Haiti became independent at a moment when slavery elsewhere was expanding, and its first governments promised their neighbours that they would not carry emancipation abroad. Ferrer asks what the new state did to the meaning of freedom anyway. Her answer turns on a dispute of 1817, when seven enslaved men from Jamaica seized the vessel they were serving on, sailed to southern Haiti, and were sheltered by President Pétion, who refused demands from their owner and from British officials by citing the constitutional article recognising as Haitian any African or Indian, and any descendant of theirs, who came to live in the republic. Working from Colonial Office papers in London alongside Haitian constitutional texts, Ferrer argues that Haiti assembled a free soil doctrine from Catholic sanctuary, older European precedent and revolutionary rights language, with sailors and fugitives pressing the state to apply it broadly.