Pierre Toussaint, born enslaved at Saint-Marc, dies a free man in New York

Pierre Toussaint died in New York on 30 June 1853, aged eighty-seven. He was born into bondage on the Berard plantation near Saint-Marc on 27 June 1766 and was carried to New York in 1787 as the colony began to burn. He was apprenticed to a hairdresser and became the most sought-after in the city. When his owner’s widow was ruined, he supported her household with his own earnings, and she freed him in 1807, on her deathbed. He took the surname Toussaint for Toussaint Louverture. He funded the building of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, took in orphans, and nursed the sick through yellow fever. He is the only layman buried in the crypt beneath the altar of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue.