Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture, Sudhir Hazareesingh, 2020

 In early 2022 I listened to an excellent podcast episode of Hardcore History by Dan Carlin on the Atlantic Slave trade. After finally finishing the long The Prize, I was able to select a new book to read. During a casual trip to the Politics and Prose bookstore and while perusing through my typical favorite section of history and biography, I noticed Black Spartacus. I immediately drew a connection with the Hardcore History episode because the culminary sketches and details of Carlin’s storytelling was all about the Haitian Revolution, a historical era and subject that I knew (and unfortunately still know) very little about. So to beef up on this, I got the book without any “due diligence” and got to reading. 

First, a quick summary of the information from the Hardcore History episode is merited since it is linked in my mind to this book. Carlin has touched on slavery in the past, both directly and in the middle of other subjects (such as Assyria, etc), because generically slavery is a critical component of human history and the historical human condition. The meaning of slavery is not always the same across time and space, but the existence and prevalence in societies of its various iterations is much more common and “normal” in human experience than is our own lack of slavery in our current experience (I will put aside the question of whether certain contemporary conditions should indeed be called slavery or not, since this is overall a political decision). 

But the story of the Atlantic slave trade is its own beast, and it took on its own unique character. It was intertwined with the development of capitalism, globalism, racism, etc. Carlin showed how the story of the Atlantic slave trade in African people may have reached its crescendo in the story of Saint-Domingue and the Haitian Revolution. Carlin is a storyteller more than an amateur historian, and through his podcast episode we trace the story of the development of conditions where the African person becomes a globally traded economic commodity and the object of oppression and exploitation, is brought from Africa into a wholly new and foreign land in the Caribbean where a new fusion culture and history is built and thereafter a violent revolution and struggle is launched to win freedom and personal liberty.

What are some details to this? Slavery in Saint-Domingue was likely the most deadly, most cruel, and most profitable of its American instantiations. Saint-Domingue was an enormous part of global French trade and its economy, the quantity of people brought there and their death rates were high. Carlin read out descriptions of the evolution of corporal punishment in society as a whole in the develoment of modernity, but drew attention to the mideaval techniques that remained in use in Saint-Domingue. The Code Noir was passed by the Ancien Regime to try to control the colonists and slavers because even by the standards of their day they were considered cruel. People were broken on the wheel, filled with gunpowder and exploded, buried in the ground up to the head and left covered in honey waiting for the bugs, etc. 

The Haitian Revolution itself was the largest mass slave rebellion in history, surpassing the Servile Wars in classical Rome, and as far as we know the only successful example insofar as the rebels gained their freedom. The politics and history of the Revolution is very complex and marked by many interconnected and overlapping factions, including:  Black, Mixed, and White racial groups; Republican/Revolutionary and Monarchist/Reactionary; French, British, Spanish; Creole and African; different African ethnolinguistic groups, etc. The Haitian revolution coincided with the French Revolution and followed the American Revolution, and featured many of the same enlightenment ideas. The story even involved one of history’s classic “greatest men,” namely Napoleon Bonaparte, as well as one who should be included in that category in the eyes of Sudhir Hazareesingh, namely Toussaint Louverture. The revolution at times was nonracial, but in the end did descend into full-fledged race war of the kind simultaneously feared and longed-for by some White conservative Americans. The salience of this racial war and revolution is very high in America, of which then-contemporary American slaveholders were well aware. There are also juicy strains of vodou, Christian, Enlightenment, and other ideological drivers to the characters in the revolution.

Interestingly, after having started to read this book, the NY Times published a deep dive into the post-revolutionary Haitian debt trap situation involving first the French and then the Americans. I believe that Haiti is indeed emblematic of the subject of Africans and Blacks in the Americas, as well as the overall dynamics of colonialism, racism, imperialism, etc, and is now being unearthed by American liberal popular media in an attempt to continue the social justice awareness campaigns stemming from the George Floyd protests and movement. 

In fact, I agree that Haiti and its Revolution offer a case study of all of the leftist concerns. I think anyone should read into this subject. In the process, they will subject their understanding of the world and their own ideology to an acid bath. What will emerge from that I can’t predict for each person, but I think for many they will think about some things differently. 

As for the book itself, it was sorely disappointing. I gained so much from the Dan Carlin episode that the lack of information and impact from Black Spartacus is a pity. The book is not a history of the Haitian Revolution or of Haiti, but is ostensibly a biography of Toussaint Louverture, a man that over the course of the Revolution grew in stature to become a major general, to military commander in chief, to Governor-General for life of the whole territory and aspiring founding father, only to be betrayed, arrested, and sent to France to die. Louverture is indeed an example of the “great men” of history, and furthermore is a Black military commander who bested the strongest European empires of his day and remains an example of Black leadership and sovereignty. Louverture did not start the revolution, which instead was either kicked off by a Mixed upper class revolution led by Vincent Ogé or perhaps the apocryphal vodou leader Boukman in a general Black uprising. 

Louverture exemplifies the complexity of the situation, as at times be is loyal to the French, to the Spanish, works with the British, returns to the French from whom he then declares independence and defeats in battle, all while being a devout Catholic and ascribed vodou magically powers by his comrades. His officers were of different races, and Louverture fought and won general freedom for his people, but Louveture was also dictatorial and forced the freed men to return to the plantations and work much the same as before. 

Unfortunately, Hazareesingh writes a hagiography rather than a biography. There is little historical information and I can only hope that Hazareesingh assumes the reader is knowledgeable about the subject matter. The author does inform us about Louverture more than about the wider context, including the personalities of most of the other leaders of the Revolution or of its enemies. There is too much time spent banging on about Toussaint’s individual prowess and genius, ranging from his speed on the horse, the discipline of his armies, the beautiful creole ideological amalgamation he created. It reads much like the naive accounts that I used to see about George Washington. There are places where the author speculates and assumes that Toussaint is intervening behind the scenes where there is limited evidence. 

Something very interesting was that Louverture, who by one point had abolished slavory, defeated rival generals, conquered the Spanish portion of Hispaniola, pushed out the French administrators, declared independence, and led the drafting of a constitution with himself as a dictator, nonetheless never pursued a change to Saint-Domingue's status as a French colony. I am not totally sure if this was out of convenience and pragmatism, or if it was a shade-of-gray understanding of sovereignty that doesn’t neatly fit into today’s black and white Westphalian nation-state system. It seemed that Lourverture identified as French, perhaps in the imperial rather than ethnic sense. French culture did in fact contain many radical elements, including abolitionists and republicans. Perhaps in another timeline there may have been something like a union between Haiti and France. 

In conclusion, in my review I find that this particular book is not that interesting but the subject itself is incredibly interesting. I am about halfway through the book at the time of first writing this, and I am not sure if I will finish it. However, I plan to tackle this topic further in the future.