Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh

Abstract

Haitian Revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture has been the focus of many plays, novels, children’s books, illustrated histories, and biographies since the nineteenth century. Yet, Louverture’s story has seemed elusive to scholars until just recently. In this biography, Hazareesingh works “to return as far as possible to the primary sources, to try to see the world through [Louverture’s] eyes, and to recapture the boldness of his thinking and the individuality of his voice” (10). Through research in libraries and archives in France, Britain, and the United States, Hazareesingh shows how Louverture “embodied the many facets of Saint-Domingue’s revolution” (2). He challenges assumptions that European ideas brought about the Haitian Revolution, instead focusing on the local origins and “intellectual potency” of the Black revolutionaries (12).Hazareesingh divides this sizeable tome into four parts, each with three chapters. The first part explores Louverture’s emergence as a revolutionary. He disputes the overstated differences between enslaved people born in the colony and those born in Africa. He explains how these distinctions were “another essential tool of white power” (25). Hazareesingh refers to the period from 1791 to 1794 as Louverture’s apprenticeship, serving under other Black revolutionaries and the Spanish. He stresses that Louverture’s choice to join the French was not a rallying to Jacobin republicanism, and he attributes Louverture’s military successes to his focus on fraternity among his troops, his presence on the battlefield, his paternal leadership, and his insistence upon humanity toward civilians and prisoners of war.Parts II and III explore Louverture’s time in power, when he acted in accordance with a “multi-layered concept” of fraternity that “included whites, people of colour, republicans from France and all the men and women across the Atlantic who were engaged in the just war against slavery” (103–104). He had to convince the formerly enslaved, particularly those born in Africa, and maroons to join the republican cause. He also faced challenges to his leadership and vision from representatives sent from France, namely Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Gabriel d’Hédouville, both of whom he outmaneuvered. Louverture worked to establish economic relationships with the United States and British in Jamaica to ensure the success of the colony, and he secured control over Spanish Santo Domingo on the eastern part of the island. Furthermore, he worked with a small group of men to draft a constitution from Saint-Domingue in 1801.In Part IV, Hazareesingh describes the last years of Louverture’s leadership as “an authoritarian spiral” (278). Indeed, his agrarian policies provoked the formerly enslaved in Saint-Domingue with their “echoes of slavery” (277), and his political and military actions prompted Napoleon Bonaparte in France to send an expeditionary force to the colony. Even though Louverture anticipated an attack and prepared the island, the French tricked and arrested him. Hazareesingh suggests that Jean-Jacques Dessalines may have been complicit in Louverture’s capture to secure power for himself. Imprisoned in Fort Joux in France, Louverture wrote and dictated his defense. Following his death, he became a hero to revolutionaries of all stripes, from enslaved people who revolted elsewhere in the Caribbean and the United States to Fidel Castro in the 1950s. Hazareesingh describes Louverture as “the first black superhero of the modern age” (329).Hazareesingh refers to Louverture as “Toussaint” throughout the manuscript while using the last names of all the other figures, including Bonaparte and Dessalines. Although exclusive use of the first name reflects a personal story, it also denies Louverture the respect afforded to other figures in the book. A formerly enslaved man deserves to be identified by his chosen name of Louverture. Production elements in this book make it more appealing to a popular audience than to a scholarly one. The book has a helpful chronology and glossary but no bibliography. Moreover, its endnotes, which run together in paragraph form, are difficult to navigate. On the other hand, a popular audience may struggle with untranslated French and Kreyol (Hatian Creole) within the text. Nonetheless, this biography makes a solid contribution to our understanding of Haiti’s most well-known revolutionary.