the decree of the national assembly of the 28th of March, which gives without distinction, to every free citizen the right of being admitted to all duties and functions whatever. My pretensions are just; and I hope you will regard them. I shall not have recourse to any raising of the slave gangs; it is not necessary, and would be unworthy of me. I wish you to appreciate duly the purity of my intentions. When I solicited of the national assembly the decree I obtained, in favor of our American colonists, known under the hitherto injurious distinction of the mixed race, I never comprehended in my claims the negroes in a state of slavery. You and our adversaries have mixed this with my proceedings, to destroy my estimation in the minds of well disposed people; but, I have demanded only concessions for a class of freemen, who have endured the yoke of your oppression for two centuries. We have no wish but the execution of the decree of the 28th of March: we insist on its promulgation; and we cease not to repeat to our friends, that our adversaries are not merely unjust to us, but to themselves; for they do not seem to know that their interests are one with ours. Before employing the means at my command, I will see what good temper will do, but if, contrary to my object, you refuse what is asked, I will not answer for those disorders, which may arise from merited revenge."

The result has been already stated. The barbarous execution of Ogé and his companions consecrated them as the martyrs of their cause.

"This act of Ogé," says the author of the notes referred to, was a mere deed of daring. There was no organized conspiracy-no scheme of revolt concocted by influential friends in Europe-no preparation for a conflict in arms. He came heated from the adventures of menacing mobs at Paris, where he had seen the monarch and the aristocracy prostrate in the dust with the people. His object was to profit by the panic which filled all men's minds. To make an appeal to their reason was useless; or, as he himself sneeringly expresses it in a letter to M. de Vincent, Who ever consulted the nobles and the clergy to redress the thousand and one abuses which existed in France?' In this single remark, we have the clear revelation of all his impulses."

The reader will not fail to peceive the bearing of these

statements upon the credibility of Bryan Edwards. The latter took his facts from the white planters of St. Domingo,* and his philosophy from the British West India Committee.

The spark that occasioned the dreadful explosion was struck out by the planters themselves. When they broke Vincent Ogé and Chavannes on the wheel, and gibbeted twenty of their followers, they taught the slaves a lesson, which in less than six months they showed themselves to have well learned by sticking upon poles along the road-side in this very spot 300 heads of their teachers.

Here let it be remarked, that the horrors of this insurrection took their type from the sanguinary character of the oppression. The death of Ogé was not the only lesson. Edwards himself details outrages committed by the whites before the massacre of 1791, which threw the rebellious negroes far in the shade-or rather in the sun-shine. One of them especially, was so shockingly indecent that he veils it in a learned tongue. p. 57. Neither were the blacks alone in their barbarity after they had commenced their bloody work. Thewhites out did them in horrors, while those horrors do not seem to have been relieved, as we are assured by Edwards those perpetrated by the blacks were, by instances of compassion and pardon. Two of the insurgents were broken alive under our author's own windows, while he was at the Cape. Of one he says, "when the executioner after breaking his legs and arms, lifted up the instrument to give the finishing stroke on the breast, and which (by putting the criminal out of pain) is called le coup de grace, the mob, with the ferociousness of cannibals called out, arretéz! [stop,] and compelled him to leave his work unfinished. In that condition the miserable wretch, with his broken limbs doubled up, was put on a cart wheel, which was placed horizontally, one end of the axletree being driven. into the earth. He seemed perfectly sensible, but uttered not a groan. At the end of forty minutes, some English seamen, who were spectators of the tragedy, strangled him

Edwards relies so implicitly upon the planters for his information, that he swallows the pretended confession of James Oge on the strength of a mere copy transmitted to him at London, in 1795, by a planter who sought to attach the colony to the British. Edwards himself was at the Cape at the very time when the "s cret" was brought out by the colonial assembly Why did he not examine the original? He also mistakes James the accessary, for Vincent the principal.

in mercy. As to all the French spectators (many of whom were persons of fashion, who beheld the scene from the windows of their upper apartments, it grieves me to say, that they looked on with the most perfect composure and sang froid. Some of the ladies, I was told, even ridiculed with a great deal of unseemly mirth, the sympathy manifested by the English at the sufferings of the wretched criminals." p. 78. This was done by men professing to be enlightened christians! Yet these are the men who have had our sympathy, while the character of their poor victims has been branded with all the "horrors of insurrection."

It would be easy, on this topic, to multiply indefinitely facts which show that the negroes of St. Domingo had been for ages in a school of horrors. We will confine ourselves however to a single anecdote which is perfectly and painfully characteristic of the system under which in our own country as well as in St. Domingo, human beings are trained up for the "horrors of insurrection." An American lady who was in St. Domingo in 1802-3 attached to the army of General Le Clerc, thus speaks of the state of society there before the revolution.*

"I have become acquainted with some Creole ladies who, having staid in the island during the revolution, relate their sufferings in a manner that harrows up the soul; and dwell on the recollection of their long lost happiness with melancholy delight. St. Domingo was formerly a garden. Every inhabitant lived on his estate like a sovereign ruling his slaves with despotic sway, enjoying all that luxury could invent, or fortune procure.

