VENERABLE PIERRE TOUSSAINT

SPRING 2021

Venerable Pierre Toussaint. // Illustration by Vinny Bove.

By Michael S. Cain

IN THE SUMMER OF 1797,* a wealthy French planter from the colony of St. Domingue – soon to become the independent nation of Haiti – stepped off of a passenger ship in New York Harbor. He was accompanied by a few family members and a handful of West African house slaves. Among the latter was a tall, mild-mannered teenager destined to become a legend. His name was Pierre Toussaint.

Toussaint arrived in the fledgling United States – George Washington had only recently stepped down as president – at a time when much of the world seemed to be turning upside-down. The colony he had sailed from was engulfed by a slave rebellion; in short order, former slaves would become rulers and their masters would be homeless. Many French aristocrats, from St. Domingue and from Europe (where France itself had been upended by revolution), were finding their way to America. There they were free to keep whatever money and valuables they might salvage – including slaves.

In this way, one of the foremost American Catholics of the early 19th century – today, the only lay person buried at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue – came to New York in the humblest of circumstances, as the slave of a family about to lose its solvency.
 

A CHILD OF DUAL WORLDS

At the age of 16, Toussaint had lived his entire life as a Black slave among the French aristocracy. In St. Domingue, he had grown up as a playmate to his master’s children, reared in the social niceties. He had been trained to greet and serve guests graciously. His command of the French language, spoken and written, was superb.

At the same time, Toussaint was one of half a million Black slaves who toiled for the benefit of some 32,000 French inhabitants of St. Domingue. The uprising that put an end to this injustice was hard-fought and bloody, and raged for years in the colony where he grew up.

In later years, Toussaint was reluctant to speak about the horrors he had witnessed, and hesitant to join the abolition debate in America because of the terrible cost he knew had been paid to end slavery in Haiti. Though he would die before emancipation came to the United States, he did obtain his own freedom in 1807, and worked quietly on behalf of his fellow Black New Yorkers, especially children, until his death in 1853. 
 

FROM SLAVE TO ENTREPRENEUR

Soon after the family had settled into a fashionable rental house in lower Manhattan, Toussaint’s master, Jean Jacques Bérard, signed the slave up to apprentice as a hairdresser. It was a smart move in a city where wealthy society women required elaborate hairdos for social engagements several times a week. From the outset, Toussaint was allowed to keep much of what he earned at his new trade.

In 1801, Bérard died, his once-extravagant fortune nearly wiped out. Within a year or two, his widow, Madame Bérard, was unable to pay her creditors. By then, however, Toussaint was earning enough as a hairdresser to assume financial responsibility for the household. Still a slave, he served tea, did the chores and paid the bills until his mistress freed him on her deathbed in 1807.

After burying Madame Bérard, Toussaint used his hairdressing money to purchase his sister’s freedom from another master. He also purchased the freedom of his fiancée, Juliette Noel, whom he had known in St. Domingue. The couple wed and moved into a smaller house on Reade Street, where they began a life whose charitable ripples are still moving through the New York community – and the world.
 

MAN OF MEANS, AND OF GOD

Toussaint’s hard work and generous spirit soon brought him significant wealth and a kind of provisional acceptance at the highest levels of New York society. As a Black man, he was forced to navigate with care the streets of his adopted city, where free Black people might be attacked by bigots or kidnapped by slave traffickers and sold back into bondage. He was also vulnerable as a Catholic, since anti-Catholic prejudice was rampant. As an entrepreneur and an acknowledged master of his trade, however, he was welcomed into the drawing rooms of New York’s elite families. There he was counted as not just a hairdresser but also a valued friend and counselor.

The wife and daughter of Alexander Hamilton were among his clients, as were numerous other prominent New Yorkers. These mostly Protestant women deeply admired Toussaint’s Catholic piety and kindness, and many corresponded with him frequently. One of them, the prominent socialite Mary Anna Sawyer Schuyler, became a close friend. She addressed him in letters as “my Saint Pierre.”
 

PARISH OF SAINTS

From his first days in New York, Toussaint was a parishioner at St. Peter’s on Barclay Street, where he attended Mass daily for decades. There, he became a significant benefactor and fundraiser. Though his good works were by no means limited to church finances, his largesse did contribute significantly to the growth of the Church in New York.

In 1805, a young widow and mother named Elizabeth Bayley Seton converted to Catholicism and joined the congregation at St. Peter’s. A few years later, she moved to Maryland to start America’s first Catholic girls school and found the Sisters of Charity, the first community of women religious in the United States. Then in 1816, at the request of St. Peter’s pastor, she sent a group of sisters to open an orphanage in New York. (The Catholic Church declared Mother Seton a saint in 1975.)

Though there is no evidence that Seton ever met Toussaint, he was instrumental in raising funds for the new Sisters of Charity orphanage, in spite of the fact that it served only white children. Meanwhile, Toussaint used his home to shelter homeless, parentless Black children. Pierre and Juliette used their own money to raise and educate these young charges.
 

