A review essay on Ashli White's study of Saint-Dominguan refugees in the early United States, praising a book that puts migrants, black and white, at the centre of a story usually told through commerce and diplomacy. White's case, as Johnson presents it, is that the exiles who began arriving in 1793 reshaped American arguments about national character, immigration policy, party loyalty and whether slavery could survive in a republic. White refugees traded on a shared creole and planter identity to win charity withheld from exiles of colour, and their public quarrels with the French minister Genet deepened American distrust of France while hardening a consensus around race. Johnson admires the range of evidence, from wills and landing reports to church records and property inventories, and rates the essay on sources the best bibliographic guide in thirty years. He doubts a book under three hundred pages can settle the questions it opens.