national heroes of his time is accomplished almost by sleight of hand. At the same time, like much of the most inspired political rhetoric, it is no better than half true. Toussaint left a considerable written record (though Phillips likely knew nothing of it): not only a copious correspondence but also the memoir he drafted in the Fort de Joux. Moreover, he has been described, from his own time into ours, by friends and admirers as often as by foes and detractors. Yet Phillips is right enough to say that practically all firsthand reports on Toussaint come from the white, European milieu; precious few comments from his black and colored contemporaries have survived. It's also true that very few accounts of Toussaint's life and work have been nonpartisan. He is almost always depicted as absolutely a devil or absolutely a saint.

Portraits of Toussaint from his own time are reminiscent of drawings of American buffalo by European artists working from descriptions and without ever having seen a buffalo. Many of these images seem to be no more than sketches of generic African features, sometimes exaggerated into grotesque caricature. A study by Haitian scholar Fritz Daguillard suggests that two of the early portraits are at least reasonably faithful to their subject. The first, a full profile view, was probably done from life as a watercolor by Nicolas Eustache Maurin. Later rendered as an engraving by Delpech, this portrait became a model for many later artists who transported the basic image of Toussaint's profile into various other contexts. Toussaint liked the original well enough to present it as a gift to the French agent Roume, whose family preserved it. He wears full dress uniform for the occasion: a general's bicorne hat, decorated with red and white feathers and the red, white, and blue French Revolutionary cockade, a high tight neck cloth and a high-collared uniform coat, heavy with gold braid. The features in this image agree with eyewitness descriptions of the time: Toussaint is just slightly pop-eyed, his profile marked by a prominent, underslung lower jaw.

The second portrait, a three-quarter view, was singled out by Toussaint's son Isaac as the only image in which he found his father recognizable. At a glance this second portrait (by M. de Montfayon, who had served under Toussaint as an engineer) does not look much like the first. Toussaint wears a similar coat as in the Maurin portrait, with gold braid, his general's epaulettes, his right hand clasping a spyglass against a ceremonial sash. In this image he is bareheaded, his remaining hair gathered in a queue at the back, and we see that his forehead is very high, and his cranium remarkably large. In the Montfayon image, Toussaint's features look more delicate, less typically African, than in the other; perhaps they were slightly idealized by the artist. If Montfayon makes the jaw less prominent, the difference can be accounted for by the angle of view. The more one looks at the two portraits together, the more reasonable it seems that they represent the same person, though in two different frames of mind. The full profile suggests a head-on belligerence; the three-quarter view presents a wary, intelligent observer. History has shown that Toussaint Louverture possessed both of these qualities, in abundance.

Twentieth-century biographer Pierre Pluchon declares that “Toussaint was in no way a handsome man. On the contrary, his physique was graceless and puny.”2 To be sure, Pluchon is one of Toussaint's demonizers, but even the friendly observers agree that Louverture was, well, funny-looking, though by the time his name became known, most people had learned not to laugh at him. He was short and slight, with a head disproportionately large for the body. Most descriptions report him to have been bowlegged, and in general he seems to have had a jockeys build—and was indeed a famous horseman. His physical capacities, even when he was in his fifties (an ancient age for a slave in a French sugar colony), were very far from “puny.” According to the French general Pamphile