Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [39]
The fact that Toussaint had a lot of business in Borgne suggests that he may have come with Bayon de Libertat from that parish, rather than having been born on Breda Plantation at Haut du Cap. The location of the plantation sold by Bayon when he moved to Breda has never been established; Gerard Barthelemy theorizes that Bayon may have come from Borgne. A substantial mountain separates Borgne from Haut du Cap and the Northern Plain, and it is not obvious why Toussaint would have involved himself in plantations there if he had no prior connection to the area. On the other hand, Borgne is an extremely fertile pocket in an out-of-the-way place, so it probably would have been easier for a free black to acquire land there than in the heavily cultivated region of the Northern Plain. And Toussaint's holdings were quite far-flung; Grande Riviere is also a good distance from Haut du Cap, and at the Fort de Joux Toussaint told his interrogator that he and Suzanne (who apparently had substantial means of her own, though still a slave in 1785) had purchased several properties in the canton of Ennery, a few miles northeast of Gona'ives and on the far side of the Cordon de l'Ouest from Toussaint's base at Breda.
In 1791, then, Toussaint was not a rebel slave, but a free man who for whatever reason had joined their cause, and in 1793 he was not a nou-veau but an ancien libre. Before 1791 he belonged to the class of affran-chis, freedmen, within which slaves of 100 percent African blood who had won manumission by whatever means available had no legal distinction from gens de couleur who had been freed by their white lovers or fathers. Then too there was a class of black and colored free persons, legally distinct from the affranchi group, who had been born of free parents and thus were never slaves. Chemist and houngan Max Beauvoir reports having seen a marriage certificate for Toussaint and Suzanne which attests thatToussaint himself was born free, but this document is not found in the scholarly record, and the hard evidence that does exist supports the idea that he was freed in the 1770s.
He was thus a member of a very small group: free blacks who owned slaves as well as property, and enjoyed the same legal status (and lack of status) as free gens de couleur, but who were separated from the gens de couleumot only by a socially significant racial difference but also by differences in their social connections. Though often despised and abused by the grands blancs, the free gens de couleur had close kinship ties to the most wealthy and powerful white colonists in Saint Domingue, and more often than not those ties did prove useful to the educational and economic advancement of the free colored population. Allowing for exceptions like Toussaint's unusually close relationship with Bayon de Libertat, free blacks enjoyed no such advantage.
Baron de Wimpfen, a traveler in colonial Saint Domingue, puts it plainly: “the black class is the last.* That's the one of the free property-owning negroes, who are few in number.”21 For a mulatto born into slavery, son of a white father, manumission could be expected almost as an unwritten right. A black slave had no such expectation. A large number of those who were freed were too old to do plantation work anymore—they were fatras, in the unsentimental term used on the slave rolls. Others won freedom for particular merit, most commonly by service in the militia or the marechaussee. Some, usually persons with a special skill like carpentry, blacksmithing, or the care and training of animals, worked on their free days to earn their recorded value and finally purchased their own freedom.
Since documents of the period don't reliably distinguish free mulat-toes from free blacks, it is difficult to estimate just how many of the latter there really were. De Wimpfen says they were “few in number”; Haitian