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 and 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 utter 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 ad "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, Katherine Scherman tells the story in The Slave Who Freed Haiti.
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