The Father of Hati

The Market Place of Ideas

Feb,24,2022

The Man who beat

Napoleon

Bonaparte

The horrendous treatment of African slaves brought to the Americas has been well documented.

The levels of tourtute that were employed  to make sure captured slaves never fathomed the idea of leaving were awful and cruel.

However the sugarcane plantations of the Caribbean were far worse.

because of the inhuman violence, Saint-Domingue and Hati  saw a steady succession of slave revolts beginning as early as 1679. This would continue into the 18th century when in the last years before the French Revolution the French brought 150,000 slaves to Saint-Domingue to keep up with the region’s economic growth.

However with all the profits being made from slave labour the conditions grew worse. Slavery is by nature a volume based industry and the more you can reduce your cost of feeding and properly clothing your slaves.

The more of the profit you can retain.

So as profits grew conditions worsened

and the growing number of slaves grew angrier at the conditions they faced.

In their book Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492-1971, Robert and Nancy Heinl quote Vastey, a slave who described the crimes against the slaves of Saint-Domingue:

"Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive…. flayed them with the Lash…. lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes…thrown them into boiling caldrons of cane syrup…put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss…consigned these miserable blacks to man-eating dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and [dagger]?”

Well from these terrible circumstances came Toussaint L'Ouverture.

Toussaint L'Ouverture was a Haitian general and the most prominent leader of the Haitian Revolution.

During his life, Louverture first fought against the French, then for them, and then finally against France again for the cause of Haitian independence. As a revolutionary leader, Louverture displayed military and political acumen that helped transform the fledgling slave rebellion into a revolutionary movement.

Louverture is now known as the

"Father of Haiti".

On January 1802, an invasion force ordered by Napoleon landed on Saint-Domingue, and after several months of furious fighting, Toussaint agreed to a cease-fire. He retired to his plantation in 1803, but unfortunately that same year was arrested and taken to a dungeon in the French Alps, where he was tortured and later passed away.

On 29 August 1954, the Haitian ambassador to France, Léon Thébaud, inaugurated a stone cross memorial for Toussaint Louverture at the foot of Fort-de-Joux.Years afterward, the French government ceremoniously presented a shovelful of soil from the grounds of Fort-de-Joux to the Haitian government as a symbolic transfer of Louverture's remains.

An inscription in his memory, was installed in 1998 on the wall of the PanParis by in Paris