C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
The Hero of Hayti
By Wendell Phillips (1811–1884)
T
At such a moment Toussaint l’Ouverture appeared.
He had been born a slave on a plantation in the north of the island,—an unmixed negro,—his father stolen from Africa. If anything, therefore, that I say of him to-night moves your admiration, remember, the black race claims it all,—we have no part nor lot in it. He was fifty years old at this time. An old negro had taught him to read. His favorite books were Epictetus, Raynal, military memoirs, Plutarch. In the woods he learned some of the qualities of herbs; and was village doctor. On the estate, the highest place he ever reached was that of coachman. At fifty he joined the army as physician. Before he went, he placed his master and mistress on shipboard, freighted the vessel with a cargo of sugar and coffee, and sent them to Baltimore; and never afterward did he forget to send them, year by year, ample means of support. And I might add, that of all the leading negro generals, each one saved the man under whose roof he was born, and protected the family.
Let me add another thing. If I stood here to-night to tell the story of Napoleon, I should take it from the lips of Frenchmen, who find no language rich enough to paint the great captain of the nineteenth century. Were I here to tell you the story of Washington, I should take it from your hearts,—you, who think no marble white enough on which to carve the name of the Father of his Country. I am about to tell you the story of a negro who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it from the reluctant testimony of Britons, Frenchmen, Spaniards,—men who despised him as a negro and a slave, and hated him because he had beaten them in many a battle. All the materials for his biography are from the lips of his enemies.
The second story told of him is this: About the time he reached the camp, the army had been subjected to two insults. First their commissioners, summoned to meet the French Committee, were ignominiously and insultingly dismissed; and when afterward François, their general, was summoned to a second conference, and went to it on horseback, accompanied by two officers, a young lieutenant, who had known him as a slave, angered at seeing him in the uniform of an officer, raised his riding-whip and struck him over the shoulders. If he had been the savage which the negro is painted to us, he had only to breathe the insult to his twenty-five thousand soldiers, and they would have trodden out the Frenchmen in blood. But the indignant chief rode back in silence to his tent, and it was twenty-four hours before his troops heard of this insult to their general. Then the word went forth, “Death to every white man!” They had fifteen hundred prisoners. Ranged in front of the camp, they were about to be shot. Toussaint, who had a vein of religious fanaticism, like most great leaders,—like Mohammed, like Napoleon, like Cromwell, like John Brown, he could preach as well as fight,—mounting a hillock, and getting the ear of the crowd, exclaimed:—“Brothers, this blood will not wipe out the insult to our chief; only the blood in yonder French camp can wipe it out. To shed that is courage; to shed this is cowardice and cruelty besides;”—and he saved fifteen hundred lives.
I cannot stop to give in detail every one of his efforts. This was in 1793. Leap with me over seven years; come to 1800: what has he achieved? He has driven the Spaniard back into his own cities, conquered him there, and put the French banner over every Spanish town; and for the first time, and almost the last, the island obeys one law. He has put the mulatto under his feet. He has attacked Maitland, defeated him in pitched battles, and permitted him to retreat to Jamaica; and when the French army rose upon Laveaux, their general, and put him in chains, Toussaint defeated them, took Laveaux out of prison, and put him at the head of his own troops. The grateful French in return named him general-in-chief. “Cet homme fait l’ouverture partout,” said one (This man makes an opening everywhere); hence his soldiers named him “L’Ouverture,” the opening.
This was the work of seven years. Let us pause a moment, and find something to measure him by. You remember Macaulay says, comparing Cromwell with Napoleon, that Cromwell showed the greater military genius, if we consider that he never saw an army till he was forty; while Napoleon was educated from a boy in the best military schools in Europe. Cromwell manufactured his own army; Napoleon at the age of twenty-seven was placed at the head of the best troops Europe ever saw. They were both successful; but, says Macaulay, with such disadvantages the Englishman showed the greater genius. Whether you allow the inference or not, you will at least grant that it is a fair mode of measurement. Apply it to Toussaint. Cromwell never saw an army till he was forty: this man never saw a soldier till he was fifty. Cromwell manufactured his own army—out of what? Englishmen, the best blood in Europe; out of the middle class of Englishmen, the best blood of the island. And with it he conquered—what? Englishmen, their equals. This man manufactured his army—out of what? Out of what you call the despicable race of negroes, debased, demoralized by two hundred years of slavery, one hundred thousand of them imported into the island within four years, unable to speak a dialect intelligible even to each other. Yet out of this mixed, and as you say, despicable mass, he forged a thunderbolt and hurled it at—what? At the proudest blood in Europe, the Spaniard, and sent him home conquered; at the most warlike blood in Europe, the French, and put them under his feet; at the pluckiest blood in Europe, the English, and they skulked home to Jamaica. Now if Cromwell was a general, at least this man was a soldier. I know it was a small territory; it was not as large as the continent: but it was as large as that Attica, which with Athens for a capital has filled the earth with its fame for two thousand years. We measure genius by quality, not by quantity.
