Baur's Boyer is a calculator rather than a hero, and the comparison with Machiavelli is meant as praise for a ruler who kept a hated and encircled republic alive.

The country he took over in 1818 had been ruined by invasion, civil war and the long fight against France, was shunned by the powers that mattered, and was split into rival states. Baur credits him with ending that division, extending his authority across the whole island, and purchasing France's acknowledgment in 1825 at a figure that mortgaged Haitian revenues for generations. The cost at home was compulsory cultivation and a long autocracy, and Baur is candid about both, as he is about the rising of 1843 and the Dominican secession that followed.

The essay closes on Boyer living out his exile in Paris and dying there in 1850, marked by a single line in the Times. Written in 1947, it carries that period's racial vocabulary throughout.