Isaac Sasportas was born in French Saint-Domingue around 1779, into the Sephardic Diaspora. Girard follows him to Charleston, where between 1793 and 1795 he lived with his uncle Abraham, a man caught up both in the American Revolution and in the political battles of the French one.

The nephew adopted the uncle's radicalism and carried it home. Back in Saint-Domingue he became a leading planner of an invasion of Jamaica, then British, meant to free the enslaved Africans there. Toussaint Louverture disclosed the plan, and Sasportas was executed in Jamaica in December 1799.