Firmin was not anomalous among Haitian intellectuals of his era. His contemporaries wrote liberally about their country's place, each offering his own rationalization, each stating his own defence of Africa and Haiti. It bears reminding that these Haitian writers penned their works in the late nineteenth century. There was as yet no full sense of a pan-African agenda and the concept of black freedom was often detached from universal claims. Indeed many of his peers shared his views of black equality using Haiti's history as evidence, but did so to justify Haitian worthiness for Eurocentric civilization models. They often dissociated themselves from the Africa of their times, a respected motherland no matter how debased they regarded its culture. Hannibal Price's De la rehabilitation de la race noire par la république d'Haïti (On the Rehabilitation of the Black Race by the Republic of Haiti) made it a point to separate blacks in Africa and elsewhere in the diaspora from the conditions of Haiti (Nicholls, 1996, p. 129). With few exceptions, all of these writers denied African culture and its remnants in Haiti as having worth. On the contrary, Haitian culture added to the conditions that kept Haiti in a retrograde state. Haitian achievement demonstrated its preparedness for European civilization.  
Haiti's elite would work assiduously to continue the pattern of French colonists in eliminating Haiti's African heritage. As Haitian sociologist Jean Casimir has stated of the century after 1804,  
In the conception of the political elite the Haitian emerged from the victory of the slaves over their masters. In order for the country to participate in the international community, the Haitian State considered no alternative solution, but to expel Africa, Africans and all their daily life and culture from the history of the country (Casimir, 2000; Ramsey, 2011).