Philippe Girard. Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life.

Abstract

Toussaint Louverture was an extraordinary historical figure in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. Contemporaries and historians have compared him to George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1791, when the military campaign of the Haitian Revolution began, Louverture was numbered among its early leadership. By 1797, he became the general-in-chief of French armed forces in Saint-Domingue and the leader of the Haitian Revolution. Four years later, similar to Washington and Bonaparte, Louverture became the head of a government he had helped to establish. Upon learning of his death in 1803, American diarist Elizabeth Drinker lamented, “the celebrated African Chief, is dead” (Elaine Forman Crane, ed., The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker [1991], 3:1659). The English poet William Wordsworth offered an elegy for the fallen hero: “Thou hast left behind / Powers that will work for thee … There’s not a breathing of the common wind / That will forget thee” (“To Toussaint L’Ouverture,” 1803). Over fifty years after his death, according to Matthew J. Clavin’s Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War (2010), the image of the Haitian Revolution’s leader served as a resonant, polarizing symbol on both sides of the war that determined the fate of American slavery. Louverture’s was a revolutionary life in the midst of Atlantic revolutions.