Constructing an Antislavery Hero: The Portrayal of Toussaint Louverture in British Abolitionist Texts, 1803–1863

Abstract

ABSTRACT Shortly after Toussaint Louverture died in 1803, a literary tradition emerged in British abolitionist texts which portrayed the character of Toussaint in heroic terms. This article takes five texts written between 1803–1863 to demonstrate how Toussaint was constructed as an antislavery hero and what the motivations were behind this construction. The hero can be understood as a lens through which Toussaint’s character, and the character of the whole Haitian Revolution, was flattened. The hero was a frame that made him knowable and understandable to European audiences, but that also erased both the mass of enslaved people that formed the grassroots of the revolution in Haiti, as well as the many aspects of Toussaint himself that were not deemed to fit the hero narrative. This literary tradition arose because the mainstream of the nineteenth-century British antislavery movement opposed and feared rebellions led by enslaved people, believing on racist grounds that they were violent, uncontrolled, and anarchic, and at odds with the new liberal vision of empire that most British abolitionists wanted to create.