Fick sets the Haitian revolution of 1791 to 1804 inside the Age of Revolution's arguments about rights and citizenship, and finds that those who made it had to build the meaning of freedom step by step. Nothing came ready-made. Each definition took shape hemmed in by colonial conditions, by war between empires, and by politics that would not hold still in either revolution.

The article follows emancipation and citizenship first as French officials applied them from 1793 to 1798, then under Toussaint Louverture between 1798 and 1802. In both phases rights came sorted by category of person, and the great mass of plantation labourers never entered the nation's civic or political life at all. Their exclusion long outlasted independence.

Fick names the paradox: collective freedom from slavery survived Atlantic war and empire only through forced labour, militarization, and individual rights withheld from the people working the land.