Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [9]
Your very humble and obedient servant,
(Signed)
Toussaint Louverture.
General of the armies of the king, for the public good.1
Probably this proclamation was not the first time that the man formerly known as Toussaint Breda had used the new surname Louverture, since it assumes that the name may already be known to his audience—but if it is not the very first time he entered this new identity into the written record, it is the first time he deliberately announced it to the general public.
Not by coincidence, August 29 was also the date that Leger Felicite Sonthonax, commissioner and chief representative of the French government then in Saint Domingue, proclaimed the abolition of slavery in the colony. The newly minted Toussaint Louverture was then officially part of the Spanish army; Spain was at war with France, and the colonists of Spanish Santo Domingo had adopted the rebel slaves of the French colony as auxiliaries to their own military. Thus, in the close of his proclamation, Toussaint was probably referring to the king of Spain, though his clustering of the words “liberty,” “equality,” and “brothers” is an intentional echo of the most familiar phrase of the French Revolution, “liberte, egalite, fraternite. “ Moreover, and somewhat con-fusingly the rebel slaves of Saint Domingue had been claiming loyalty to the king of France almost from the moment of their first rising.
Since the fall of 1791, Toussaint had been in the mountains with the revolting slaves, though before 1793 his role was not obviously prominent. The proclamation of Camp Turel was his first deliberate effort to call attention to himself and the part he intended to play. Though Toussaint had been fighting a guerrilla war against the French for nearly two years, the timing of the proclamation suggests that he must have known in advance that Sonthonax would abolish slavery and when he was going to do it. What he meant to convey, in his lines and between them, was that Toussaint Louverture, a black man born into slavery in the colony, was the true apostle of liberty here—not the white commissioner Sonthonax, who had only recently arrived from France.
Toussaint Breda had been a trusted retainer on Breda Plantation, near Haut du Cap, and only a short distance from the port of Cap Francais. He served as coachman for Breda's French manager, Bayon de Libertat—an important role, since coachmen often carried messages for their masters, alone and on their own responsibility. In his addi-tional role of commandeur, Toussaint enjoyed considerable authority over the majority of more ordinary slaves on the plantation. Such com-mandeursvrere responsible for organizing and directing work gangs and often had other managerial duties. Surprisingly, they were allowed to carry swords, as an emblem of their authority and perhaps as a practical tool of enforcement as well.
Nocturnal gatherings of Saint Domingue's slaves were prohibited in theory, but often tolerated in practice, as a means of defusing tensions that might otherwise be released in the rebellion which all the French colonists had excellent reason to fear. Commonly called “cal-enda,” these gatherings featured drumming and dancing and sometimes competitive stick-fighting and were officially regarded by the French as innocuous peasant dances—though some observers did report that rituals drawn from African religion were performed on these occasions.
On the night of August 14,1791, an assembly of commandeurs took place in a wooded area called Bois Cai'man, or Crocodile Forest, part of the Lenormand de Mezy Plantation in Morne Rouge, on the border of the richest cane-growing area in all Saint Domingue, the Northern Plain. The commandeurs came from all the important plantations of the Northern Plain and the foothills surrounding it: Limbe, Quartier Morin, Petite Anse, Port Margot,