Black volunteers from Saint-Domingue fought at the siege of Savannah in 1779, a fact Clark finds slighted by white American historians and inflated by those who set out to correct them.

Working through French journals, troop returns and officers' papers, he counts roughly seven hundred grenadiers and chasseurs from the colony, assigned to trench work and a feigned attack, and reshuffled into unfamiliar companies by de Fontanges on the eve of the assault. That reorganization, he suggests, is why their movements cannot now be traced in any detail.

The gap has left room for legend. Clark is sceptical of the familiar roll of future Haitian leaders said to have served there, and of the claim that a black legion saved the American army from annihilation; sources for these assertions are seldom given. He argues the men are owed an accurate account rather than a heroic one, and that black pride stands to gain from the exchange.