A documentary collection built around Toussaint Louverture, opening with an editor's survey of the society he came out of: some four hundred fifty thousand enslaved people against a white minority a fifteenth their number, a Code Noir that restrained nothing, mortality high enough to require constant fresh imports, and a colony administered entirely from France with no representative assembly to absorb colonial grievance.

That introduction also sketches what resistance looked like before 1791, from poisoning and marronage answered by mounted patrols manned by free men of color to a long run of conspiracies, the most ambitious of them Mackandal's betrayed plot of 1758.

The documents follow. A first part gathers Toussaint's own proclamations, beginning with the calls to arms of 1793 that answered Sonthonax's emancipation offer by insisting the enslaved should take their liberty themselves. A second collects the sharply divided verdicts of contemporaries, republican Frenchmen among them.