Death of Toussaint L'Overture

Wendell Phillips

Returning to the hills, Toussaint issued the only proclamation which bears his name, and breathes vengeance: "My children, France comes to make us slaves. God gave us liberty. France has no right to take it away. Burn the cities, destroy the harvests, tear up the roads with cannon, poison the wells. Show the white man the hell he comes to make"; and he was obeyed.

When the great William of Orange saw Louis XIV. cover Holland with troops, he said: "Break down the dikes, give Holland back to ocean"; and Europe said, "Sublime!" When Alexander saw the armies of France descend upon Russia, he said: "Burn Moscow, starve back the invaders!" and Europe said, "Sublime!" This black saw all Europe come to crush him, and gave to his people the same heroic example of defiance.

Holland lent sixty ships. England promised by special message to be neutral; and you know neutrality means sneering at freedom, and sending arms to tyrants. England promised neutrality, and the black looked out and saw the whole civilized world marshaled against him. America, full of slaves, was of course hostile. Only the Yankee sold him poor muskets at a very high price. Mounting his horse, and riding to the eastern end of the island, he looked out on a sight such as no native had ever seen before. Sixty ships of the line, crowded by the best soldiers of Europe, rounded the point. They were soldiers who had never yet met an equal, whose tread, like Cæsar's, had shaken Europe: soldiers who had scaled the Pyramids, and planted the French banners on the walls of Rome. He looked a moment, counted the flotilla, let the reins fall on the neck of his horse, and turning to Christophe, exclaimed: "All France is come to Hayti; they can only come to make us slaves; and we are lost!"

Toussaint was too dangerous to be left at large. So they summoned him to attend a council; he went, and the moment he entered the room the officers drew their swords and told him he was a prisoner. They put him on shipboard and weighed anchor for France. As the island faded from his sight he turned to the captain and said, "You think you have rooted up the tree of liberty, but I am only a branch; I have planted the tree so deep that all France can never root it up."

He was sent to a dungeon twelve feet by twenty, built wholly of stone, with a narrow window, high up on one side, looking out on the snows of Switzerland. In this living tomb the child of the sunny tropics was left to die. But he did not die fast enough. Napoleon ordered the commandant to go into Switzerland, to carry the keys of the dungeon with him and stay four days. When he returned, Toussaint was found starved to death.

Napoleon, that imperial assassin, was taken, twelve years later, to his prison at St. Helena, planned for a tomb, as he had planned that of Toussaint, and there he whined away his dying hours in pitiful complaints. God grant that when some future Plutarch shall weigh the great men of our epoch, he do not put that whining child of St. Helena into one scale, and into the other the negro, meeting death like a Roman, without a murmur, in the solitude of his icy dungeon.