The BN Village - View Single Post

Mafdet · (#2 (**permalink**))

[b]

Toussaint louverture (although not a King but a great Leader)

Leader of the Haitian Revolution - Born in 1743, the eldest of eight children born to slaves on the Bréda plantation in northern Haiti. Taught to read and write by his godfather, Toussaint rose quickly in rank among the household slaves, and became first his master's coachman, and then steward of all livestock on the estate. In the early months of 1792 he joined the slave uprising and began to organise the rebellious slaves into a revolutionary army.

A skilful military leader, expert at guerrilla warfare, and able to instill loyalty, respect and admiration in his followers, he soon became the undisputed leader of the black forces. Over the years of bloody conflict, he maneouvered and manipulated the competing armies of French Republicans and Royalists, the Spanish and British, to achieve the goal of an independent republic free from slavery.

Toussaint himself was captured by the French in 1802 and was taken to France. He died in prison in April 1803, but as, William Wordsworth wrote in his poem, To Toussaint L'Ouverture, "Though fallen thyself, never to ride again, Live and take comfort. Thou has left behind Powers that will work for thee." Under the command of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the united black and mulatto forces defeated the troops sent by Napoleon Bonaparte to reimpose slavery, and the revolution was completed when Haiti declared independence on January 1st 1804.

More than twenty [slave revolts] occurred in the years 1789–1832, most of them in the Greater Caribbean. Coeval with the heyday of the abolitionist movement in Europe and chiefly associated with Creole slaves, the phenomenon emerged well before the French abolition of slavery or the Saint-Domingue uprising, even before the declaration of the Rights of Man. A few comparable examples occurred earlier in the century, but the series in question began with an attempted rebellion in Martinique in August 1789. Slaves claimed that the government in Europe had abolished slavery but that local slaveowners were preventing the island governor from implementing the new law. The pattern would be repeated again and again across the region for the next forty years and would culminate in the three large-scale insurrections in Barbados, 1816, Demerara, 1823, and Jamaica, 1831. Together with the Saint-Domingue insurrection of 1791, these were the biggest slave rebellions in the history of the Americas.