King takes up the years before 1791 in the life of the man who did most to make the insurrection succeed. Older accounts cast Toussaint as a coachman still enslaved on the Breda estate; that picture has given way since Debien noticed his absence from the plantation's slave lists, and King works from documents that show him free well before the revolution.

What that freedom looked like is the substance of the article. Toussaint belonged among the libres de savane, people free in practice whose manumission was never registered, and who used notaries to shore up a status the law left precarious. He leased and sold land at Haut-du-Cap, held slaves, and had a solid tile-roofed house built for his wife.

Rather than treat this as a discrediting fact, King places him beside slaveholding revolutionaries in Virginia, arguing that in a plantation colony ambition led inevitably to owning people, and that what matters is what a man transcends.