1740 and All That

luzula: Another book report from me!

Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life by Philippe Girard (2016)
This had been on my ereader for years, probably bought on some ebook sale; I picked it up now because it's a part of the 18th century I knew little about. The only thing I knew beforehand was that Toussaint Louverture (which my dictation program picks up as "to some liberty", very fitting) led a successful revolt against slavery on Haiti around the time of the French Revolution. He seems to have been a complicated man!

It's interesting how the 18th century politics I already know about played out in Saint Domingue (which became Haiti). At first, it was the white colonizers who wanted independence from France (because they were afraid the French revolution would take their privileges away), and the enslaved black people fought as royalists! I guess this is not as surprising as you might think--people often seem to hate their immediate overlords the most (peasants their feudal landlord, enslaved people their slave drivers and owners) while the king appears as a far-off benevolent figure who would fix things if only he knew. And in fact the French king had enacted some legislation to try to rein in cruelties in slavery, under the pressure of abolitionists. But over time, Toussaint Louverture and other leaders shifted over to "rights of man" arguments, similar to the French revolutionaries, and he seems to have been fiercely resentful of racism.

I can't help but note some of the arguments of the plantation owners, because plus ca change: "Actually our slaves are perfectly happy and would never revolt if not for OUTSIDE AGITATORS!" "Actually WE are the slaves, because government wants to take our liberties [i e our property rights, i e our right to own people] away!"

It's also interesting how racism increased during the 17th and 18th centuries--at first, social station/class sometimes trumped race, such that people of color could be plantation owners, and poor white people were classed with poor free people of color. But at the end of the period, there was a crackdown on wealthier free people of color, who often owned enslaved people of their own or aspired to it, to keep them down economically and socially. Toussaint Louverture was born enslaved but was freed later on, so he was part of that class.

I can see why he was often called "the black Napoleon" at the time – he was a military leader in a revolutionary war, and after his side had won, he installed himself as military dictator for life. Also he became the richest man on the island, which does not surprise me, because getting private gain from public office is pretty much the standard for 18th century elites. He upheld the abolition of slavery, but he also ordered the former field slaves back to the same work on their previous estates and used the army to enforce his labor laws. At first, people could switch estates once a year, but after a while this was not allowed. The sale of small plots of land was forbidden, to prevent people from setting up small farms of their own. This is admittedly better than being enslaved (you can’t be bought and sold, and you’re at least supposed to get a wage) but the field workers revolted against these conditions, and Louverture had several thousand of them killed. (The book notes that white French abolitionists might have used a similar system, had they had control of the island—it’s not slavery, after all…)

So why did he do this? Obviously he stood to gain from it financially since he now owned many of these estates, but it seems he mainly wanted to prove that a country with black leadership could hold its own economically – the main export was sugar which apparently required large plantations and refineries. When Napoleon (temporarily) conquered the island back after a few years, his representative said "I will more or less follow Toussaint’s labor code, which is very good, and so strict, that I would never have dared to propose one like this on my own."

After reading the book, I read four reviews of it in peer-reviewed journals, since after all I don’t know this subject and don’t know if the book could be biased. The reviews all agree that the book is based on thorough archival research which has uncovered many new sources which were not known before, and they don’t disagree with any facts. Two of the reviews however don’t agree with the author about some of his interpretations of Louverture’s motivations, and don’t think he’s generous enough towards him. It doesn’t surprise me that interpretations vary – a figure like this is bound to be controversial.

Mildred: there's very little info on the military aspects of the revolution (clearly not the author's interest), except that the author says that Louverture quite deliberately used disease as a factor on his side--he would delay such that yellow fever and other diseases would decimate the soldiers newly come from France. And it killed a LOT of them.

But! As it turned out, mildred_of_midgard had already read this book.

