1792: Approximately 200 emigré families from Saint-Domingue reached Philadelphia to escape the growing restlessness and violence in the French colony.

1792: Approximately 200 emigré families from Saint-Domingue reached Philadelphia to escape the growing restlessness and violence in the French colony. The arrival of these refugees provided North American residents with a visual and dramatic sense of the rebellion that printed accounts could not convey. During the same year, the Maryland legislature debated whether these new inhabitants would be allowed to keep the enslaved people they brought with them. By October, another group of colonists had established a modest settlement along the Clinch River in Virginia. This early wave of migration introduced the “contagion” of revolutionary ideas to the coastal cities of the United States.