Further,—Cromwell was only a soldier; his fame stops there. Not one line in the statute-book of Britain can be traced to Cromwell; not one step in the social life of England finds its motive power in his brain. The State he founded went down with him to his grave. But this man no sooner put his hand on the helm of State than the ship steadied with an upright keel, and he began to evince a statesmanship as marvelous as his military genius. History says that the most statesmanlike act of Napoleon was his proclamation of 1802, at the peace of Amiens, when, believing that the indelible loyalty of a native-born heart is always a sufficient basis on which to found an empire, he said: “Frenchmen, come home. I pardon the crimes of the last twelve years; I blot out its parties; I found my throne on the hearts of all Frenchmen;”—and twelve years of unclouded success showed how wisely he judged. That was in 1802. In 1800 this negro made a proclamation; it runs thus: “Sons of St. Domingo, come home. We never meant to take your houses or your lands. The negro only asked that liberty which God gave him. Your houses wait for you; your lands are ready; come and cultivate them;”—and from Madrid and Paris, from Baltimore and New Orleans, the emigrant planters crowded home to enjoy their estates, under the pledged word, that was never broken, of a victorious slave.
Again, Carlyle has said, “The natural king is one who melts all wills into his own.” At this moment he turned to his armies,—poor, ill-clad, and half-starved,—and said to them: Go back and work on these estates you have conquered; for an empire can be founded only on order and industry, and you can learn these virtues only there. And they went. The French admiral, who witnessed the scene, said that in a week his army melted back into peasants.
It was 1800. The world waited fifty years before, in 1846, Robert Peel dared to venture, as a matter of practical statesmanship, the theory of free trade. Adam Smith theorized, the French statesmen dreamed, but no man at the head of affairs had ever dared to risk it as a practical measure. Europe waited till 1846 before the most practical intellect in the world, the English, adopted the great economic formula of unfettered trade. But in 1800 this black, with the instinct of statesmanship, said to the committee who were drafting for him a constitution: “Put at the head of the chapter of commerce that the ports of St. Domingo are open to the trade of the world.” With lofty indifference to race, superior to all envy or prejudice, Toussaint had formed this committee of eight white proprietors and one mulatto,—not a soldier nor a negro on the list; although Haytian history proves that with the exception of Rigaud, the rarest genius has always been shown by pure negroes.
Again, it was 1800, at a time when England was poisoned on every page of her statute-book with religious intolerance, when a man could not enter the House of Commons without taking an Episcopal communion, when every State in the Union except Rhode Island was full of the intensest religious bigotry. This man was a negro. You say that is a superstitious blood. He was uneducated. You say that makes a man narrow-minded. He was a Catholic. Many say that is but another name for intolerance. And yet—negro, Catholic, slave—he took his place by the side of Roger Williams, and said to his committee: “Make it the first line of my Constitution that I know no difference between religious beliefs.”
Now, blue-eyed Saxon, proud of your race, go back with me to the commencement of the century, and select what statesman you please. Let him be either American or European; let him have a brain the result of six generations of culture; let him have the ripest training of university routine; let him add to it the better education of practical life; crown his temples with the silver of seventy years,—and show me the man of Saxon lineage for whom his most sanguine admirer will wreathe a laurel rich as embittered foes have placed on the brow of this negro: rare military skill, profound knowledge of human nature, content to blot out all party distinctions and trust a State to the blood of its sons,—anticipating Sir Robert Peel fifty years, and taking his station by the side of Roger Williams before any Englishman or American had won the right;—and yet this is the record which the history of rival States makes up for this inspired black of St. Domingo.
