Notarial acts from the French national archives let King reconstruct the property of the man known before 1791 as Toussaint dit Breda. No record of his manumission survives at Cap Francais, which places him among the libres de savane, people free in practice whose status was never formally registered; for them, getting a notary to record a contract was itself a way to shore up a claim to freedom. King finds Toussaint holding a coffee plantation at Haut-du-Cap worked by slaves, selling parcels of land, and commissioning a substantial hardwood and masonry house for his wife in the city, the holdings of a small planter and urban landlord. Owning slaves, he argues, was the entry price for rising above peasant life in a colony built on plantations, and he sets Toussaint beside Washington and Jefferson, judging leaders by what they transcended rather than by the standards they shared.