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Once news of the French Revolution of 1789 reached the island, insurrection was in the air. The initial rebellion on the Manquets plantation in 1791 stirred up slaves on the surrounding plantations, and within a few years the insurrectionary force grew to fifty thousand men, one hundred times the size of the largest slave revolt in U.S. history.

Louverture had known of and perhaps helped shape plans for the uprising, but he waited to see how it would go, only joining in a month after it began. The colony’s political situation was extremely complicated, with numerous factions, parties, and shifting alliances, and it was unclear what would happen on your plantation next week, let alone to the whole island over time.

When Louverture joined the rebels he was about forty-seven and already known as “Old Toussaint.” Within a few months he had appointed himself brigadier general and was leading one of the three chief rebel groups. To build support, Louverture implied that he was acting on behalf of the French king, Louis XVI, who, he said, had issued him a document promising the rebels three days of rest a week in exchange for their efforts. He was able to pull off this ruse because almost none of his followers could read and write.

Between 1791 and 1793, he and the rebels made such progress that France dispatched eleven thousand troops to hold them back—more than the nation sent abroad during the U.S. War of Independence.

After Louis XVI was guillotined in Paris in 1793, the British and Spanish invaded Saint-Domingue, each hoping to seize the prize while France was preoccupied. Once Spain declared war on France, Louverture went to the Spanish commander and offered to integrate his six hundred men into the Spanish army, which other rebellious slave groups were also joining. And so Louverture became a colonel in the Spanish army, fighting the French.

The following year, seeing an advantage for himself and his troops, Louverture defected to the French army. Within a year, he and his men, now five thousand strong, had retaken almost all of the French towns he had just conquered for Spain, and subdued several rebel groups still allied with the Spanish. These victories, in concert with military setbacks in Europe, forced Spain to sue for peace. Louverture had defeated his first European superpower.

Next he faced the British, who had sent two large battalions to Saint-Domingue. Unprepared to tackle a large professional army, Louverture began retreating in 1795 and maintained a defensive posture for two years, even as the remaining blacks on the island, some 500,000 men in all, joined his side. Time, guerrilla skirmishing, and yellow fever wore down Louverture’s foes. Twelve thousand of the twenty thousand British soldiers who arrived on the island were buried there, and in 1798 Louverture negotiated the departure of their remaining forces. He had defeated his second European superpower.

In 1801 he invaded Santo Domingo, the Spanish part of the island that is now the Dominican Republic, and defeated the Spanish for good. On July 7, 1801, he became governor of the entire island where he had once been a slave. He promptly published a new constitution. Saint-Domingue would still be a French colony, in name, but the constitution abolished slavery, opened all jobs to all races, and made the territory functionally independent. In just ten years Louverture and his army had accomplished the unimaginable.