Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [37]
“I hope,” he wrote to the owner soon after his return to Breda, “that henceforward there will be no such disorder. Your negroes seem to be very Happy that I command them, They Know how determined I am that no one will do them Injustice, that they will have provisions to live on in their place, that they will be Cared For When they are ill, but also that they will work for Their master.”16
Substitute the word “liberty” for “master,” and you have something almost identical to the policy that Toussaint Louverture would institute in 1801, as military governor of Saint Domingue.
The same day that Bayon de Libertat resumed his post at Breda, most of the runaway slaves also returned to the plantation—some intermediary must have been able to find them and let them know that the regime was about to change. Against expectation, the slave Louis recovered from the self-inflicted wound on his throat, though Bayon reported that he now wheezed like an asthmatic and had a hard time making his speech understood. As the work gangs returned to their normal routines, the epidemic among the horses and cattle also subsided.
Apparently one of de Libertat's personal retainers, a man with a knowledge of veterinary medicine and a knack for diplomacy with discontented slaves, assisted considerably with restoring order at Breda— assistance which may have been enough to justify his manumission. Toussaint was in his thirties at this time, still only approaching the prime of his powers, and it was a very unusual thing for a valuable male slave to be freed at that relatively young age. With the several skills he was known to possess, Toussaint a Breda might have earned and saved the money to purchase his own freedom, or he might have had his liberty as a gift, in recognition of some extraordinary service such as playing an indispensable role in restoring the plantation from chaos to good order. In a letter to the French Directory in 1797, Toussaint himself credits Bayon de Libertat (not the comte de Noe) with having set him free: “Twenty years ago the heavy burden of slavery was lifted from me by one of those men who think more of their duties to fulfill toward oppressed humanity than the product of work of an unfortunate being. Here I speak of my former master, the virtuous Bayon.”17
In the memoir he wrote in prison at the Fort de Joux, Toussaint touches on his life as a slave in a graceful but not especially informative arabesque: “I have been a slave; I dare to say it, but I never was subjected to reproaches on the part of my masters.”18 At the top of the arc of his career—as brigadier general, lieutenant governor, and finally governor general of Saint Domingue—he would often allude in this general way to the time he had spent in slavery. He never mentioned that he had been freed from his enslavement for seventeen years before he put himself at the head of the revolting blacks whom Sonthonax's proclamation of abolition had redefined as nouveaux libres.
The surviving list of Breda's slaves is dated 1785, just six years before the insurrection on the Northern Plain put an end to the whole situation. In fact there is one Toussaint on the list, but his particulars bear no relation to those of Toussaint Louverture. The Toussaint who remained a slave in 1785 is listed as a sugar refiner (a skill that was never part of Louverture's portfolio), and is only thirty-one years of age—Louverture must have been at least ten years older by