Lea’s Reviews > The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World > Status Update

“Race was the basis for the system of chattel slavery that fueled the Atlantic economy. If it could not be imaginatively codified and its mechanism understood, manipulated, controlled, slavery was imperiled. Jefferson’s algebra was one of a range of symbolic strategies Americans deployed in response to racial anxieties magnified by the Haitian Revolution….fanciful reductions of a complex reality.”