It was 1801. The Frenchmen who lingered on the island described its prosperity and order as almost incredible. You might trust a child with a bag of gold to go from Samana to Port-au-Prince without risk. Peace was in every household; the valleys laughed with fertility; culture climbed the mountains; the commerce of the world was represented in its harbors. At this time Europe concluded the Peace of Amiens, and Napoleon took his seat on the throne of France. He glanced his eyes across the Atlantic, and with a single stroke of his pen reduced Cayenne and Martinique back into chains. He then said to his Council, “What shall I do with St. Domingo?” The slaveholders said, “Give it to us.” Napoleon turned to the Abbé Grégoire: “What is your opinion?” “I think those men would change their opinions if they changed their skins.” Colonel Vincent, who had been private secretary to Toussaint, wrote a letter to Napoleon, in which he said: “Sire, leave it alone: it is the happiest spot in your dominions; God raised this man to govern; races melt under his hand. He saved you this island; for I know of my own knowledge that when the Republic could not have lifted a finger to prevent it, George III. offered him any title and any revenue if he would hold the island under the British crown. He refused, and saved it for France.” Napoleon turned away from his Council, and is said to have remarked, “I have sixty thousand idle troops: I must find them something to do.” He meant to say, “I am about to seize the crown; I dare not do it in the faces of sixty thousand republican soldiers: I must give them work at a distance to do.” The gossip of Paris gives another reason for his expedition against St. Domingo. It is said that the satirists of Paris had christened Toussaint the Black Napoleon; and Bonaparte hated his black shadow. Toussaint had unfortunately once addressed him a letter, “The first of the blacks to the first of the whites.” He did not like the comparison. You would think it too slight a motive. But let me remind you of the present Napoleon, that when the epigrammatists of Paris christened his wasteful and tasteless expense at Versailles Soulouquerie, from the name of Soulouque, the Black Emperor, he deigned to issue a specific order forbidding the use of the word. The Napoleon blood is very sensitive. So Napoleon resolved to crush Toussaint, from one motive or another; from the prompting of ambition, or dislike of this resemblance,—which was very close. If either imitated the other, it must have been the white, since the negro preceded him several years. They were very much alike, and they were very French,—French even in vanity, common to both. You remember Bonaparte’s vainglorious words to his soldiers at the Pyramids: “Forty centuries look down upon us.” In the same mood, Toussaint said to the French captain who urged him to go to France in his frigate, “Sir, your ship is not large enough to carry me.”
Napoleon, you know, could never bear the military uniform. He hated the restraint of his rank; he loved to put on the gray coat of the Little Corporal, and wander in the camp. Toussaint also never could bear a uniform. He wore a plain coat, and often the yellow Madras handkerchief of the slaves. A French lieutenant once called him a maggot in a yellow handkerchief. Toussaint took him prisoner next day, and sent him home to his mother. Like Napoleon, he could fast many days; could dictate to three secretaries at once; could wear out four or five horses. Like Napoleon, no man ever divined his purpose or penetrated his plan. He was only a negro; and so in him they called it hypocrisy. In Bonaparte we style it diplomacy. For instance, three attempts made to assassinate him all failed, from not firing at the right spot. If they thought he was in the north in a carriage, he would be in the south on horseback; if they thought he was in the city in a house, he would be in the field in a tent. They once riddled his carriage with bullets; he was on horseback on the other side. The seven Frenchmen who did it were arrested. They expected to be shot. The next day was some saint’s day; he ordered them to be placed before the high altar, and when the priest reached the prayer for forgiveness, came down from his high seat, repeated it with him, and permitted them to go unpunished. He had that wit common to all great commanders, which makes its way in a camp. His soldiers getting disheartened, he filled a large vase with powder, and scattering six grains of rice in it, shook them up, and said: “See, there is the white, there is the black; what are you afraid of?” So when people came to him in great numbers for office, as it is reported they do sometimes even in Washington, he learned the first words of a Catholic prayer in Latin, and repeating it, would say, “Do you understand that?”—“No, sir.”—“What! want an office, and not know Latin? Go home and learn it!”
