"THE HORRORS OF ST. DOMINGO."

BY THE EDITOR.

THE caption of this article has passed into a sort of charm against all humane interference with what some of our fellow citizens are pleased to call "their peculiar species of property." We shall make it our business to analyze these magic words, and to discover, if possible, from what incantations they derived their spell-binding power.

There are few so sceptical as to doubt the existence of the two following facts, viz: first, that St. Domingo once teemed with an immense population of degraded slaves, sixteen times more numerous than their masters, and secondly, that the same island, under the name of Hayti, now contains a much larger population of freemen, under an organized and independent government, and who, according to their own account of the matter, have no desire to return to slavery. How the intervening "horrors" could have been conjured into an anti-liberty beacon, to scare men so proud of their own "blood-bought liberty" as our countrymen, is a mystery worthy of solution. Does the secret lie in that portentous monosyllable, black? This deepens the mystery. The more probable hypothesis is, that truth may have met with foul play, somewhere between the two facts above mentioned.

What have been the probabilities of our getting at the whole truth in regard to St. Domingo, for the last forty seven years? Singularly small and disadvantageous to the cause of Haytian liberty. 1. The triumphing of slaves could expect little sympathy from slaveholders, or their abet

We as a nation, by color and practice, were on the side of the defeated. Our planters sympathized with the planters of St. Domingo; and by interest as well as sympathy were impelled to forestall public opinion by the most favorable representation of their case. 2. Many whites, driven from St. Domingo, told us their own story with none to call it in question, and this too over the wine cups of open-hearted hospitality, in a land where the parties of the other part, had they been present, would have had to sit at the second table. 3. The language of the Haytians being foreign to us, the English stepped in as our interpreters. They wrote

the histories which alone stand on the shelves of our libraries; and wrote them with even stronger motives to justify the whites and condemn the blacks, than our own slaveholders could have had.

Bryan Edwards, the historian of the West Indies, accompanied an armament which sailed from Jamaica to Cape François in September, 1791, for the purpose of putting down a revolt of the negroes who were said to have risen to the number of 100,000. He gathered his information from the terrified planters, and put forth his "Historical survey, &c. comprehending a narrative of the calamities which have desolated the country ever since the year 1789, with some reflections on their causes and probable consequences, &c." in 1797, while a British army was yet in St. Domingo striving to reinstate the planters in their arcient "property." His elegance as a writer, is not more conspicuous than his enmity towards such friends of freedom as Sharp, Clarkson and Wilberforce, whom he does not scruple to characterize as "fanatics," and mad "exciters of rebellion." Another line will make the portrait of this historian sufficiently complete for the American reader. He thus calumniates the good Lafayette. "This man had formerly been possessed of a plantation at Cayenne, with seventy negro slaves thereon, which he had sold without any scruple or stipulation concerning the situation of the negroes, the latter end of 1789, and from that time enrolled himself among the friends of the blacks." To this blind or wilful mangler of truth, more perhaps than to any other source, does our country owe its impressions of the "horrors of St. Domingo." With a callous heart and graphic pen he dwells on the atrocities of the revolted slaves till humanity is in aguechills. Yet it is by his philosophy, and not his facts, that he attempts to make out a case against the slave, and the friends of the slave. Nay, on the ground of the very facts which came most immediately under his observation, the

History of St. Domingo, p. 85.

+History of St. Domingo, p. 62.—It is well known that Lafayette purchased a plantation at Cayenne for the express purpose of proving by experiment the prac ticability of colonial cultivation by free labor. The negroes whom he purchased and employed, were never sold by him, but unhappily they were sold contrary to his will, when his estates were confiscated by the French National Assembly. This took place however in 1792, not 1789.-See Recollections of the private life of Lafayette, by M. Cloquet, vol. 1, p. 150.

conclusions which he labors to establish may be easily overthrown. The same thing is true of Consul General McKenzie, James Franklin and the rest of the humble copyists, imitators and successors of Bryan Edwards.