"The pleasures of the table were carried to the last degree of refinement. Gaming knew no bounds, and libertinism, called love, was without restraint. The Creole is generous, hospitable, magnificent, but vain, inconstant, and incapable of serious application; and in this abode of pleasure and luxurious ease, vices have reigned at which humanity must shudder. The jealousy of the women was often ter

"Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo in a series of letters, written by a Lady at Cape François, to Colonel Burr, late Vice Pr sident of the United States." Philadelphia, 1803. This work of a sadly mised cated female. is chiefly occupied with the love affairs of her sister, the wife of a French officer The writer, however, in the simplicity of her prejudice, exposes so many facis, that her book might well enough have been entitled, The Secret of the Horrors of St. Domingo.

rible in its consequences. One lady who had a beautiful negro girl continually about her person, thought she saw some symptoms of tendresse in the eyes of her husband, and all the fires of jealousy seized her soul.

"She ordered one of her slaves to cut off the head of the unfortunate victim, which was instantly done. At dinner her husband said he felt no disposition to eat, to which his wife with the air of a demon, replied, perhaps I can give you something that will excite your appetite; it has at least had that effect before. She rose and drew from a closet the head of Coomba. The husband shocked beyond expression, left the house and sailed immediately for France, in order never again to behold such a monster."

If the abominable tyranny of the white planters was abundantly sufficient to excite their victims to insurrection, their perfidy was no less so to keep them in that state. The mulattoes, many of them being slaveholders themselves, were naturally inclined to take part against the revolted slaves, and in some instances they did so. But many of them, seeing the insurrection successful, reluctantly adopted it as the means of obtaining their own ends. In the western or rather central part of the colony, they appeared with the revolted slaves in great force against Port au Prince. The whites soon came to terms. On the 11th of September, the concordat, already referred to, was signed, by which the planters of Port au Prince granted to the mulattoes all that was claimed by Ogé, and declared the punishment of that chief an execrable crime, and the cause of all the misfortunes which for the last 19 days had desolated the plains and the mountains of the north! This instrument was ratified by the colonial assembly on the 20th of the same month, that body now declaring that it would no longer oppose the decree of the 15th May, in favor of the mulattoes. These were the same men who sixteen months before declared they "would rather die than divide their political rights with a bastard and degenerate race" (a race of their own begetting!) "These concessions, at an earlier period," says Edwards, "would have operated with powerful effect in the salvation of the colony; but they now came too late, and produced only a partial truce, a temporary and fallacious cessation of miseries,"-a remark worthy of all remembrance-a lack of just, equal and

timely concessions, was truly the cause of all the horrors of St. Domingo; but in this instance the fault was not that the concession came too late; it was made in bad faith. Its only object was to disarm the mulattoes till their humble allies, the negroes, could be conquered, and then, as the result proved, it was to be taken back. At the very time when the whites and mulattoes in St. Domingo, were signing their concordat, the ill-starred national assembly, in France, was rescinding its decree of the 15th of May! No sooner had this act been confirmed to the colonial assembly at Cape François, by the arrival of commissioners to keep the peace, than in contravention of the will of those commissioners, they issued an order for "disarming the whole colored population-a population which, by the testimony of cotemporary writers, had, from the moment that their just rights were acquiesced in by the colonists, fought against the rebel slaves with all the zeal that the interests of property could inspire." This threw the mulattoes at once into a coalition with the insurgent slaves, who were before that occurrence fast dwindling away. Concession to both classes, even at the eleventh hour, would have put an end to the "horrors;" but the whites preferred their continuance to a loss of their unjust power.

Edwards dwells upon the diabolical cruelties that now occurred on both sides, with a minuteness of detail scarcely less atrocious than the spirit in which they were perpetrated. After describing the barbarous outrages of the mulattoes upon the family of a M. Sejourné, near Jeremie, he exclaims, "Such are thy triumphs, philanthropy !" On the very next page he gives the letter of the Abbe Gregoire, the grand ring-leader of the "exciters of this rebellion," the man who had stirred up the mulattoes to wade through all this blood. And what is the language of this blood-thirsty man to these very mulattoes? He says, "Doubtless you will be permitted to shed tears over the ashes of Ferrand de Beaudiere, and the unfortunate Ogé, assassinated under the forms of law, and dying on the wheel for having wished to be free! But may he among you perish, who shall dare to entertain an idea of revenge against your persecutors! They are already delivered over to the stings of their own

Notes on St. Domingo.