Boyd's study of James Redpath's effort to settle African Americans in Haiti opens on the broader nineteenth-century enthusiasm for colonization. Sending Black Americans beyond the country's borders drew Americans looking for ground between abolitionists and defenders of slavery.

Those who favored it agreed that Black people could never be absorbed into a dominant Anglo-Saxon culture, but they never settled on a method, an agency, or a destination. Jefferson looked to the Louisiana Purchase; others proposed Florida, Texas, lands west of the Mississippi and, as settlement pushed on, sites in Canada and farther south. Roughly twelve thousand Black Americans were shipped to Liberia by the American Colonization Society, a philanthropic body with chapters in both regions.