Toussaint Louverture governed Saint-Domingue as a virtually independent ruler from late 1798 until early 1802, yet his record as a statesman has drawn far less attention than the slave revolt that raised him. Girard works through British, French, Spanish, Cuban and American archives to argue that a literature built on United States policy papers has left Louverture receiving other people's decisions rather than pursuing designs of his own.

Those designs were neither the export of revolt nor a straight march to independence. He declined to attack the slave colonies around him, courted London and Washington for trade and for the arms he needed against Rigaud in the south, and stopped short of severing the tie to France. A planter and slave owner himself before 1791, he bound the survival of emancipation to his own survival in office.

The four-way manoeuvring that resulted, among Britain, France, the United States and Saint-Domingue, held for years before collapsing in 1802.