Jefferson recognized his fundamental hypocrisy, based on an irreconcilable opposition between justice and self-preservation. “We have the wolf by the ears,” he remarked of slavery to a friend, “and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.” Jefferson was no less anxious to shield his private life from posterity than from his contemporaries, but what we know of it shows the confusion of his attitudes. It has only recently been revealed that while ambassador to France (1785–9) Jefferson began a long relationship with his slave Sally Hemings (who was the half-sister of his beloved deceased wife Martha).
Jefferson’s energy and creativity were phenomenal. He knew French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Greek and Anglo-Saxon. At seventy-one he read Plato in the original (he thought it overrated). He collated Native American dialects. He was a keen archaeologist who pioneered new methods of excavation on the Indian burial mounds on his estate, and an oenophile who promoted the establishment of American vineyards. He smuggled back plants and seeds from his travels to enrich his new country. He invented a swivel chair and an early form of automatic door. He was a magnificent architect: his own constructions—the University of Virginia and his Virginian estate of Monticello—are now World Heritage Sites. His library, which he left to the American nation, became the Library of Congress.
At the White House President Jefferson greeted guests in his slippers. The “sage of Monticello” welcomed visitors, only occasionally escaping to his retreat at Poplar Forest for the solitude he craved. All America wanted to sit at the feet of the republican radical who had proved himself America’s greatest architect. He died, like his old friend John Adams, on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the day their Declaration of Independence promulgated freedom across the world.
TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE
Comte de Lavaux, the French governor-general of Saint-Domingue, describing Toussaint
Toussaint Louverture was the founding father of Haiti. A plantation slave himself, he won his own freedom and went on to help emancipate hundreds of thousands of others and to found the world’s first black state. He was a skillful politician and general who led the Haitian revolution from the early 1790s and drove the mighty European powers of France, Spain and Britain out of Haiti. Though at times his enemies found him harsh and uncompromising, he left behind a nation free from slavery and transformed by his enlightened leadership.
Toussaint once said, “I was born a slave, but nature gave me a soul of a free man.” His early years demonstrated this perfectly. He was born François Dominique Toussaint to a father who had been shipped by French slave traders to Saint-Domingue (the French colony, later called Haiti, occupying the western third of the island of Hispaniola). Toussaint rose swiftly through the ranks of service under his owner, the Comte de Bréda. Naturally intelligent and fortunate enough to acquire a basic education in French and Latin, he rejected the voodoo beliefs of many of his fellow slaves and remained an ardent Catholic all his life. By 1777 he had served as a livestock handler, healer and coachman, finally becoming Bréda’s plantation steward, a post normally reserved for a white man.
Toussaint won his freedom at the age of thirty-four and thereafter farmed a plot of fifteen acres with thirteen slaves of his own. The first uprising of the Haitian revolution broke out under the mulatto reformer Vincent Ogé in 1790, but Toussaint took no part. In August 1791 another revolt erupted as thousands of black slaves across Saint-Domingue rose in rebellion. Toussaint realized that this larger rising could not be ignored. After helping Bréda’s family to escape and sending his own family to safety on the Spanish side of the island, he joined the rebel ranks.
There were more than half a million slaves on Saint-Domingue, compared to just 32,000 European colonists and 24,000
In 1793 war broke out between France and Spain. By this time Toussaint was a major figure in the black Haitian army. His leadership was widely admired and he had attracted talented allies such as Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henry Christophe, both future leaders of Haiti. Toussaint joined the Spanish and served with distinction in a series of engagements.
