Toussaint Louverture

Toussaint Louverture was born enslaved in Saint-Domingue and freed in his thirties, and when the slaves rose in 1791 he became, within a few years, the general who defeated the Spanish, the British and the planters, abolished slavery, and governed the colony in the name of a France that could not control him. The Constitution of 1801 made him governor for life and the colony effectively independent; Napoleon sent an army, and Toussaint was tricked into captivity and died in a fortress in the Jura in 1803. Dessalines finished what he had begun. Wordsworth wrote a sonnet to him in prison.