Healy opens with the difficulty of judging Toussaint Louverture at all, given a century of European writing on Haiti that she regards as prejudiced rather than merely partisan, and points to recent work rehabilitating Dessalines as a model of what corrective scholarship can achieve.

The assessment that follows is arranged around four roles: liberator of the enslaved, planner of the colony's economy and society, general who drove out Spanish, British and French armies in turn, and statesman who framed a constitution. From these she draws a hemispheric claim. She credits Toussaint with supplying arms and a refuge to the South American independence movements, and with wrecking Leclerc's expedition, which destroyed Napoleon's reason for holding Louisiana. The Purchase followed, doubling the territory of the United States — an outcome she attributes, at one remove, to a man born a slave on the Bréda plantation.