A history of the Citadelle La Ferriere and of the king who finished it. Wilson follows Henry Christophe from a childhood in the eastern Caribbean to service at a Cap-Francais hotel, to the Savannah campaign in the American war, and then to his refusal of a constrained presidency in 1806, the secession of the north, and the crown he took in 1811. The kingdom is described through its instruments: a hereditary nobility with new titles, the Code Henry and its courts, a rural code that made work compulsory and fixed the working day, schools and a royal academy, a gourde backed by gold, and a hundred and fifty foreign ships loading coffee and sugar in 1817. Building the fortress cost some twenty thousand lives, and how two hundred and seventy-five guns reached a summit at three thousand feet remains unexplained. Rule through fear, the essay concludes, lost Christophe the affection of people newly out of slavery.