Toussaint L'Ouverture (born François-Dominique Toussaint, 1746 to 1803) was born to slave parents from Africa and rose up to free the blacks on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. A fight for freedom is seldom simple, however. As a member and then leader of Haiti's French Republicans, Toussaint faced armed opposition from numerous factions:

• The Napoleonic French overlords
• The British, whom he drove off the island
• The Spanish who ran the other half of the island (today's Dominican Republic)
• The mulattos, persons of mixed black-white heritage, who were opposed to losing their place in Haiti's racial hierarchy.

Napoleon's forces captured Toussaint and shipped him to Paris, where he died in jail. The sparks of liberty aren't always that easy to extinguish, however. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who fought under L'Ouverture, soon led the Haitians against the French again and drove them out in 1804.