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By Root 791 0

large material investment in the colonial status quo which the royalist conspiracywas meant to restore and preserve. But the rest of his story shows that he also had an ability to see beyond that immediate practical interest; he was endowed with a greater foresight than Blanchelande, Cambefort, Tousard, Bayon de Libertat, and their kind. In a flash, he would have seen the whole future that they had failed to see. What a sweet irony it must have seemed to him, that the rulers of the colonial world should actually invite and encourage him to launch the series of actions that would, in ten years' time, replace French Saint Domingue with an independent black nation. And if he were careful, secretive, and discreet (as long practice had taught him always to be), Toussaint Breda might emerge at the end as Toussaint Louverture, the nearly omnipotent master of his universe.

*Apparently Gaou-Guinou is the ancestor intended.

*The unlucky Louis referred to above.

*Meaning they were at the bottom of the social order of free persons.

*Aristocratic fugitives from the French Revolution were classed as emigres and subject to various sanctions if they returned to French territory.

THREE

Turning the Tide

With the proclamation of Camp Turel, Toussaint came out from behind the curtain which had hidden his movements in 1791 and 1792, and placed himself squarely on the stage of the military and political theater of Saint Domingue. Still, his political motives remained somewhat obscure in the summer and fall of 1793. In the August 29 proclamation, he declared himself the partisan of liberty. That, however, did not necessarily mean that he intended to fall in with the French Revolution as it was being expressed in the colony by Commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel. Indeed, Toussaint was still at war with the Jacobin commissioners, still fighting, as the proclamation put it, for the king.

The declared royalism of the rebel slaves in the early 1790s has always looked peculiar. Macaya's equation of the kings of Congo, France, and Spain with the three wise men who followed the star seems, at first glance, a piece of perfect nonsense. However, a little better than half of the slaves who had risen in arms had been born in Africa and so had some direct experience of the African style of kingship. What they knew of European kings was conjectural—none had ever visited the Western Hemisphere. The kings of France and of Spain were almost as remote to these New World revolutionaries as the star that had shone on the birth of Christ so many centuries before. On the other hand, the French king had put his signature on the Code Noir, which ordered a more lenient regime for Saint Domingue's slaves than the one which the colonists actually maintained. According to the legend of Bois Caiman, Louis XVI had in some sense been invoked there as the guarantor of the rights that the slaves were rising to claim: three days of liberty per week and abolition of the whip. From African wars and the sale of prisoners, Saint Domingue's slaves knew something about captured and imprisoned kings. By analogy, they could form an idea of Louis's increasingly fragile position as hostage of the Jacobins in France.

If his son Isaac's memoir is to be credited, Toussaint Louverture was the grandson of an African king, and something of that royal atmosphere was even preserved during his childhood, but Toussaint had been born on Hispaniola and never traveled off the island until the very end of his life. What he knew of Africa was legend. He knew as much about France as we do about the moon—yet we know quite a lot about the moon, even if we've never been there.

Just a couple of weeks before the proclamation of Camp Turel, Antoine Chanlatte, an homme de couleur who commanded for General Laveaux and the French at Plaisance, reported the failure of an attempt to win the rebels of that area to the side of the commissioners and the French Revolutionary government. The rebels in question were led by “Toussaint a Breda,” who had a headquarters at Marmelade, a key post in