• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 772 0

scholar Jean Fouchard suggests, on the contrary, that they may have been as numerous as the free mulattoes, especially if blacks with the status of liberte de savane are included. But if free blacks were to be educated, they paid for it themselves, having no white fathers to send them to the colleges for colonists' children in France. Nor did free blacks have family resources to help them enter the plantation economy on a large scale. Most operated as tradesmen and craftsmen: carpenters, masons, tailors, and the like. Some, it appears, were professional criminals. According to one account, many free blacks were less materially comfortable than slaves on the more humanely run plantations—such slaves might even look down on impoverished free blacks. Free blacks living in the countryside were constantly suspected of harboring maroons, and indeed it was sometimes difficult to distinguish a runaway from a legitimate free black.

Some free blacks made an argument that they ought to be seen as superior to the mulatto group: “The Negro comes from pure blood; the Mulatto, on the contrary, comes from mixed blood; it's a mixture of the Black and the White, it is a bastard species … According to this truth, it is plain enough that the Negro is above the Mulatto, just as pure gold is above mixtures of gold.”22 But this scrap of rhetoric had no effect on the social reality of Saint Domingue, where even mulatto slaves felt superior to free blacks. Intermarriage between gens de couleur and free blacks was rare, and frowned upon by the former. Saint Domingue used an elaborate algebra to define sixty-four different variations of European-African mixture, and in this situation many mulattoes took an interest in lightening their children's skin through breeding.

Toussaint Breda, then, was exceptional even within the small class of free blacks, for very few of them owned land and slaves on the scale that he did. And even if the free blacks really did amount to half of the affranchis, the group was simply too small to give him an adequate power base. He had perceived, earlier than most, that even the gens de couleur all together, though numerous and determined enough to put up a good fight, would be in the end too small and weak to win the ultimate battles. The wellspring of real power was within the huge majority of half a million African slaves, and therefore Toussaint Louverture did everything he possibly could to identify himself with them.

Between 1776, when he was freed, and 1791, when the rebellion began, Toussaint Breda had a surprising number of common interests with members of the white planter class, despite the profound racial gap between him and them, and especially with the one white planter who had been his master and had willingly set him free. Some ten years older than Toussaint, Bayon de Libertat (like Napoleon Bonaparte) had roots in the Corsican petty nobility. One of his ancestors, known as Le Borgne (One-Eye), had won a certain celebrity in the service of King Henry IV of France. In France the family was based in Comminges, not far from an area called the Isle de Noe, so it is likely that de Libertat already had some connection to Louis Panteleon, comte de Noe, as well as his uncle Panteleon II de Breda, when Bayon first came among flocks of impoverished noblemen and younger sons to seek his fortune in Saint Domingue. One Lespinaist, another manager who hoped to sup-plant de Libertat on one of the plantations he was in charge of, wrote bitterly that de Libertat owed all his fortune to the comte de Noe.

The count was a Creole, born in the colony, where his family had been established for nearly a century, and he was heir to several important plantations at Haut du Cap, Plaine du Nord, and Port Margot, in the mountains between Haut du Cap and Borgne. Breda Plantation came to him through the marriage of his father, Louis, to Marie-Anne-Elisabeth de Breda. Louis Panteleon was born in 1728, two years after the marriage; when he was two his father was killed in a duel at Cap Francais. The toddler count was thus left fatherless