Toussaint Louverture's constitution of 1801 usually appears as a footnote, overshadowed by his arrest, his deportation and the rise of Dessalines. Drexler and White make a larger claim for it. Once American newspapers circulated the text in the autumn of 1801, no text by a Black author was more widely read in the United States, they contend, and probably none was until Douglass published his Narrative in 1845.

They meet the objections head-on. The document was not written in the United States, not published there first, not about the country, and not authored by Toussaint in any conventional sense, having been drafted by a committee made up largely of white planters.

Their reply is that early African American writing is full of texts with tangled origins, Wheatley's London-printed poems among them, and that reading the constitution as literature shifts where the tradition can be said to begin.