Schoelcher builds his life of Toussaint from documents, quoting dispatches, ministerial instructions, speeches to the Constituent Assembly and colonial memoirs, and arguing openly with the authorities he cites.

He starts with the free men of colour, some of them educated in Paris at the expense of white fathers, whose petition for civil and political rights in October 1789 met a courteous evasion. He follows the rising of 1791 and the bands of Jean-Francois and Biassou, who after the execution of Louis XVI took Spanish pay and royalist cockades and swelled their forces with enslaved men drawn by the promise of standing as free men.

The abolitionist purpose is never concealed. Schoelcher reproduces a colonist's tirade against people of mixed descent as evidence of how imbecilic colour prejudice could become, and records with disgust that once their own rights were won, men of colour sent the slaves they had roused back to the workshops.