Then again, like Napoleon,—like genius always,—he had confidence in his power to rule men. You remember when Bonaparte returned from Elba, and Louis XVIII. sent an army against him, Bonaparte descended from his carriage, opened his coat, offering his breast to their muskets, and saying, “Frenchmen, it is the Emperor!” and they ranged themselves behind him, his soldiers, shouting “Vive l’Empereur!” That was in 1815. Twelve years before, Toussaint, finding that four of his regiments had deserted and gone to Leclerc, drew his sword, flung it on the grass, went across the field to them, folded his arms, and said, “Children, can you point a bayonet at me?” The blacks fell on their knees praying his pardon. His bitterest enemies watched him, and none of them charged him with love of money, sensuality, or cruel use of power. The only instance in which his sternest critic has charged him with severity is this: During a tumult, a few white proprietors who had returned, trusting his proclamation, were killed. His nephew, General Moise, was accused of indecision in quelling the riot. He assembled a court-martial, and on its verdict ordered his own nephew to be shot, sternly Roman in thus keeping his promise of protection to the whites. Above the lust of gold, pure in private life, generous in the use of his power,—it was against such a man that Napoleon sent his army, giving to General Leclerc, the husband of his beautiful sister Pauline, thirty thousand of his best troops, with orders to reintroduce slavery. Among these soldiers came all of Toussaint’s old mulatto rivals and foes.
Holland lent sixty ships. England promised by special message to be neutral; and you know neutrality means sneering at freedom, and sending arms to tyrants. England promised neutrality, and the black looked out on the whole civilized world marshaled against him. America, full of slaves, of course was hostile. Only the Yankee sold him poor muskets at a very high price. Mounting his horse, and riding to the eastern end of the island, Samana, he looked out on a sight such as no native had ever seen before. Sixty ships of the line, crowded by the best soldiers of Europe, rounded the point. They were soldiers who had never yet met an equal; whose tread, like Cæsar’s, had shaken Europe;—soldiers who had scaled the Pyramids, and planted the French banners on the walls of Rome. He looked a moment, counted the flotilla, let the reins fall on the neck of his horse, and turning to Christophe, exclaimed: “All France is come to Hayti: they can only come to make us slaves; and we are lost!” He then recognized the only mistake of his life,—his confidence in Bonaparte, which had led him to disband his army.
Returning to the hills, he issued the only proclamation which bears his name and breathes vengeance: “My children, France comes to make us slaves. God gave us liberty; France has no right to take it away. Burn the cities, destroy the harvests, tear up the roads with cannon, poison the wells, show the white man the hell he comes to make;”—and he was obeyed. When the great William of Orange saw Louis XIV. cover Holland with troops, he said, “Break down the dikes, give Holland back to ocean;” and Europe said, “Sublime!” When Alexander saw the armies of France descend upon Russia, he said, “Burn Moscow, starve back the invaders;” and Europe said, “Sublime!” This black saw all Europe marshaled to crush him, and gave to his people the same heroic example of defiance.
It is true, the scene grows bloodier as we proceed. But remember, the white man fitly accompanied his infamous attempt to reduce free men to slavery with every bloody and cruel device that bitter and shameless hate could invent. Aristocracy is always cruel. The black man met the attempt, as every such attempt should be met, with war to the hilt. In his first struggle to gain his freedom, he had been generous and merciful, saved lives and pardoned enemies, as the people in every age and clime have always done when rising against aristocrats. Now, to save his liberty, the negro exhausted every means, seized every weapon, and turned back the hateful invaders with a vengeance as terrible as their own, though even now he refused to be cruel.
Leclerc sent word to Christophe that he was about to land at Cape City. Christophe said, “Toussaint is governor of the island. I will send to him for permission. If without it a French soldier sets foot on shore, I will burn the town, and fight over its ashes.”
