King works from notarial acts in the colonial archives at Aix-en-Provence, the loans, sales, wills and marriage contracts that free people of colour signed in Saint Domingue in the decades before 1791. Two distinct leadership groups emerge from them. Planter families such as the Laportes of Limbé descended from unions with white settlers, held land and slaves across four generations, sent children to France for schooling, and managed property for long-term stability. A second group, typified by a formerly enslaved wigmaker turned coffee planter named Pierre Augustin, had no such kin, built its connections through the militia and the rural constabulary, and traded land for profit. Military service, King argues, was the main ladder open to men without white relatives, and the colony leaned on it heavily: free men of colour filled more than half the militia companies and the entire rank and file of the maréchaussée.