Gillikin follows the people who reached Charleston from Saint-Domingue between 1791 and 1822 — ruined planters, gens de couleur and enslaved people alike — and asks how a slaveholding southern city absorbed them. Charlestonians had been reading about the island for years before the largest group landed in 1793, and sympathy for dispossessed planters was already shadowed by suspicion of their politics and dread of what the newcomers might carry.

Assimilation, she argues, was neither quick nor smooth, and it turned on regional particulars: South Carolina's commercial and educational ties to Europe and the Caribbean made distant events feel immediate, and its leaders were caught between kinship with the French and their obligations under a new federal constitution. Refugees were repeatedly drawn into local arguments about republicanism, their standing rising and falling with France's reputation through the Terror, Napoleon and the Restoration.