First, selenak had read Mike Duncan's Hero of two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution and reviewed it here. Then, in response to a discussion about Lafayette's proposal to turn his sugar plantation into an enterprise operated via free, paid laborers instead of slaves, lizrael commented, "I'm not convinced that the kind of sugar cane plantation (I'm assuming it was sugar cane?) that was common in Caribbean could succeed as a fair and humane enterprise in competition with slave plantations, but it would have been very interesting to find out if it there was any way it could!"

And mildred_of_midgard commented:

Interestingly, Louverture tried exactly this, during the Haitian Revolution, and failed. However, the deck was stacked against him, so it's not proof that a plantation owner couldn't have made it work. (According to the Louverture biography I read, the only previous attempt had been Lafayette's--and that author mentions nothing about how it ended, perhaps because that was irrelevant to the discussion at hand.)

But I found the discussion of free and slave plantations in Haiti in the book I read just fascinating.

First and foremost--and based on your comment, you probably know this--sugarcane was a crop that was very complex to produce. It required expensive infrastructure and division of labor, which meant a huge up-front investment and a large workforce. Other crops, you could just plant in your field and grow them; sugarcane was a different beast.

So in order to get a free sugar plantation going, you would have had to get a large amount of people willing to work together on the plantation.

This was a problem during the Haitian revolution, because the newly freed slaves associated plantation work with slavery, and quite understandably didn't want to keep doing the same thing they'd always done. Their goal was to divide up the huge plots of land and farm it individually, each person feeling like he or she was working for themselves/their family, and not part of a huge enterprise. They could have grown coffee, or something like that, using this method.

But Louverture was dead set on sugarcane plantation or bust, and that was as much for psychological reasons as the former slaves' refusal was. In Louverture's mind, he had to prove to the world that free blacks could be just as successful or more successful than slaves, and that meant successful at the same thing. If ending slavery meant abandoning the sugarcane plantation model, that was not a very good economic argument for abolition. He also needed to bring in enough of a profit that he could fund the military to fight off the major European powers currently trying to bring Haiti back to the status quo.

But sugarcane work was so unpopular that even once Louverture started offering wages, he could not get the workers into the fields except at gunpoint. At which point the former slaves were like, "Are you *sure* we are former slaves? Or did we just change masters?" And while Haiti wasn't producing sugar, supply dropped and prices rose worldwide, making the economic argument even harder to sell.

If, instead, you had a Lafayette-type system where the slaves were voluntarily freed by the whites and didn't have to worry about invasion and reconquest, and where race relations were better, would the former slaves have been so dead set against the plantation model? Hard to say. Self-determination counts for a lot; individual farms might still have been more popular.

But how profitable was the slave-based plantation? The author I read argued that all the contemporary claims that it was extremely profitable were "book cooking" arguments made in the face of abolitionists arguing that slavery wasn't profitable. So you can't trust the inflated self-published numbers, and there aren't really good reliable numbers.

Still, there's indirect evidence that planters were facing hardships, some of which were caused by the reasons selenak points out: high slave mortality, and not so much the need to retrain (because sugarcane plantation work was less about skilled labor than about brute force manual labor), but the fact that these slaves were super unmotivated to be especially productive. Which, of course, fed into racist arguments that Africans were so lazy that slavery was necessary to make them work at all.

It's also worth pointing out that the colonies were founded under the mercantilist model, where the point, as far as the government was concerned, *wasn't* to make planters a profit. (The planters obviously had a different opinion here.) The point was to raise exports for the mother country, so that the import-export ratio for France as a whole was more favorable compared to that of other nations. So as long as the Caribbean plantations gross sugar export volume was high, the profit level mattered less--so slave-based plantations may have been unprofitable even at their peak.

The book I read was Philippe Girard's Toussaint Louverture, which has been criticized in reviews for being too hard on Louverture, and I have not yet read Black Spartacus, which has been called hagiographical, as a counterpoint. So take all discussion of Louverture's personal culpability with that caveat.

( Salon discusses )