The Opening

He was born around 1743, an enslaved man on the Bréda plantation in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the most profitable sugar colony in the world. He was granted his freedom around 1776, became a modest property owner with enslaved labour of his own, and was fifty when the August 1791 slave uprising began. He led the formerly enslaved through the Spanish-allied years and the 1794 French abolition decree, became governor general of Saint-Domingue in 1801, and was captured by Napoleon Bonaparte's expeditionary force on June 7, 1802, deported in chains across the Atlantic, and died of pneumonia in the Fort de Joux dungeon in the Jura mountains of France on April 7, 1803. He never saw the independence of Haiti, declared by Jean-Jacques Dessalines nine months after his death.

Edward Forrester's biography traces the arc through the Bréda plantation childhood and the long apprenticeship as a coachman, the 1791 Bois Caïman ceremony, the long Spanish alliance and the 1794 French defection, the unification of the colony in 1801 and the constitution he promulgated that summer, the February 1802 Leclerc expedition, the June 1802 betrayal at Le Gonaïves and the Atlantic crossing in irons, and the death in the high cold of the Fort de Joux dungeon.

What emerges is a portrait of the formerly enslaved general who led the only successful slave revolution in modern history — and the French Republic that, in the end, killed him for it.