Toussaint Louverture's years before the revolution were long clouded by legend, in part because Toussaint described his youth in terms that served his politics better than the record. Girard and Donnadieu work from French plantation and notarial documents not previously mined, and a more detailed, more complicated portrait emerges.

They map his kinship network: African-born parents, surrogate parents, his first wife Cécile, his second wife Suzanne, and a wide circle of prominent free black families. One finding is that Jean-Jacques Dessalines had once been enslaved by Toussaint's son-in-law. The circumstances of Toussaint's own enslavement, the family that owned him, and his manumission together suggest a comparatively mild experience of bondage, and the land he accumulated during his rise proves to have been extensive but not dependably profitable.

The wider payoff concerns plantation life, the free population of color in Saint Domingue, and the character of the revolution, and it clarifies the choices Toussaint later made as governor for life.