Toussaint Louverture wrote his constitution in 1801 as governor-general of Saint-Domingue, years before Haiti existed. Its third article declared that everyone there is born, lives, and dies free and French, a statement of loyalty to the French Republic that simultaneously advertised his own independent authority.

Semley examines the difficult kind of black citizenship the document tried to build, resting at once on the end of slavery and on continued membership in an empire. The constitution is read next to French constitutions of the 1790s and to Haiti's own early constitutions, with attention to how each speaks about marriage and family in gendered terms.

Louverture sought to convert racial slavery into black citizenship by enforcing standards of order, purity, and family life, and in doing so, Semley argues, arrived at troubling new accounts of blackness and Frenchness, and of a gendered self, that bear on present-day debates over human rights.