Only in Saint-Domingue, Fick argues, was the natural-rights language of 1776 and 1789 carried through to its conclusion, since only there was slavery itself destroyed rather than invoked as a figure of speech. The insurgents exposed contradictions in Enlightenment thought that neither of the other revolutions had to confront.

Most of the essay follows what became of that freedom. Emancipation held, but Toussaint tied cultivators to the estates through a militarized agricultural code, blocked land sales below fifty carreaux so that no class of smallholders could form, and required passports of anyone not working a plantation. The constitution of 1801 wrote the arrangement into fundamental law. Dessalines carried the logic further, sorting every citizen into laborer or soldier and declaring all Haitians black, a formula Fick treats as legal fiction laid over an unhealed split between anciens and nouveaux libres.

Independence made abolition permanent at the price of a state whose agrarian majority stayed outside politics.