Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [22]
At the same time it really does seem that the letter expresses the point of view, the fears, and the hope of the vast majority of rebel slaves who could not read or write but nevertheless had become aware of their leaders' earlier scheme to sell them down the river. One senses that this demand for liberty for all, not just a few, must have been composed with their full knowledge and dispatched with their approval. That point is underlined by the statement that the authors' “way of thinking” has been formed by “consulting everyone to whom we are connected in the same cause.”
Of the three signatories, Jean-François and Biassou were by then recognized as the two most formidable leaders of the black revolt. Charles Belair, who was Toussaint's nephew by blood or adoption, was a child of fourteen in 1792. Given his tender age and the relationship, some suspect that Belair's name was used as a screen and that Toussaint was really the third author of the document. Though pure speculation, the idea is intriguing nonetheless. Toussaint had signed other missives that were sent to the whites earlier—but those messages were a lot more moderate than this one. During this early period of the revolution, Toussaint seemed to be doing everything in his power to pass completely unnoticed. If he was noticed, by an observer like Gros, he was always playing a mediatory role—displaying his willingness and his ability to temporize between violently opposed factions.
The letter of July 1792 describes very clearly almost all the points of policy which Toussaint Louverture would fight to achieve over the next decade. Jean-François and Biassou would both be trafficking in slaves themselves before they were done. Toussaint, from this day forward, was always committed to general liberty. The idea of restoring the plantations with free, wage-earning labor was one he pursued to the very end. And the principle of natural human rights was bedrock to which he would always return. That black slaves were laying claim to the natural rights which white Frenchmen had declared for themselves is the most radical aspect of the document. The black leaders, and especially Toussaint, understood very well that in order to justify the institution of slavery, the white slave masters needed to define black men as something less than human. The black men would fight, and many would die, to annihilate that definition.
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Given that the 1792 letter was addressed as an appeal to the French Colonial and National assemblies, the requirement that it be ratified by the Spanish government seems a little peculiar. But for some time before the letter was written, the rebel slaves in the Northern Department had a much healthier relationship with the Spanish colonists on the eastern two-thirds of the island than with the French to the west. Jean-François and Biassou had established themselves in the mountains along the Spanish border. Ouanaminthe, which they controlled, was a border town with its Spanish sister Dajabon just across the Massacre River, related like Ciudad Juarez to El Paso. These positions also gave the rebel slaves access to the grassy savannah of what is now Haiti's Central Plateau, then a sparsely populated Spanish possession. There the black warriors could find beef on the hoof, and perhaps fresh horses; it was also the area Toussaint thought safest for his wife and children in the fall of 1791.
Both Toussaint's first letters to Biassou and the report of Procurator Gros offer evidence that the Spanish were supplying arms and ammunition to the insurgent slaves from an early date. Gros, whose memoir is practically the only eyewitness account of what went on in the rebel camps around Grande Riviere, believed that the whole slave rebellion had been instigated by Spanish and probably French royalists, using the mulattoes as pawns. It must be remembered that Gross pamphlet was published as a piece of propaganda; the first edition, printed when Gros was a refugee in Baltimore, puts an English translation first, with the French original in small