Wood follows Jean-Jacques Dessalines from his service as one of Toussaint Louverture's generals to the throne of an independent Haiti. The account opens with Leclerc's expedition of 1801, the wave of defections that came once word spread that Napoleon meant to restore slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique, and the campaign that ended in Rochambeau's capitulation and the proclamation at Gonaives on the first day of 1804.

The portrait that follows is not admiring. Illiterate, despotic and feared, Dessalines governed a country kept permanently on a war footing, maintained an army that absorbed much of the eligible male population, and sorted every citizen into soldier or laborer under a regime of compulsory field work. He annulled colonial-era land transfers to free people of color and ordered titles reverified, embittering black and mixed-race proprietors alike. Crowned Jacques I late in 1804, he was killed two years later.