Swanson introduces and prints for the first time two letters of 1816 by Stephen Grellet, a Limoges nobleman's son who fled the French Revolution, lost his religion in Demerara, and became a Quaker minister in the United States. Addressed to William Allen and George Stacey, they describe three months spent travelling in Petion's southern republic.

The introduction sets the trip in its Atlantic context: a Black state whose victory had hardened proslavery opinion abroad, an island split between a kingdom in the north and a republic in the south, and an abolitionist movement then under sustained attack. Grellet says almost nothing of that internal conflict. He judged Haitians favourably, blamed what offended him on French irreligion and on the local clergy, and held that instruction and material help would make the country exemplary.

Swanson argues that the letters, passed over by the nineteenth-century biographies built from Grellet's now-lost journal, show something the journal cannot.