Haitians honour Jean-Jacques Dessalines as a founder devoted to his countrymen's freedom; white contemporaries called him a butcher. Girard sets both aside for a ruler who took much of his outlook and policy from the Atlantic plantation system he grew up inside.

Archival work in France, Britain and the United States yields an uncomfortable record. Dessalines urged France to arrest fellow black revolutionaries, hesitated for years over breaking with France, and kept close relations with some white Frenchmen even after the massacres of 1804. He negotiated widely with neighbouring states to hold on to colonial trade links, worked to keep the sugar plantations whole though he had himself been enslaved — probably by Toussaint Louverture's son-in-law — imposed a strict feudal order on former slaves, tried to import African labourers, and drew on American and European as well as African sources.

Interest, in Girard's reading, drove Dessalines as much as the race and ideology that dominate the historiography.