A collection on the people who left Saint-Domingue during its revolution and washed up, by way of Cuba and elsewhere, in Louisiana.

The opening essay makes the largest claim. Louisiana and Saint-Domingue were one colonial world, tied by trade, shipping, kinship and a shared Creole language, and the older colony effectively made the younger one. The refugee waves of the early nineteenth century were therefore not an arrival of strangers but a return within the family — a transfusion that prolonged the life of French Creole Louisiana and left the region opaque to the rest of the country.

An editorial introduction tests this against the 1850 census and church records. The refugees who went to the countryside stayed few, mostly white and poor, farming or working trades, with the great majority holding under five hundred dollars in property. Those who stayed in New Orleans held their identity far longer, sustained by intermarriage and repeated failed attempts to reclaim island estates.