DEVOTED TO THE BEATITUDES

For decades, tirelessly, Toussaint dedicated himself to service, to delivering the mercy of Christ to those in need. In addition to his charitable work, he routinely put in 12-plus-hour days at his trade, walking the streets from stately home to stately home to dress the hair of the fashionable – all in order to have more to share with the poor and the troubled.

Hannah Sawyer Lee, Toussaint’s first biographer and the sister of his close friend Mary Anna Schuyler, gives us a close-up account of his virtue in Memoir of Pierre Toussaint, Born a Slave in St. Domingo. “He often quoted in his native language from the Sermon on the Mount,” she recalled, “and the Beatitudes seemed to have found their way into his heart.”

Whenever he was not at work, it seems, Toussaint was giving food to the hungry, sheltering the homeless, welcoming the stranger, comforting the grieving, visiting the imprisoned and the sick. The hairdresser’s response to the frequent outbreaks of yellow fever in New York seems especially heroic in light of our current dealings with the scourge of Covid-19. Toussaint had seen plenty of yellow fever during his youth in Haiti. He knew its deadly power, but did not shy from helping those in its grip.

Lee writes of one case in her memoir of Toussaint: “When the yellow fever prevailed in New York, by degrees Maiden Lane was almost wholly deserted, and almost every house in it closed. One poor woman, prostrated by the terrible disorder, remained there with little or no attendance, till Toussaint, day by day, came through the lonely street, crossed the barricades, entered the deserted house where she lay, and performed the nameless offices of a nurse, fearlessly exposing himself to the contagion.”
 

A MAN FOR OTHERS

The Great New York Fire of 1835, which wiped out much of Toussaint’s wealth.

Through the 1820s and early 1830s, Toussaint’s wealth grew steadily through constant work. When a friend observed that the hairdresser had accumulated enough money to retire in comfort, he replied, “Madam, I have enough for myself, but if I stop work, I have not enough for others.”

In 1835, the Great New York Fire raged through lower Manhattan’s warehouses, destroying hundreds of buildings. It is believed that Toussaint lost investments totaling $900,000 in today’s dollars. With reduced means, he carried on with his charitable works, funding orphanages and other Catholic institutions, including the first Catholic school for Black children.
 

“It must not be supposed that Toussaint’s charity consisted merely in bestowing money; he felt the moral greatness of doing good, of giving counsel to the weak and courage to the timid, of reclaiming the vicious, and above all, of comforting the sick and sorrowful.”

HANNAH SAWYER LEE, MEMOIR OF PIERRE TOUSSAINT, 1854

Racism, too, remained all too real. In the America of the 1840s, moving inexorably toward civil war, New York no longer permitted slavery, but prejudice and violence against Blacks were common. This hit home for Toussaint in 1842 when, at the cathedral now known as Old St. Patrick’s on Mulberry Street, he and his family were turned away because of his race by ushers unaware of his VIP status. Cathedral trustees rushed to apologize as soon as they learned of the slight, but they could not undo what had happened – at a church whose construction he had helped fund.

The next decade was one of gradual physical decline for Toussaint, even as his spirit seemed to soar ever closer to God. In 1851, his beloved wife and partner, Juliette, died and was buried in the cemetery of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral beside their adoptive daughter, Euphémie, who had died two decades earlier. Surrounded by Black friends, Toussaint marched from the funeral at St. Peter’s to the burial site on Mulberry Street, where his many white friends, clients and admirers joined the mourners to pay their respects.

After her death, he grew increasingly inactive and bedridden. Pierre Toussaint died on June 30, 1853. Two days before, his last recorded words were “God is with me” – and then, when asked if he wanted anything, “Nothing on Earth.”

Pierre, Juliette and their adopted daughter Euphemie Toussaint, as painted in miniatures by artist Anthony Meucci, circa 1825.

 

A SERVANT AT REST

Having come into this world as a slave, Pierre Toussaint left it as a man of substance, well known in Manhattan and widely admired for his charitable work. “High Mass, incense, candles, rich robes, sad and solemn music. … The Church gave all it could give, to prince or noble,” Eliza Hamilton Schuyler, daughter-in-law of Mary Anna Schuyler, wrote in describing Toussaint’s funeral at St. Peter’s. “The body of the church was well filled with men, women, children, nuns, and charity sisters; likewise … people of his own color, all in mourning. Around stood many of the white race, with their eyes glistening with emotion.”

New York’s newspapers also took note of Toussaint’s passing with extravagant praises. “His charity was of the efficient character which did not content itself with a present relief of pecuniary aid,” said one obituary, “but which required time and thought by day and by night, and long watchfulness and kind attention at the bedside of the sick and the departing.”

“For sixty years,” wrote the Home Journal, “he attended Mass at six in the morning, as punctual as a clock, until prostrated by illness. His days and nights were given to visits, ministrations to the sick, attendance upon the bereaved, and attempts to reform the erring and console the afflicted.”

