Fiehrer sets out to put substance behind a phrase repeated more often than it is examined, Louisiana's Caribbean connection. Census returns, colonial chronicles, parish and military lists and the Debien correspondence carry an account of Saint Domingue from buccaneer beginnings through indigo, then sugar and coffee, to the plantation society of some 800 large estates and roughly 450,000 enslaved people that broke apart after 1791. Expulsion from eastern Cuba sent about 9,000 people to New Orleans in 1809, in near-equal parts white, free coloured and enslaved, doubling the city and seeding its newspapers, theatres, opera and dance music. Fiehrer doubts the tale of wholesale slaughter that later shaped memory, since the surviving counts of refugees in Cuba, France and the United States account for most of the colony's whites. He asks for demographic and genealogical work to displace a local historiography formed by Reconstruction politics and by diplomatic hostility to Haiti.