Rhodes reads the Georgia Gazette straight through from 1763 to 1799, along with papers in Boston, Baltimore, Charleston, New York, London and Paris, and pulls out 123 items concerning Haitians. From them she reconstructs both an episode and the way it was reported.

The episode is the siege of Savannah in 1779, where men of colour from Saint-Domingue fought under d'Estaing beside American troops, and where several future leaders of Haitian independence got their first experience of war. White historians, she notes, have mostly passed over their part while Black historians have magnified it, and she treats the silence and the celebration as two forms of the same distortion.

She also traces what a partisan, Tory-controlled press chose to print and to withhold about Black soldiers and, later, about the revolution in the colony — an anxiety that resurfaces in the Charleston conspiracy trials of 1822.