Saint-Domingue's free population of African descent numbered some twenty-seven thousand by 1789, and a few of them owned slaves. King uses that fact to reopen the standard portrait of Toussaint Louverture as a gifted plantation coachman who rose out of bondage only in 1791.

Following Debien's discovery that Toussaint's name is absent from the Breda slave lists of 1785, King argues that he passed the years before the revolution as a free man: a small planter and slaveholder in his own right, at home in the propertied free colored world rather than in the field gangs.

The revision matters for how the revolution is read. If the leader who did most to secure its success came out of that class rather than the maroon camps and the sugar works, then the familiar story of 1791 as a rising conspired by runaways and slave foremen needs more room in it for free people of color and their ambiguous position.