📍Bréda Plantation, Haut-du-Cap, Cap-Haïtien, Haiti
1743 – 1803“I was born François-Dominique Toussaint around 1743 on the Bréda plantation in Saint-Domingue — the colony that became Haiti — enslaved from birth. I taught myself to read, rose to a position of relative privilege as a livestock overseer, and was freed around 1776. When the Haitian Revolution began in 1791 I joined it, and within a few years I was its dominant military and political figure. I defeated the French, the Spanish, and the British. I governed Saint-Domingue and drafted a constitution in 1801 that abolished slavery permanently. Napoleon sent an army to re-establish French authority and slavery. I was captured by treachery in 1802 and died in a French prison in the Jura mountains in 1803. The revolution I led continued without me and Haiti declared independence in 1804.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: Bell, M. Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (2007), Pantheon; James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins (1938), Secker & Warburg