Toussaint Louverture
Toussaint Louverture led the only successful slave revolt in history to found a state, and died in a French prison before it was declared. He was born enslaved around 1743 on a plantation in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the richest colony in the world, producing perhaps forty per cent of Europe's sugar and half its coffee with a population of some 500,000 enslaved people and 30,000 whites. He was a coachman and a herbalist, learned to read, was freed in his thirties, and rented land and slaves of his own before the revolution. The rising began in August 1791 in the north, and Toussaint joined it some weeks in, fighting first for the Spanish in Santo Domingo and changing sides in 1794 when the French Convention abolished slavery. He then fought the Spanish and the British — the latter losing perhaps 15,000 men, largely to yellow fever — and drove both off the island by 1798. He governed as an extraordinarily effective administrator: restoring plantation production with paid labour, keeping the property of many white owners, opening trade with the Americans and the British, and issuing a constitution in 1801 that abolished slavery permanently and named himself governor for life. That constitution is what decided Napoleon, who sent 20,000 men under his brother-in-law to restore slavery. Toussaint was invited to a meeting under a flag of truce in June 1802, arrested, and shipped to a fortress in the Jura, where he died of cold and neglect in April 1803. Haiti declared independence eight months later. He is reported to have said on being taken aboard that in overthrowing him the French had cut down only the trunk of the tree of liberty, and that it would spring up again from the roots. The French expedition lost most of its men to yellow fever and was driven out by Dessalines within eighteen months.
- Lived: 1743 CE – 1803 CE
- Nationality: Haitian
- Roles: revolutionary_leader, general, political_leader
