White asks what the Haitian Revolution did to political thinking in the young United States, and in the process recasts how republicanism and slavery sat together at a founding moment. For Americans after their own revolution, events in Saint-Domingue exposed the gap between professed democratic principle and the practice of slaveholding.

For thirteen years, from 1791 to 1804, enslaved people and free people of color fought for equal rights on French revolutionary terms. Refugees, white and mixed-race, reached American cities, and their arrival made the contradiction concrete: slaveholders in the United States could read their own possible fate in the predicament of Haitian planters.

White gathers reactions across the divisions of the day — Black and white, northern and southern, Federalist and Democratic Republican, proslavery and antislavery. Setting the new republic in a wider Atlantic frame, she shows the refugees' presence provoking some of the earliest arguments about what the nation was.