Woodward sets out to trace, largely from secondary accounts, the course of Toussaint Louverture's fight for the freedom of some half a million enslaved people in France's richest colony. He opens with the island's division between Spain and France, the plantation economy that made the western portion so profitable, and the racial arithmetic — a few tens of thousands of whites and free people of color against a vast enslaved majority — that the decrees of the National Constituent Assembly destabilized in 1791.

From there the narrative follows Toussaint's rise, his maneuvering against French agents and British forces, and the campaign against Leclerc's expedition: the retreat to the mountains, the surrenders of Christophe and Dessalines, and Toussaint's own capitulation at Le Cap in 1802. Seized weeks later and shipped to France, he died in prison the following spring, but the war continued and Dessalines proclaimed independence in 1804.