Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [32]
A legal document to which Toussaint was a party in the 1770s is signed by someone else in his stead, suggesting that Toussaint could not write his own name at that date. But this suggestion might very well have been a ruse. The white colonists of Saint Domingue frowned on literacy among their slaves, fearing the dangerous ideas that might be introduced, and there is evidence that the slaves themselves saw reading and writing as rebellious if not revolutionary acts—which it would have been most advisable to practice in secret. Another story, perhaps apocryphal, holds that Toussaint was beaten bloody by a colonist who saw him reading a book on the main street of Haut du Cap, and that Toussaint wore the bloodstained coat until, in the early days of the revolution, he found his assailant again and killed him.
Almost all of Toussaint's correspondence was dictated to secretaries. A few surviving letters written from prison in his own hand reveal that he was able to write in French, rather than the much more common Creole patois in which slaves communicated with their masters and among themselves, though his spelling was strictly phonetic. He seems to have read Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher who had himself once been a slave. In public addresses he made at the height of his power, he occasionally referred to Machiavelli, and his career indicates that he had mastered many fundamentals of The Prince, whether or not he learned them from the book.
If he had not read all of the Abbe Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes, he certainly had read the notorious passage in which the radical priest predicts a violent end to slavery: “All that the negroes lack is a leader courageous enough to carry them to vengeance and carnage. Where is he, this great man, that nature owes to its vexed, oppressed, tormented children? Where is he? He will appear, do not doubt it. He will show himself and will raise the sacred banner of liberty. This venerable leader will gather around him his comrades in misfortune. More impetuous than the torrents, they will leave everywhere ineffaceable traces of their just anger.'5
In Isaac's version, Toussaint was born on Breda Plantation. During his youth, the plantation had among its team of French managers a man named Beage. In his maturity, Toussaint would be renowned for his self-control; he distinguished himself from the other rebel leaders by a more temperate disposition and a much cooler head. Still, at the age of eighteen he lost his temper with Beage in an argument about a horse, and went so far as to strike him. Such events were almost unheard-of: any slave who forgot himself so far as to hit a white man was liable to punishment by death, and more than likely a very slow and painful death. Apparently in this rare case the unusually humanitarian program which Isaac credits the comte de Noe with installing at Breda was respected by the manager. If Toussaint's rash action had any consequences, they were not permanent or fatal.
From an early age, Toussaint had been put in charge of much of Breda's livestock. It was a logical assignment for a slave too small and frail to be of much service in the cane fields; moreover, Toussaint seems to have had an inborn talent for working with animals, which his masters encouraged him to develop. With something like a natural jockey's build, Toussaint would become famous as a horseman—even Frenchmen who sneered at his style admitted there was no horse he could not handle. He also became an expert horse trainer and had considerable skill as a vet. When Bayon de Libertat took over the management of Breda in 1772, Toussaint emerged as the new steward's coachman and probably his most