Redpath, a Scottish immigrant journalist and friend of John Brown, accepted a commission from President Geffrard in 1860 to recruit African American settlers for the Artibonite Valley. Boyd reconstructs the venture from Redpath's letters to Haitian ministers, his Boston paper The Pine and Palm, and the increasingly hostile columns of the New York Anglo-African. Geffrard offered advanced passage, land grants and citizenship after a year. Redpath spent twenty thousand dollars, employed agents including John Brown Jr. and several prominent Black figures, and had shipped more than a thousand emigrants by late 1861. Returning settlers described unsurveyed plots, unfinished wells and canals, floorless prefabricated cottages, thirst, fever and theft. By 1862 he had left for war correspondence, and a federal investigator in 1864 could find only two hundred survivors. Boyd concludes that the agency accomplished more than wartime conditions warranted before foundering on Haitian administration and on Redpath's own quarrelsome temperament.