Independence in 1804 left Haiti's leaders with a survival problem: the new nation needed strong ties to other states. They looked hardest at the United States, home to a sizeable free black population that included vocal champions of emigration and colonization. Through the 1820s, President Jean-Pierre Boyer helped move thousands of black Americans to Haiti, promising land, commercial opportunity and, above all, a black state.

The appeal reached opposed constituencies. Black community leaders and journalists presented emigration as a way to resist discrimination and prove the race an equal on the world stage; antislavery whites wanted to support a nation founded by liberated slaves; businessmen of both races saw trade; racist whites saw a way to export America's race problem.

Migration ebbed by the decade's end as emigrants found the republic was no black Eden. Fanning reconstructs the campaign's rise and fall from letters, diaries, travellers' reports, newspapers and American, British and French consular records.