Toussaint had managed the remarkable feat of moving with equal grace and generosity in the disparate worlds of wealthy New York society, displaced French nobility, and free and enslaved Blacks, showing equal love, respect and Christian mercy to all. As the service ended, Toussaint’s many white friends and associates stood back – honoring a request he had made at the time of Juliette’s burial – to let members of the Black community bear him out of St. Peter’s and through the streets to the cemetery of St. Patrick’s on Mulberry Street. There, Black and white, rich and poor commingled again in prayer as their beloved Toussaint was laid to rest beside his wife and adopted daughter.
 

BEYOND THE GRAVE

The decades following Toussaint’s death were tumultuous ones in New York and all over America. Amid the political turmoil leading up to the Civil War and the unsettled times that followed, his story faded in the public memory. Were it not for the efforts of Hannah Sawyer Lee, whose Memoir of Pierre Toussaint stitched together details of his extraordinary life from notes left behind by her sister, Mary Anna Schuyler, and a variety of other sources, we would likely have a scant awareness of Toussaint today.

For nearly a century, the legend of the former slave who managed to achieve financial and social success while leading a life of unsurpassed Christian piety was kept alive as oral history in the Haitian-American and Black Catholic communities. Then, in 1938, a 9-year-old Black religious education student challenged an 18-year-old seminarian named Charles McTague to name one Black Catholic who had been respected by white people. Looking for an answer, McTague learned about Toussaint. Eventually, doing some follow-up research, he was able to locate the Toussaint family gravestone – on which the faded lettering had become illegible to the naked eye – in the cemetery on Mulberry Street. The discovery catalyzed a movement.

In 1951, Cardinal Francis Spellman blessed a plaque to mark the headstone, and in 1968 his successor, Cardinal Terence Cooke, formally initiated Toussaint’s case  (or “cause,” in canonical parlance) for canonization. After more than two decades of exhaustive research and due diligence by the Pierre Toussaint Guild, the cause was submitted to the Vatican. Pope St. John Paul II declared Toussaint “venerable” in 1997.

Meanwhile, in 1989, Cardinal John O’Connor had arranged for the hairdresser’s remains (which had to be exhumed as part of the canonization process) to be relocated to a vault beneath the altar of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Toussaint is the only lay person ever accorded this honor. At a 1999 Mass in Toussaint’s honor, O’Connor said, “He is now buried beneath this high altar with all of the bishops, archbishops and cardinals of New York. It will be a great privilege for me to be buried in a vault in the same section with Pierre Toussaint.”
 

A LEGACY OF SERVICE

Scholars of the Pierre Toussaint Scholarship Fund, 2019.

“If ever a man was truly free, it was Pierre Toussaint. ... If ever a man was a saint, in my judgment, it was Pierre Toussaint. ... No one can read this man’s life – and the records are thoroughly authentic – without being awed by his holiness.”

CARDINAL JOHN J. O’CONNOR, ARCHBISHOP OF NEW YORK 1984–2000

In the process of canonization, after a candidate has been declared venerable, the Church requires evidence of two genuine miracles before a declaration of sainthood. In his 1999 homily, O’Connor acknowledged this but emphasized that there is no need to wait for canonization to extoll Toussaint’s example of Christian mercy. “Beatified or not, Pierre Toussaint remains a wonderful model,” he said, “and I wish he were here.”

His legacy today is alive and well in the Archdiocese of New York. The Pierre Toussaint Guild, instrumental in his cause for sainthood, also helps to broadcast his inspiring story to the world. The Pierre Toussaint Scholarship Fund, administered by the archdiocese’s Black Ministry Office, carries on his mission to provide education and improvement opportunities to young people, providing financial grants, mentorship and opportunities for students at all levels to develop their faith as well as their careers. The foundation also supports the College Pierre Toussaint in Sassier, Haiti, creating opportunities for young Haitians to gain the skills to serve their community.

In his lifetime, Toussaint was respected as a devout and holy man. People came to him – Black, white, rich, poor – to ask him not only to help them in their need but also to advise them and pray for them. In the words of Fr. Quinn, who eulogized Toussaint at his funeral in 1853, he was “one who always had wise counsel for the rich and words of encouragement for the poor.”

Today, in a world that seems to worship the vain and self-serving, we could use some of Toussaint’s counsel and encouragement. Indeed, we could do worse than to emulate the former slave from Haiti who lived to serve God and others, and came to embody so strikingly the love and mercy of Jesus Christ. 
 

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*A note about dates: Many books and articles about Pierre Toussaint, following the lead of memoirist Hannah Sawyer Lee, state that he was born in 1766 and arrived in New York in 1787. While Lee’s memoir is reliable in most respects, these dates are speculative and probably incorrect. In this account, Archways has used dates based on the research of journalist Arthur Jones for his book Pierre Toussaint: A Biography (2003).