Matthewson traces how a president who privately urged gradual emancipation came to embargo trade with the hemisphere's second independent republic and withhold recognition from it. Jefferson encouraged Saint-Domingue's separation from France and inherited a pragmatic line from Adams, but Gabriel's conspiracy in 1800 and the Easter Plot of 1802 hardened Virginian opinion, and he faced a Congress unwilling to countenance a black state.

Earlier accounts explained the embargo chiefly by Jefferson's appetite for the Floridas and his wish to oblige Napoleon. Matthewson reads it instead as a victory for southern conservatives, arguing that defending slavery at home required disparaging Haiti abroad. He places the decision beside Britain's, which in the same years moved to end its own slave trade and cultivate influence on the island while the United States turned to planting the southwest with slave labour.

Jefferson's stated aversion to slavery, on this account, never survived contact with racial fear and loyalty to Virginia's planter class.