The slave revolt that destroyed Saint-Domingue did not end when Dessalines declared independence in 1804. Clavin follows its afterlife in American memory, and argues that the memory did political work.

Two accounts of the revolution circulated on both sides of the Atlantic, and neither was neutral. One, given wide currency by the Jamaican planter Bryan Edwards, dwelt on massacred white families and served slaveholders as a standing warning. The other made Louverture a general and statesman worth admiring. Both were retold in newspapers, pamphlets, engravings, taverns and shipboard talk, and both were fiercely disputed.

Clavin's larger claim is that the revolution's reach cannot be measured within its own decade. Seventy years on, Americans fighting their own war over slavery reached for Haiti, as promise or as threat, and he sets out to restore that link to the history of the Atlantic world.