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In 1797, in the midst of the long revolt, Louverture demonstrated that he could not only lead troops, but also persuade and inspire civilians with his vision for a new way of life. Vincent de Vaublanc, a white deputy from Saint-Domingue, warned the French Parliament that the colony had fallen under the control of “ignorant and brutish negroes.” Vaublanc’s speech had a tremendous impact, and there were rumors of a counterrevolution being plotted in Paris.

Louverture’s response was to publish a justification of the Haitian Revolution that laid out his theory of race and culture. As Philippe Girard wrote, “One by one he listed Vaublanc’s accusations; one by one he took them apart. Blacks were not lazy and ignorant savages: slavery had made them so. Some violence had indeed taken place in the Haitian Revolution, but violence had also taken place in the French Revolution, he reminded his readers; the slaves had in fact proved remarkably merciful toward the planters who had so cruelly oppressed them.” Louverture demonstrated that these former slaves had elevated their culture to a point where he could in justice close the letter by reaffirming black freedmen’s “right to be called French Citizens.”

In 1798, after Louverture negotiated peace and a diplomatic relationship with the British, the London Gazette wrote:

Toussaint L’Ouverture is a negro and in the jargon of war has been called a brigand. But according to all accounts, he is a negro born to vindicate the claims of this species and to show that the character of men is independent of exterior color.

This newspaper, in a nation that traded more African slaves than any other, published that encomium thirty-five years before Britain abolished slavery. As Louverture had envisioned, Europeans were beginning to see that it was the culture of slavery rather than the nature of the slaves themselves that shaped their behavior.

Some Americans began to see it that way, too. In 1798, during a rift with France, the U.S. Congress banned all trade with France and its colonies. Commerce to and from Saint-Domingue came to a standstill. Louverture sent a man named Joseph Bunel to see the U.S. secretary of state, Thomas Pickering, about lifting the embargo. Louverture shrewdly selected a white man as his ambassador to appeal to the sensibilities of the slave-owning country. It worked. In 1799, the U.S. Congress authorized President John Adams to exempt from the trade embargo any French territory that did not interfere with American trade. The law was so transparently intended for Saint-Domingue that it was nicknamed “the Louverture clause.”

Pickering wrote Louverture to let him know that the United States would resume commerce with Saint-Domingue. Philippe Girard characterizes the letter beautifully in his masterpiece, Toussaint Louverture:

He closed with an arresting flourish: “I am with due considerations, Sir, your obedient servant.” To a former slave, the niceties of diplomatic language must have had a peculiar ring: Louverture was not used to hearing prominent white men refer to themselves as his “obedient servant.”

More than sixty-five years before the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery in the United States, Congress made special provisions for a black man. They negotiated with him not through the lens of the color of his skin but through the lens of the culture he had created.

Louverture used seven key tactics, which I examine below, to transform slave culture into one respected around the world. You can use them to change any organization’s culture.