Lundy follows ship passenger lists, Pennsylvania Abolition Society manumission books, customs house returns and city directories to ask what happened when people fleeing Saint Domingue landed in the city that led the American campaign against slavery. Of more than 3,000 arrivals between 1791 and 1794, some 800 were black and nearly all of those were enslaved, mostly teenagers separated from parents or children. Pennsylvania's gradual abolition law freed them after six months of residence, whereupon owners signed them to indentures running to age twenty-eight, so that real freedom came years afterwards. White philanthropy meanwhile raised $12,000 in days for the French colonists while black Philadelphians had spent two years gathering $3,500 for their own church. Lundy traces the newcomers into catering, shoemaking and property, into parish registers showing French-named couples marrying for decades, and into an 1824 emigration society and a black Fourth of July shaped by Haitian independence.