Matthewson reconstructs Jefferson's Haitian policy from French diplomatic dispatches, Gallatin's papers, congressional debates and the president's private letters, and finds a sequence rather than a settled position. During the Leclerc expedition Jefferson promised France cooperation, then withheld it once Bonaparte's ambitions in Louisiana became clear, so that American provisions, arms and ammunition kept reaching the black army. After independence he refused recognition and pressed Congress for the trade embargo enacted in 1805 and tightened twice thereafter. Gallatin later stated the motive plainly, naming the danger that unrestricted contact with black Haiti posed among the numerous slaves at home. Matthewson sets the reversal inside the congressional bargain by which the South bought northern acquiescence on slavery, and inside the panic that followed Gabriel's conspiracy in Virginia. Jefferson's letters give up on gradual emancipation in the same years. The Haitian victory he had helped secure hardened his country against its own revolutionary promise.