Perched three thousand feet above the northern plain, the La Ferrière Citadel is presented here as the crowning work — and the great cost — of Henry Christophe's kingdom. Wilson recounts how Christophe refused the presidency in 1806, secured full powers in the north, and crowned himself in 1811, then built a state around a civil code and a rural one, compulsory labor, courts, schools, a printing house, and a currency backed by gold.

The fortress itself is described from the inside: galleries, magazines, cisterns, and barracks meant to hold a garrison through a three-year siege, with cannon captured from the French still trained on the valley. How thousands of conscripted men hauled guns and half a million tons of stone up those paths no surviving record explains; twenty thousand are said to have died doing it. Paralyzed by a stroke and abandoned, Christophe shot himself in 1820 and was buried in the courtyard.