YMMV *please look at the illustrations in this book prior to reading*

From 1954 comes this astonishing children's book that will enlighten people of all ages! ( )

In the years just after the American Revolution, the tiny mountainous island of Haiti was seething with unrest. A colony of France in those days, it had half a million Negro slaves ad fewer than 40,000 whites. Brutally the French planters beat their black slaves, forcing them to work from dawn to dusk in the cane fields, driving them to starvation and misery. Then into the foreground came a small misshapen figure of a man wearing a yellow turban - Toussaint Louverture, the grandson of an African chieftain. Among the oppressed and tortured mass he was one of the few slaves of Haiti who was acquainted with the affairs of history and dedicated to the rights of man. At first the French ridiculed him as 'the monkey in the yellow turban,' but soon they realized this little man was in reality a giant of intellect and leadership. Vividly and dramatically, Katharine Scherman tells the story in The Slave Who Freed Haiti.

This book was written in the 50s and so has "negroes" and likely a few other not correct comments, but gives both middle school students and adults an incredible, exciting, and inspiring introduction to the man who led the only successful slave revolution ever.

It offers many insights into Toussaint Louverture's military strategies, his thinking about life, his love for Haiti and its people, his plans, and deepest feelings.
Wildly expressive and evocative woodcuts accompany this first edition and are as unsparring as the author's words.

After Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States: "We were no longer in peril. We owe our safety to the intrepid black slave in Haiti who handed out
muskets to his people and whipped Napoleon's proudest army before it could get anywhere near the United States."

It will be good if Philippe Girard's just published (2016) Toussaint Louverture will confirm and expand on this honor.

And what a horrifying betrayal - one prays for his rescue up to the end! ( )

The life of the black man who led his people--plantation slaves--in a revolt against their masters.