Larrier assembles the ways nineteenth-century African Americans imagined and honoured Haiti, against a dominant discourse that cast it as a place of barbarity and a danger to the enslaved population of the United States. Black sailors carried news of the revolution north; refugees who settled in America supplied accounts said to have fed the plots of Denmark Vesey and Gabriel.

Five African American diplomats served in Port-au-Prince between 1869 and 1892. John Mercer Langston, who left the fullest personal record, describes a government built by black ability and is struck by the bearing of the officers who board his ship at Cap Haitien.

The black press followed the republic closely, running series on its history, schools, trade and treaties and rebuking Washington for withholding recognition. Two waves of emigration, encouraged by Boyer and later by a Haitian bureau, drew settlers who named their colonies after the cities they had left.