The setting is Saint-Domingue, the richest of all the European colonies in the Americas. The time embraces the earliest days of the colony and focuses sharply on the closing years of the 18th century. The protagonists are the masses of fugitive slaves, men and women maroons, and their unsung leaders such as Boukman, Macandal, Polydor, who by guile, determination and bloody sacrifice made it possible to create the Haitian republic. All told against the backdrop of daily slave life and the politics of the mainland and the colony.