Bourhis-Mariotti traces how Haiti came to occupy the imagination of free and emancipated African Americans in the decades before the Civil War. As conditions in the United States worsened and colonization schemes aimed at Africa met resistance, black activists increasingly named the young Caribbean republic as the place where a people might govern itself.

The subject here is not the departures themselves, which earlier historians have covered, but the advocacy that produced them: a body of persuasion written and circulated largely by Blacks, and built more on hope than on reporting, since very few emigrants or travelers had sent anything back. James Theodore Holly gave the argument a providential shape. By 1860 President Geffrard's government had hired James Redpath to run an emigration bureau from American soil, and Redpath recruited black lecturers and newspapers to sell the plan.

Read this way, the campaign restores the range of black abolitionist thought and the initiative Blacks took within it.