Toussaint Louverture

François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture was born into slavery on the Bréda plantation in the French colony of Saint-Domingue around 1743. Self-taught in French, Spanish, and the military doctrine of Caesar and Frederick the Great, he rose by his fortieth year to manage the plantation that owned him. In 1791, when the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue rose against the brutality of the most profitable colony in the Atlantic world, Toussaint joined the rebellion not as a young firebrand but as a seasoned man of forty-eight.

Within five years he commanded a disciplined army that defeated the French planters, then the Spanish, then the British — each in turn the most formidable military powers of the age. By 1801 he had unified the island under a constitution he drafted himself: it abolished slavery permanently, declared all citizens equal before the law, and named him governor-general for life. Napoleon, who had no intention of permitting a free Black republic in the Americas, dispatched thirty thousand troops under his brother-in-law Charles Leclerc to restore French rule and reinstate slavery.

Toussaint was arrested through deceit in June 1802, transported to France, and imprisoned in the Fort de Joux in the Jura Mountains. He died there of pneumonia, neglect, and cold on the seventh of April 1803, having said before his deportation: "In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty. It will spring up again from the roots, for they are numerous and deep." His successor Jean-Jacques Dessalines completed the work. On the first of January 1804, Haiti declared independence — the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere, the first Black republic in modern history, and the only successful slave revolution the world has ever known.

For the descendants of every enslaved African, Toussaint Louverture established a principle history could not retire: that a people held in chains could organize, fight, win, and govern. Frederick Douglass invoked him; Marcus Garvey invoked him; every African independence movement of the twentieth century invoked him. He is honored here as the founder.