Two slave inventories drawn up in April 1785 for the Breda estates at Haut-du-Cap and Plaine-du-Nord, the plantations where Toussaint Louverture spent his early life, are the core evidence here. Geggus reads them with the attorney Bayon de Libertat's correspondence and with notarial and parish records that show Toussaint legally freed and leasing land well before 1789, and he weighs that against contemporaries who kept describing him as a slave. The listings show workforces that were unusually African, with more than twenty named nations, Congos the largest group, and the Arada of Toussaint's parentage a small minority. Comparing sex ratios, ages, sickness, births and deaths, Geggus finds Haut-du-Cap much the harsher place, with high mortality, low fertility and a small healthy field gang, while Plaine-du-Nord sat near regional norms. Evidence that conditions worsened towards revolt he judges mixed and the surviving papers too fragmentary to settle it.