A coachman is born a league from Cap and loses his African name

Girard sets the birth about a league outside Cap around 1743 and immediately complicates the identity. The man probably received an African name that has not survived, and was long known instead by his master's plantation. Fellow enslaved people mocked his slight build with a nickname meaning worthless stick. The name Louverture came much later. He worked for a manager with a reputation for relative mildness, was assigned to the barn and stables rather than the killing work of the cane fields, and rose to coachman and unofficial veterinarian. He married and learned to read, neither forbidden under the French slave code and both rare among the enslaved. Girard notes claims that he joined a masonic lodge, since as governor he signed above a row of masonic dots, and that he visited France, but says the evidence for both is thin.

In October 1741 the Conseil Superieur of Martinique told Paris that the deaths of enslaved people and livestock came from particular slaves misusing medical knowledge, making powders and drugs from plants and handing them round as remedies. It warned that such practitioners might turn their skills on owners, argued that medicine could not be told apart from poisoning because the composition was kept secret, and said other slaves would never denounce them for fear of becoming victims. It concluded that slaves should be barred from giving any remedies, powders or drugs for any illness. Before the royal answer came, the court had to deal with Jean Francois, who admitted in January 1742 to distributing remedies across many quarters of the island. No accusation of harm could be found, and with no law the court could not execute him, so it argued about irons and deportation. The royal declaration arrived on 1 February 1743 on precisely the terms requested.

On 23 January 1745 a court in Orange County, Virginia convicted a woman named Eve of mixing poison into the milk of her owner, Peter Montague, who had languished four months before dying. The record calls the act feloniously and traitorously done, and she was burned at the stake. Virginia treated the killing of a master by a slave as a species of treason, on the model of the English rule under which a wife who killed her husband committed petit treason. Trial records from Virginia counties usually run to a few lines listing the accused, the charge and the outcome, so cases with this much detail are rare. Where a method is named it is almost always something put into food or drink, which is what European ideas about poisoning expected. In four trials between 1763 and 1798 the accused were said to have poisoned their owners while pretending to give them medicine.

Toussaint was born on 20 May 1743 at Bréda in the northern plain and he was manumitted in 1776, at thirty three. Then he stayed. He worked as a free man on and around the same estate for fifteen more years, rented land, kept livestock, and at one point held enslaved people himself. That last fact gets left out of the hero version and it should not be, because it tells you he understood the system from the inside of both of its ledgers. He was forty eight when the north rose in 1791, which made him old for a war. The literacy, the coachman's knowledge of the road network, the veterinary knowledge, the relationships with both plantation managers and field workers, none of that came from the revolution. He walked in with it, and it is why he ended up commanding rather than following.