Beard announces his purpose at the outset: to prove through narrative rather than argument that no fixed barrier separates light- and dark-skinned peoples, and that a despised race is capable of heroism and virtue. Toussaint's life is the vehicle.

The story opens with the island's geography and moves through the collision of planters, free men of colour and the enslaved after 1789: the deputation of men of colour to Paris, the colonial assembly's refusal to share power, Ogé's rising, and the great revolt of the northern plain. Toussaint appears first as the Bréda coachman who shields his master's household, then as the commander who outmanoeuvres his rivals, and finally as the prisoner left to starve in the Jura after Bonaparte's betrayal.

Later chapters carry the account past independence, through Dessalines, the division between Christophe and Pétion, and Boyer's reunification, down to the Haiti of the author's own century.