Bookplanet: biography of black Haiti liberator who defeated Napoleon

Black general who bested Napoleon and changed history gets his due
Review of “Toussaint Louverture: A Biography” by Madison Smartt Bell
By Steve Kettmann/SF Gate

Napoleon Bonaparte faced a fateful decision in early 1801. He could think strategically and find a way to work with the former slaves who had come to power in the French colony of Saint Domingue (present day Haiti). Or he could give in to pressure from French plantation owners fearful of losing their holdings -- and income -- and send an army across the Atlantic, seeking to reassert French domination and, eventually, slavery.

Napoleon made the wrong choice, as he himself reflected later in life, during his exile on the island of Saint Helena. Napoleon's failure had everything to do with his inability, as a white European, to appreciate the tactical military prowess and remarkable leadership qualities of the general who ruled over Saint Domingue, Toussaint Louverture, who is said to be the grandson of an African king named Gaou-Guinou.

The thousands of French soldiers Napoleon sent across the Atlantic were almost all killed, either through the guerrilla tactics of Toussaint and his followers or from yellow fever and smallpox. Toussaint himself was eventually captured and sent back to shiver to death in a French chateau near the Alps, but the revolutionary forces he planned and unleashed ran their course without him, and Haiti soon earned its independence. Napoleon, rattled by the setback in Saint Domingue and hurting for cash, decided to raise funds with one of the great poor choices of all time, selling more than 800,000 square miles of territory to the United States for a mere $15 million in 1803's Louisiana Purchase.

As a parlor game, Napoleon's blunder represents a historical what-if, rife with possibilities, given the persistence of slavery elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere long after Haitian independence, and given the cancerous legacy of slavery and racism that plagues the United States to this day. Madison Smartt Bell pauses briefly in his long-awaited biography, "Toussaint Louverture," to touch on these intriguing what-ifs.

"Though in 1801 Napoleon had not yet crowned himself emperor, he already had an imperial bent, and the possibility of an imposing French empire in the New World was real," Bell writes. "The army which Toussaint had forged was certainly the most formidable fighting force in the Caribbean, if not in the whole Western Hemisphere. That army might well have spread the abolition of slavery, under the flag and the liberating rhetoric of the French Revolution, all across the Spanish and French colonies of the Greater and Lesser Antilles and even into Louisiana, which was then still a French possession. If it had done so, we would be living in a very different world today."

Napoleon was far from alone in underestimating Toussaint. He was not much to look at, small and hunched over, and often his first instinct was to hang back and let others take credit for his deeds. In fact, Bell makes a convincing case that even in the early days of the Saint Domingue slave rebellion, starting in 1791, Toussaint was one of the key leaders, but he nevertheless hid behind a variety of deceptively humble roles. He was, in short, a master chess player, focused always on the objective and never in a hurry to be feted and celebrated for his vision or courage. He had read "The Prince" and took Machiavelli's arguments to heart.

Toussaint thrived on showing different sides of his personality at different times. He was a devout Catholic, for example, but also a lifetime practitioner of vodou, given to being seized at different times by different spirits who would lead him in different directions. He had a statesmanlike ability to think of the big picture, playing England, France and the United States off each other, all to further his goal of ensuring that slavery would not be reinstated; he was also, at times, capable of betrayal and great brutality.

He will be forever linked historically with his general, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who continued what Toussaint started and is known as the "Liberator" of Haiti, whereas Toussaint, Haiti's other founding father, must settle for the honorific "Precursor." Just how much of Dessalines' savage slaughter was conducted on the orders of Toussaint will never be known, but Bell presents a stark view of the bloodletting.

In the end, Bell's Toussaint is more heroic for his contradictions. In fact, a reader closes this relatively concise study, in which so much insight and background has been distilled into a mere 299 pages, wanting more. That could be a good thing. Readers looking to learn more about Toussaint can tackle Bell's trilogy of novels about him, starting with "All Souls' Rising" (Pantheon 1995), which was nominated for a National Book Award and put Bell on the map as a novelist to watch.

It's hard to argue with Bell when he asserts: "As the leader of the only successful slave revolution in recorded history, and as the founder of the only independent black state in the Western Hemisphere ever to be created by former slaves, Francois Dominique Toussaint Louverture can fairly be called the highest-achieving African-American hero of all time." Amazing, really, that at this late stage it takes this biography to try to right the historical wrong of Toussaint being so little known in the United States.

(Steve Kettmann co-wrote "What a Party!" with Terry McAuliffe, which will be published later this month (St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne Books). He lives in Brooklyn.)