Madison Smartt Bell - Toussaint Louverture

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, Franois Dominique Toussaint Louverture can fairly be called the highest-achieving African-American hero of all time. And yet, two hundred years after his death in prison and the declaration of independence of Haiti, the nation whose birth he made possible, he remains one of the least known and most poorly understood among those heroes. In the United States, at least until recently, the fame of Toussaint Louverture has not spread far beyond the black community (which was very well aware of him and his actions for two or three generations before slavery ended here). Neither Toussaint's astounding career nor the successful struggle for Haitian independence figures very prominently in standard history textbooksdespite, or perhaps because of, their critical importance from the time they began in the late eighteenth century to the time of our own Civil War.

In his own country, Toussaint Louverture is honored very highly indeedbut not unequivocally. In the pantheon of Haitian national heroes, Toussaint is just slightly diminished by the label Precursor of liberty and nationhood for the revolutionary slaves who took over the French colony of Saint Domingue. The title Liberator is reserved for Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the general who took Toussaint's place in the revolutionary war, who presided over Haiti's declaration of independence from France, and soon after crowned himself emperor. It's true enough that Dessalines was the first man across the finish line in the race for liberty in Haiti. But without Toussaint's catalytic role, it's unlikely that Dessalines or anyone else would have known how or where to enter that race.

Today's Haiti, known until 1804 as French Saint Domingue, occupies the western third of the island of Hispaniola, or Little Spainthe name that Christopher Columbus gave it when he first arrived in 1492. The 1.3 million Taino Indians who already lived there called their homeland Ayiti, which means mountainous place. Most of the Indians were peaceable Arawaks, though a community of more warlike Caribs had settled, comparatively recently, on an eastern promontory, in what is today the Dominican Republic.

Hispaniola was not the first landfall in the New World for Columbus's expedition, but it was the first place where he built a settlement on land, beginning with timber from one of his three ships, the Santa Maria, which had foundered in the Baie d'Acul, on Haiti's northwest coast. After their long, cramped voyage of uncertain destination, Columbus's sailors and soldiers may well have felt that they had blundered into paradise, especially since in the beginning the Arawaks received them as gods descended from the sky. Food grew on trees and the living was easy. The awestruck Arawaks were friendly, their women agreeably willing. The Spaniards were fascinated, among other things, by the pure gold ornaments these natives wore.