Lundy tracks the arrival of Saint Domingue refugees in Philadelphia, from the fifteen who stepped off the Charming Sally in May 1791 to the roughly three thousand who followed over the next thirty months, asking why this city in particular drew them.

The city was free, the state around it was free, and it held both the young republic's capital and a centre of antislavery organizing, with gradual abolition acts promising freedom after six months to anyone a settling owner brought in. That made the landing of enslaved refugees awkward. Awkwardness turned to alarm: a run of arsons, a growing black population and the news from the island produced open talk of imported insurrection, and in 1798 the governor barred further such landings.

Among black Philadelphians the meaning ran the other way. Independence in 1804 became a source of pride, an argument against colonization schemes, and eventually the basis of an emigration society.