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The second chapter examines the impact of the American and Haitian revolutions on Georgia. The alliance between the British and slaves almost completely destroyed slavery during the American Revolution. Just as planters began the process of reestablishing the plantation regime, the events in St. Domingue disrupted the institution and influenced its development. The events in Haiti altered authorities' perceptions of people of African descent, both enslaved and free, and thus shaped decisions related to the slave order. In response to the Haitian Revolution, Georgia's authorities cracked down on arrivals of foreign people of color and enhanced the privileges of some native people of color.

Chapter 2 provides an in-depth look at the social and historical context of refugees’ lives in revolutionary St. Domingue. Although the refugees who fled the revolution were forced to leave much of their property behind in order to rebuild their lives, they brought with them social practices, cultural expressions, and political experiences that would make an indelible mark on Louisiana. First-generation refugees and their descendants from each of the three major social categories—whites, free people of color, and enslaved blacks—made distinctive impacts on the newly American territory. This chapter provides necessary historical context that helps to explain how the refugees and their descendants would have experienced the new racial and cultural context they found in Louisiana.

The introduction presents the St. Domingue/Haiti to Louisiana migration case, which traces the integration of white and free black refugees and their descendants over the course of two hundred years. The St. Domingue refugees initially reinforced Louisiana’s triracial system. Then, over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the binary Anglo-American racial system came to dominate as the Anglo-American population grew and their racial practices asserted increased pressure on the Latin/Caribbean system. The introduction discusses the ways these immigrants and their descendants coped with contrasting understandings of race and draws parallels between this historical case and the situation of contemporary immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean who often resist the binary logic of the Anglo-American US system.

Chapter 3 follows white St. Domingue refugees as they integrate into Louisiana’s Creole community and struggle against the tide of Anglo-Americanization during the nineteenth century. As the refugees blended into the Creole community, they felt the consequences of the racial and cultural assumptions Anglo-Americans made about Creoles. The most damaging of these was the suspicion that—because of their higher tolerance for publicly acknowledged interracial relationships—all Creoles, whether they appeared to be white or not, were really racially mixed. This chapter explains how and why most white Creoles eventually let go of their Creole identity and blended into Louisiana’s white Anglo-American community.

Chapter 4 examines the experience of St. Domingue refugees of color across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The focus is on refugees and their descendants who were free people of color. As was the case with white Creoles, Creoles of color faced intense pressure with the rise of Jim Crow to take a stand on one side or the other of the starkly drawn black/white border. Although they were officially categorized with black Anglo-Americans, Creoles of color in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued in many ways to operate according to a Latinized racial system that allowed them to differentiate themselves socially from Anglo-blacks. In contrast to the white Creoles who blended into white Anglo-American society, many Creoles of color saw a benefit in preserving their Creole identity because it provided a way of resisting the degrading racial effects of the Anglo-American racial system.

In 1803, the United States purchased Louisiana from France, clearing its imperial rivals out of a vast area and securing the main trade route of the interior for its western citizens. It also took possession of the port of New Orleans, long coveted by Britain. St. Louis not only provided a gateway to the West but also offered the promise of a limitless trade in furs. During the 1790s, the French empire relinquished two areas to the United States: the Detroit region in 1796 and the Mississippi Territory in 1798. Exiles from successive regimes in France sought asylum and opportunity in French America. Large numbers of French people from the French colony of St. Domingue (present-day Haiti) arrived in both St. Louis and New Orleans between 1793 and 1804. The largest wave of francophone refugees from St. Domingue arrived in Louisiana in 1809 and 1810 after being deported from Cuba in response to Bonapartist schemes in Spain.

By the late 1730s, the Jamaicans had grown weary of battling with the Maroons. The shortage of white militia and British regulars, along with the Maroons’ proficiency in guerrilla warfare and their knowledge of the terrain, led to high white casualties and heavy expenses. In the treaties of 1738-39, the Jamaicans granted autonomy to the Maroons. In return, the Maroons agreed to live in isolated reservations and serve as slave catchers for the whites. They would preserve white freedom and black slavery. But in July 1795, the turmoil by the Trelawney Town Maroons in the northern mountains caught the colony by surprise. The St. Domingue rebellion, just a day’s sail from Jamaica, created paranoia. The Jamaican elite did not worry unduly about a few hundred Maroons in the distant northwest village of Trelawney Town, far from the urban centers of Spanish Town and Kingston. Rather, the fear loomed that the uprising would “corrupt” the slaves who comprised 90 percent of the population. This chapter describes the exigencies that led the island to instigate war against the Maroons.

After 1783 and the presentation of a Quaker petition to Parliament, a highly organized campaign for the immediate abolition of the slave trade gained strong public support. Until 1788, Buke seems to have maintained his preference for the comprehensive reforms over a long period that he had outlined in his Negro Code. In the parliamentary debates from 1788 to 1791, however, he openly sided with immediate abolition. Thereafter, evidently concerned by the extent to which abolition of the slave trade was coming to be identified with other radical reforms, which he deplored, and perhaps concerned at the prospect that revolutionary upheavals in the French West Indies would spread to the British islands, he reverted to being an advocate of gradual reform. He submitted his Code to ministers in 1792 and it was later taken up by those who were looking for an alternative to abolition. By then, the West Indies were taking a lower place than the threat of Revolutionary France in Burke’s calculations. In previous wars he had pressed for British resources to be sent to the West Indies. Now he regarded West Indian campaigns as a diversion from the European war. At the very end of his life, however, the resources of the West Indies helped to relieve his acute financial difficulties. He was awarded a crown pension on funds derived from West Indian duties.