Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [160]
From this inflamed passage it is very plain not only that the violent loss of Saint Domingue to its former slaves remained a very sore spot in France, even a half century after the fact, but also that despite the final end of slavery in French possessions, the assumption of black racial inferiority, which the ideology of slavery very much required, had scarcely been weakened among Frenchmen. With this play, Lamartine made an argument for the equality of the races which anticipated the black pride movements of the Caribbean basin by nearly a hundred years. He offended his contemporary critics by providing his Toussaint with linguistic powers and a rhetorical style that would have been natural to a white French hero of the theater. From the modern point of view, it seems impossible that Toussaint could be made to speak in elegant Alexandrian rhyming couplets without a very great distortion of his personality, his thought, and his actual mode of expression—yet Lamartine is sometimes ingenious in adapting statements Toussaint was known to have made to the very rigid requirements of the verse form:
Ma double autoritetient tout en equilibre:*
Gouverneur pour le blanc, Spartacus pour le libre,
Tout cede et reussit sous mon regne incertain,
Je demeure indecis ainsi que le destin,
Sur que la liberte, germant sur ces ruines
Enfonce en attendant d'immortelles racines.6
The Haitian people, as they named themselves, were the first to put an end to slavery in the New World, with their definitive defeat of the French in 1803 and their declaration of independence in 1804. In the course of the next half century, the “peculiar institution” died, by slow and miserable degrees or in great spasms of violence, the last of which was the American Civil War. The story of Toussaint Louverture was adopted by the nineteenth-century abolitionists, not only Wendell Phillips but also Englishmen like M. D. Stephens and James Beard, and Frenchmen including Lamartine, Victor Schoelcher, and Gragnon Lacoste, who burnished and enshrined it in legend.
Since Phillips was not constrained by a verse form or by tight theatrical unities, his Toussaint is somewhat truer to life than Lamartine's, though the American orator permits himself many small distortions of fact, and embraces apocryphal details most warmly. For Phillips, as for Lamartine, the career of Toussaint was proof of the argument—as counterintuitive in 1861 as it was in 1850—that black men were as good as white:
Now, blue-eyed Saxons, proud of your race, go back with me to the commencement of the century, and select what statesman you please. Let him be either European or American; let him have a brain the result of six generations of culture; let him have the ripest training of university routine; let him add to it the better education of practical life, crown his temples with the silver of seventy years; and show me the man of Saxon Lineage for whom his most sanguine admirer will wreathe a laurel rich as embittered foes have placed on the brow of this negro—rare military skill, profound knowledge of human nature, content to blot out all party distinctions, and trust a state to the blood of its sons— … this is the record which the history of rival states makes up for this inspired black of St. Domingo.7
When he generalized the concept, Phillips grew more stark. “Some doubt the courage of the negro. Go to Hayti, and stand on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had, and ask them what they think of the negro's sword.”8
Emerging from the success of the Haitian Revolution, the gens de couleur, few in number as they were, enjoyed significant advantages of wealth and education over the vast black majority. The first Haitian historians—Beaubrun Ardouin, Celigny Ardouin, Saint Remy Thomas Madiou—came from this class, as did Toussaint's first Haitian biographer, Pauleus Sannon, who served as Haiti's foreign minister during the World War I era. The colored historians who wrote in the early nineteenth century