In 1904 an obscure Arctic explorer and Geological Survey clerk named Robert Stein wrote privately to the novelist Thomas Nelson Page with a plan to empty the United States of its black population. Smith reconstructs the scheme from that unpublished letter, which is why it has been missing from accounts of colonization as a strain in American racial thought.

Stein proposed persuading Britain to rename Nigeria Hopeland and open it to nine million emigrants, installing a Tuskegee graduate as a costumed emperor while real authority stayed with British officials, and holding out polygamy as an inducement. Property and labor would be made illegal for blacks at home so that flight would look voluntary; the South, cleaned out, would prosper.

Page let the proposal drop. Smith reads it as an extreme instance of an ordinary fear, and of a habit of fashioning orderly, unworkable solutions to problems its author found intractable.