Sweet's research note opens not with Kongo but with a French colonist. Louis Narcisse Baudry des Lozières landed at Norfolk, Virginia, on February 26, 1794, after a four-month crossing from Le Havre that began in a storm and never improved.

Worse had come earlier. Two years before, with the revolution just under way, Baudry found his wife and daughter wandering in the woods of Saint-Domingue, driven from their home by rebels. He was an officer, wounded near Léogane, and most of the men under his command were killed. He fled the colony in March 1792, met briefly in Paris with his brother-in-law, the writer Moreau de Saint-Méry, and was soon exiled again, settling in Philadelphia.

There he worked as clerk, bookseller, and editor. He traveled North America, spent time with relatives in New Orleans, and recast himself as an authority on the natural history of the French colonies, lecturing to the American Philosophical Society and publishing on scientific subjects.

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.