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First marriage and manumission

Until 1938, historians believed that Louverture had been a slave until the start of the revolution. In the later 20th century, discovery of a personal marriage certificate and baptismal record dated between 1776 and 1777 documented that Louverture was a freeman, meaning that he had been manumitted sometime between 1772 and 1776, the time de Libertat had become overseer. This finding retrospectively clarified a private letter that Louverture sent to the French government in 1797, in which he mentioned he had been free for more than twenty years.

Upon being freed, Toussaint took up the name of Toussaint de Bréda (Toussaint of Bréda), or more simply Toussaint Bréda, in reference to the plantation where he grew up. Toussaint went from being a slave of the Bréda plantation to becoming a member of the greater community of gens de couleur libres (free people of color). This was a diverse group of Affranchis (freed slaves), free blacks of full or majority African ancestry, and Mulattos (mixed-race peoples), which included the children of French planters and their African slaves, as well as distinct multiracial families who had multi-generational mixed ancestries from the varying different populations on the island. The gens de couleur libres strongly identified with Saint-Domingue, with a popular slogan being that while the French felt at home in France, and the slaves felt at home in Africa, they felt at home on the island. Now enjoying a greater degree of relative freedom, Louverture dedicated himself to building wealth and gaining further social mobility through emulating the model of the grands blancs and rich gens de couleur libres by becoming a planter. He began by renting a small coffee plantation, along with its 13 slaves, from his future son-in-law. One of the slaves Louverture owned at this time is believed to have been Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who would go onto become one of Louverture's most loyal lieutenants and a member of his personal guard during the Haitian Revolution.

Between 1761 and 1777, Louverture met and married his first wife, Cécile, in a Catholic ceremony. The couple went on to have two sons, Toussaint Jr. and Gabrielle-Toussaint, and a daughter, Marie-Marthe. During this time, Louverture bought several slaves; although this was a means to grow a greater pool of exploitable labor, this was one of the few legal methods available to free the remaining members of a former slave's extended family and social circle. Louverture eventually bought the freedom of Cécile, their children, his sister Marie-Jean, his wife's siblings, and a slave named Jean-Baptist, freeing him so that he could legally marry. Louverture's own marriage, however, soon became strained and eventually broke down, as his coffee plantation failed to make adequate returns. A few years later, the newly freed Cécile left Louverture for a wealthy Creole planter, while Louverture had begun a relationship with a woman named Suzanne, who is believed to have gone on to become his second wife. There is little evidence that any formal divorce occurred, as that was illegal at the time. Louverture, in fact, would go on to completely excise his first marriage from his recollections of his pre-revolutionary life, to the extent that, until recent documents uncovered the marriage, few researchers were aware of the existence of Cécile and her children with Louverture.