Johnson assesses Ashli White's study of the Saint-Domingue refugees who reached American ports between 1793 and 1809, and of what their presence did to political argument in the young United States. White's claim, as he presents it, is that these arrivals, white and black, reshaped debate over national character, migration policy, factional politics and slavery's place in a republic.

He follows her through the chapters: the shared creoleness white refugees invoked to attract charity, the philanthropy withheld from exiles of colour, the public quarrel between the emigres and the French minister Genet that left Americans doubting French republicanism, the fear of contagion that slaveholders soothed by congratulating themselves on their own humanity, and the last wave in 1809, whose insistence on landing with their property forced Congress into an exemption from the slave trade ban.

Johnson counts it a corrective for a field slow to take Haiti's emergence seriously.