The horrors of St. Domingo may be thus classified: 1. The horrors of insurrection. 2. The horrors of emancipation. 3. The horrors of the Code Rurale. 4. The hor rors of idleness. 5. The horrors of desolation.

I. THE HORRORS OF INSURRECTION,

We have no disposition to deny or palliate the bloody and unnatural atrocities perpetrated by either party in the protracted wars of St. Domingo. Human nature ought to recoil from them with horror and disgust. But when these horrors are imputed to a wrong cause; when they are hung up as a warning over the calm sea of humanity and fellow feeling, and not over the rocks and shoals and whirlpools of despotism, it is time to lift up a note of remonstrance.

The main object of Edwards' book is, to show that the insurrection in St. Domingo was caused by a set of men who held and promulgated the doctrine that "all men are born and continue free and equal as to their RIGHTS." He holds up the insurrection as the fruit of that doctrine; and he puts forth his history as a complete refutation of it.

If it be true that the advocates of equal rights instigated the oppressed to vindicate their claims by violence and blood, it was their error and their sin. We do not seek to justify such conduct. But the truth of the charge against the Amis des noirs, or friends of the blacks, is far from being proved by Bryan Edwards, while another cause is proved, which is of itself abundantly sufficient to account for the facts, We mean the oppressive and hypocritical conduct of the whites. There were in the French part of St. Domingo in 1789 not less than 480,000 slaves. They were treated, according to Edwards, neither much better nor much worse than those of Great Britain. This treatment he supposes to have been mild and just. But what sort of mildness and justice it was, may be gathered from the following admissions in regard to slavery in general. After stating that the slaves of St. Domingo could not avail themselves of what he calls the "tenderness and philanthropy of the Code

Noir," he adds, "In countries where slavery is established, the leading principle on which government is established is FEAR; or a sense of that absolute coercive necessity, which having no choice of action, supersedes all question of RIGHT. It is in vain to deny that such actually is, and necessarily must be, the case in all countries where slavery is allowed. Every endeavor therefore to extend positive rights to men in this state, as between one class of people and the other, is an attempt to reconcile inherent contradictions, and to blend principles together which admit of no combination." The treatment that was received from these masters who thus ruled by fear, would of course depend much upon their character. They were avaricious. Says Edwards, in his preface, "Let me not be understood, however, as affirming that nothing is to be attributed on this. occasion to the slave trade. I scorn to have recourse to concealment or falsehood. Unquestionably the vast annual importations of enslaved Africans into St. Domingo, for many years previous to 1791, had created a black population in the French part of that island, which was, beyond all measure, disproportionate to the white;-the relative numbers of the two classes being as sixteen to one.' p. xxii. They were licentious. To a population of 30,000 whites, there were 24,000 mulattoes. The following picture shows a baseness of tyranny which has no parallel, except perhaps in our own country. Edwards says of the mulattoes, "In many respects, their situation was even more degrading and wretched than that of the enslaved negroes in any part of the West Indies; all of whom have masters that are interested in their preservation, and many of whom find in those masters powerful friends and vigilant protectors. Although released from the dominion of individuals, yet the free men of color in all the French islands were still considered as the property of the public, and as public property they

"In 96 years, ending in 1774, 800,000 slaves had been imported into the French part of St. Domingo, of which there remained only 290,000 in 1774. Of this last number only 140,000 were Creoles, or natives of the island, i. e. of 650,000 slaves the whole posterity were 140,000. Considerations sur la Colonie de St. Domingue, published by authority in 1777." Quoted from Clarkson's "Slavery and com. merce of the Human Species." p. 156.-At this rate, with what infernal rapacity must the slave trade have been driven, nearly to double the slaves in the next 19 years! Edwards himself states the number imported in 1788 to have heen 29,506, in 98 vessels, i. e. 301 to each vessel! Of these slaves 15,674 were men, 7,040 women, 4,245 boys, and 2,547 girls! p. 208.