Leclerc landed. Christophe took two thousand white men, women, and children, and carried them to the mountains in safety; then with his own hands set fire to the splendid palace which French architects had just finished for him, and in forty hours the place was in ashes. The battle was fought in its streets, and the French driven back to their boats. Wherever they went, they were met with fire and sword. Once, resisting an attack, the blacks, Frenchmen born, shouted the Marseilles Hymn, and the French soldiers stood still; they could not fight the ‘Marseillaise.’ And it was not till their officers sabred them on that they advanced, and then they were beaten. Beaten in the field, the French then took to lies. They issued proclamations, saying, “We do not come to make you slaves; this man Toussaint tells you lies. Join us, and you shall have the rights you claim.” They cheated every one of his officers, except Christophe and Dessalines and his own brother Pierre; and finally these also deserted him, and he was left alone. He then sent word to Leclerc, “I will submit. I could continue the struggle for years,—could prevent a single Frenchman from safely quitting your camp. But I hate bloodshed. I have fought only for the liberty of my race. Guarantee that, I will submit and come in.” He took the oath to be a faithful citizen; and on the same crucifix Leclerc swore that he should be faithfully protected, and that the island should be free. As the French general glanced along the line of his splendidly equipped troops, and saw opposite Toussaint’s ragged, ill-armed followers, he said to him, “L’Ouverture, had you continued the war, where could you have got arms?” “I would have taken yours,” was the Spartan reply. He went down to his house in peace; it was summer. Leclerc remembered that the fever months were coming, when his army would be in hospitals, and when one motion of that royal hand would sweep his troops into the sea. He was too dangerous to be left at large. So they summoned him to attend a council; and here is the only charge made against him,—the only charge,—they say he was fool enough to go. Grant it: what was the record? The white man lies shrewdly to cheat the negro. Knight-errantry was truth. The foulest insult you can offer a man since the Crusades is, “You lie.” Of Toussaint, Hermona, the Spanish general, who knew him well, said, “He was the purest soul God ever put into a body.” Of him history bears witness, “He never broke his word.” Maitland was traveling in the depths of the woods to meet Toussaint, when he was met by a messenger and told that he was betrayed. He went on, and met Toussaint, who showed him two letters,—one from the French general offering him any rank if he would put Maitland in his power, and the other his reply. It was, “Sir, I have promised the Englishman that he shall go back.” Let it stand, therefore, that the negro, truthful as a knight of old, was cheated by his lying foe. Which race has reason to be proud of such a record?
But he was not cheated. He was under espionage. Suppose he had refused: the government would have doubted him,—would have found some cause to arrest him. He probably reasoned thus: “If I go willingly, I shall be treated accordingly;” and he went. The moment he entered the room, the officers drew their swords and told him he was prisoner; and one young lieutenant who was present says, “He was not at all surprised, but seemed very sad.” They put him on shipboard and weighed anchor for France. As the island faded from his sight, he turned to the captain, and said, “You think you have rooted up the tree of liberty, but I am only a branch; I have planted the tree so deep that all France can never root it up.”
Arrived in Paris, he was flung into jail, and Napoleon sent his secretary Caffarelli to him, supposing he had buried large treasures. He listened awhile, then replied, “Young man, it is true I have lost treasures, but they are not such as you come to seek.” He was then sent to the Castle of Joux, to a dungeon twelve feet by twenty, built wholly of stone, with a narrow window high up on the one side, looking out on the snows of Switzerland. In winter, ice covers the floor; in summer, it is damp and wet. In this living tomb the child of the sunny tropic was left to die. From this dungeon he wrote two letters to Napoleon. One of them ran thus:—
“Sire, I am a French citizen. I never broke a law. By the grace of God, I have saved for you the best island of your realm. Sire, of your mercy grant me justice.”
Napoleon never answered the letters. The commandant allowed five francs a day for food and fuel. Napoleon heard of it, and reduced the sum to three. The luxurious usurper, who complained that the English government was stingy because it allowed him only six thousand dollars a month, stooped from his throne to cut down a dollar to a half, and still Toussaint did not die quick enough.
This dungeon was a tomb. The story is told that in Josephine’s time, a young French marquis was placed there, and the girl to whom he was betrothed went to the Empress and prayed for his release. Said Josephine to her, “Have a model of it made, and bring it to me.” Josephine placed it near Napoleon. He said, “Take it away,—it is horrible!” She put it on his footstool, and he kicked it from him. She held it to him the third time, and said, “Sire, in this horrible dungeon you have put a man to die.” “Take him out,” said Napoleon, and the girl saved her lover. In this tomb Toussaint was buried, but he did not die fast enough. Finally the commandant was told to go into Switzerland, to carry the keys of the dungeon with him, and to stay four days; when he returned, Toussaint was found starved to death. That imperial assassin was taken, twelve years after, to his prison at St. Helena, planned for a tomb as he had planned that of Toussaint; and there he whined away his dying hours in pitiful complaints of curtains and titles, of dishes and rides. God grant that when some future Plutarch shall weigh the great men of our epoch, the whites against the blacks, he do not put that whining child at St. Helena into one scale, and into the other the negro, meeting death like a Roman, without a murmur, in the solitude of his icy dungeon!