Toussaint Louverture

Toussaint Louverture was born into slavery on a plantation in Saint-Domingue, the French colony that is now Haiti, then the world's richest sugar colony, where hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans worked under brutal conditions. He learned to read, became a coachman and steward, and was freed in the 1770s. In 1791 the enslaved people of the northern plain rose in revolt, and Toussaint soon became its most skilled leader. After France abolished slavery in 1794, he fought for the French Republic, defeating Spanish and British invaders, and by 1801 he governed the whole island and issued a constitution naming himself governor for life. He was a devout Catholic and tried to restore the plantation economy with paid but strictly controlled labor. Napoleon, who meant to restore slavery, sent a large army in 1802. Toussaint was invited to a meeting, seized, and shipped to France, where he died in a cold prison in the Jura mountains in 1803. Haiti declared independence the next year.

Faith: A Catholic who identified as a loyal Christian and made Catholicism Saint-Domingue's only publicly professed faith. Source: Wikipedia