Why did British writers and caricaturists of the Napoleonic years praise Toussaint Louverture so warmly? Gregory Pierrot reads the Times of London, the Anti-Jacobin, James Stephen's 1803 pamphlet, Marcus Rainsford's 1805 history, satirical prints catalogued at the British Museum and Wordsworth's sonnet of 1803, and argues that the praise did political work. Britain had fought the black revolutionaries of Saint Domingue and lost. Recasting their general as an honorary Englishman, a lone hero of natural nobility detached from any army or nation, allowed the country to forget its own military and commercial involvement while it tightened slavery at home. Racial labels shifted with his fortunes, black or negro or mulatto as each moment required, and Dessalines was assigned the savagery Toussaint was spared. Once imprisoned and dead, Toussaint could be pitied, versified and absorbed into a literary line running through Oroonoko and Three-Fingered Jack, which drained the revolution of its politics.