Command of Hispaniola

Controlling all Saint-Domingue, Louverture turned to Spanish Santo Domingo, where slavery persisted. Ignoring commands to the contrary by Roume and by Napoleon Bonaparte, who had become first consul of France, Louverture overran it in January 1801, freed the slaves, and amazed the Europeans and mulattoes with his magnanimity.

In command of the entire island, Louverture dictated a constitution that made him governor-general for life with near absolute powers. Catholicism was the state religion, and many revolutionary principles received ostensible sanction. There was no provision for a French official, however, because Louverture professed himself a Frenchman and strove to convince Bonaparte of his loyalty. He also described his success in restoring order and prosperity in epistles that, like all his writings, were ungrammatical yet testify to the grasp, incisiveness, and depth of a formidable intellect.

Bonaparte had confirmed Toussaint Louverture’s position but saw him as an obstacle to the restoration of Saint-Domingue as a profitable colony. Louverture knew Bonaparte despised Blacks and planned to reinstitute slavery. He was also aware that Bonaparte would seek to intimidate the island upon making peace with England; therefore, he drilled a huge army and stored supplies. Yet Louverture behaved ambiguously: venerating France, fearing Bonaparte, aging and growing weary, he trusted no one and failed to clarify his purposes. He desired above all to prevent a restoration of slavery while preserving the society he had built. Europeans and mulattoes looked hopefully to France to repress the huge Black majority; on the other hand, many Black leaders, such as Moïse, wanted to expel all Europeans and divide the plantations. Some Blacks were alienated by Louverture’s perfidies and equivocations, his mysteriousness, and the occasional atrocities he thought necessary amid such dangers.

A French invasion under Gen. Charles Leclerc began in January 1802 in far greater force than expected. Most Europeans and mulattoes defected to him; after a few weeks of furious fighting, the chief Black leaders, even Christophe and Dessalines, sided with Leclerc as well. In May Louverture formally agreed to lay down his arms in exchange for Leclerc’s promise not to restore slavery.

Louverture retired in honor to a plantation. A few weeks later, in June, he was invited to a parley by a French general, Jean-Baptiste Brunet, under false pretenses. With the cooperation of Leclerc and under orders from Napoleon, who suspected him of plotting an uprising, Louverture was seized at Brunet’s home and sent to Fort-de-Joux in the French Jura Mountains, where he was confined and interrogated repeatedly and where he died in April 1803.