Matthewson reconstructs Jefferson's dealings with Saint-Domingue and then with independent Haiti, and argues that neither his professed dislike of slavery nor his racism accounts for what he did. What governed him throughout was his identification with Virginia's planters and his determination to secure Louisiana and the Southwest.

Jefferson helped bring French power in the Caribbean down, which brought the Haitians their independence and at the same time opened enormous tracts of land to slaveholders. The reaction that followed, fed by the massacres of 1804 and by the Virginia conspiracies of 1800 and 1802, hardened southern opinion. He gave up his hope of early emancipation, rebuffed Dessalines, and settled on embargo and refusal of recognition, a policy that survived until 1862 at the cost of northern merchants.

Racial fear is granted a real but secondary place, and the shift of antislavery leadership from the United States to Britain is dated to these years.