Hunt follows the reverberations of the Haitian Revolution through the antebellum United States and finds them less in policy than in imagination. Proslavery writers assigned Haiti to a tropical belt they thought naturally suited to black people; abolitionists borrowed the imagery of the Spanish black legend to render the slave South a place of cruelty and licence, with French, Catholic, sugar-growing Louisiana as its most lurid emblem. Melville and Faulkner both worked obliquely with the same association.

Some of the influence travelled with people. Refugees from Saint-Domingue settled across the Lower South, apprenticed their children, sued for freedom on the strength of the French abolition, opened academies in New Orleans and Natchez, and founded the French-language newspapers that kept Creole identity alive until after the Civil War.

Hunt also traces the alarm the revolution spread around the Caribbean and Spanish America, where Bolivar rebuilt his faltering movement under Petion's protection.