In January 1822 the Haitian president replied to four Greek expatriates in Paris who had written to him seeking support for the rising against Ottoman rule. Sideris and Konsta present that letter in English translation, with a short account of its recipients and of how it survived.

Boyer declines to send money, explaining that the treasury is exhausted and that absorbing the eastern part of the island has proved ruinously expensive. What he offers instead is recognition: a people who broke their own chains cannot be indifferent to others fighting the same fight, and he closes by invoking Leonidas, Miltiades, Marathon and Salamis.

The editors note that the text comes down through a Greek translation preserved in a revolutionary secretary's papers, and read the classical allusions as a deliberate pairing of the citizen-soldier of antiquity with the volunteers of Haiti and of the Greek revolt.

Baur's Boyer is a calculator rather than a hero, and the comparison with Machiavelli is meant as praise for a ruler who kept a hated and encircled republic alive.

The country he took over in 1818 had been ruined by invasion, civil war and the long fight against France, was shunned by the powers that mattered, and was split into rival states. Baur credits him with ending that division, extending his authority across the whole island, and purchasing France's acknowledgment in 1825 at a figure that mortgaged Haitian revenues for generations. The cost at home was compulsory cultivation and a long autocracy, and Baur is candid about both, as he is about the rising of 1843 and the Dominican secession that followed.

The essay closes on Boyer living out his exile in Paris and dying there in 1850, marked by a single line in the Times. Written in 1947, it carries that period's racial vocabulary throughout.