TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE
A LECTURE BY WENDELL PHILLIPS
LECTURE DELIVERED IN NEW YORK AND BOSTON – DECEMBER 1861
The excerpts below are taken from a speech delivered in 1861 by Wendell Phillips, a prominent white American abolitionist.
The Speech, written near the beginning of the American Civil War, when Northerners were debating whether to allow African
Americans to serve in the military, celebrates the achievements of the Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture (c. 1744 – 1803).
Toussaint L’Ouverture was a former salve who led the struggle to liberate other enslaved Haitians. At one time, he was the
most powerful leader in Haiti, which was threatened alternately by French, British, and Spanish armies.
If I stood here tonight to tell the story of Napoleon, I should take it from the lips of Frenchmen, who find
no language rich enough to paint the great captain of the nineteenth century. Were I here to tell you the
story of Washington, I should take it from your hearts – you, who think no marble white enough on which
to carve the name of the Father of his Country. [applause] I am about to tell you the story of a Negro who
has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it from the reluctant testimony of Britons, Frenchman,
Spaniards, - men who despised him as a Negro and a slave, and hated him because he had beaten them in
many a battle. All the materials for his biography are from the lips of his enemies…
Let us pause for a moment, and find something to measure him by. You remember Macaulay says,
comparing Cromwell with Napoleon, that Cromwell showed the greater military genius, if we consider that
he never saw an army until he was forty; while Napoleon was educated from a boy in the best military
schools in Europe. Cromwell manufactured his own army; Napoleon at the age of twenty-seven was placed
at the head of the best troops Europe ever saw. They were both successful; but, says Macaulay, with such
disadvantages, the Englishman [Cromwell] showed the greater military genius. Whether you allow the
inference or not, you will at least grant that it is a fair mode of measurement. Apply it to Toussaint.
Cromwell never saw an army until he was forty; This man [Toussaint] never saw a soldier until he was
fifty. Cromwell manufactured his own army – out of what? Englishmen – the best blood in Europe.
Out
of the middle class of Englishmen – the best blood of the island. And with it he conquered what?
Englishmen – their equals. This man [L’Ouverture] manufactured his army out of what? Out of what you
call the despicable race of Negroes, debased and demoralized by two hundred years of slavery, one hundred
thousand of them imported into the island within four years, unable to speak the dialect intelligible even to
each other. Yet out of this mixed, and, as you say, despicable mass, he forged a thunderbolt and hurled it at
what? At the proudest blood in Europe, the Spaniard, and sent him home conquered [cheers]; at the most
warlike blood in Europe, the French, and put them under his feet; at the most determined blood in Europe,
the English, and they skulked home to Jamaica. [applause]… I know it [Haiti] was a small territory; it
was not as large as the continent; but it was as large as Attica [classical Greece], which, with Athens for a
capital, has filled the earth with its fame for two thousand years. We measure genius by quality, not by
quantity…
I would call him Cromwell, but Cromwell was only a soldier, and the state he founded went down with
him into his grave. I would call him Washington, but the Great Virginian held slaves. This man
[Toussaint] risked his empire rather than permit the slave-trade in the humblest village of his dominions.
You think me a fanatic tonight, for you read history, not with your eyes, but with your prejudices. But
fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of History will put Phocion for the Greek, and
Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, La Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright
consummate flower of our earlier civilization, and John Brown the ripe fruit of our noonday [thunders of
applause], then, dripping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of
the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L’Ouverture. [long-continued applause]
Source: Retrieved from www.thelouvertureproject.org