Toussaint Louverture was nicknamed 'sickly stick' before leading Haiti's revolution
As a thin boy on the Bréda plantation, Toussaint was mocked as Fatras-Bâton, the sickly stick. He grew into a skilled horseman, won his freedom, and at nearly 50 joined the 1791 slave revolt. He ended up governing all of Saint-Domingue and defying Napoleon.
Toussaint was born into slavery on 20 May 1743, probably on the Bréda plantation at Haut-du-Cap, eldest son of Hyppolite, an Allada captive sold after Dahomey's wars of expansion, and his second wife Pauline, of the Aja people. The Code Noir stripped enslaved Africans of their original names, so his parents' birth names are lost. He spoke Fon first, then Creole, and later standard French. After his parents died, the plantation carpenter Pierre-Baptiste Simon, thought to be his godfather, helped raise the family.
Trained as a coachman and horse handler, he avoided the brutal cane fields and was protected by the overseer Bayon de Libertat after a fight with a white labourer. He once threw the plantation's attorney off a horse he tried to take without permission. Freed before the French Revolution, the devout Catholic became a paid overseer and eventually owned coffee plantations, and enslaved people, himself.
When revolt broke out in 1791 he served as a lieutenant to Georges Biassou and first sided with Spanish Santo Domingo, but switched to Republican France once it moved to abolish slavery. Gradually he outmanoeuvred rivals and took control of the whole island, reviving plantations with paid labour, trading with Britain and the United States, and keeping a large, disciplined army. His 1801 constitution named him governor-general for life, a direct challenge to Napoleon Bonaparte.
In 1802 General Jean-Baptiste Brunet invited him to talks and arrested him on arrival. Deported to France, he was held at the Fort de Joux and died there on 7 April 1803. His lieutenant Jean-Jacques Dessalines went on to defeat French troops, weakened by yellow fever, at Vertières that November, and Haiti declared independence on 1 January 1804, the first independent black republic in the Americas. France demanded 150 million gold francs before recognising it in 1825.
Source: Toussaint Louverture
