In January 1817 seven enslaved men from Jamaica seized the vessel they were working and sailed it to Haiti. Petion refused to give them up, resting his refusal on the article of the 1816 constitution that made anyone of African descent who reached Haitian ground free. Ferrer builds her argument out of the international dispute that followed.

Most scholarship has asked whether Haiti's example inspired abolitionists or rebels elsewhere. Ferrer redirects the question toward the Haitian state, which promised after independence not to interfere with its neighbours and yet legislated an antislavery of its own, addressing itself deliberately to black people across the hemisphere and making its territory a place slavery could not follow.

She refuses a triumphal ending. Legal freedom in Haiti often meant compulsory labour or naval service, and one of the sailors chose slavery under a British master instead. The liberty Haiti's rulers had in mind was not always the liberty their own people wanted.