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CHAPTER III.

        The diverse elements of the population of Hayti--The blacks, the whites, the mulattoes; immorality and servitude.

        THE large black population of Hayti was of African origin. Stolen from their native land, they were transplanted in the island to become beasts of burden. The slave-trade was then at its height. Nations and individuals who stood at the head of the civilized world, and prided themselves in the name of Christian, were not ashamed to traffic in the bodies and souls of their fellow-men. Three hundred vessels, employed every year in that detestable traffic, spread robbery, conflagration, and carnage over the coasts and the lands of Africa. Eighty thousand men, women, and children, torn from their homes, were loaded with chains, and thrown into the holds of ships, a prey to desolation and despair. In vain had the laws and usages of Africa, less unjust than those of Christian countries, forbidden the sale of men born in slavery, permitting the outrage only in the case of persons taken in war, or such as had lost their liberty by death or crime. Cupidity created an ever-growing demand; the price of human flesh rose in the market; the required supply followed. The African princes, smitten with the love of lucre, disregarded the established limitations, and for their own bad purposes multiplied the causes which entailed the loss of liberty. Proceeding from a less to a greater wrong, they undertook wars expressly for the purpose of gaining captives for the slave mart; and when still the demand went on increasing, they became wholesale robbers of men, and seized a village, or scoured a district. From the coasts the devastation spread into the interior. A regularly organized system came into operation, which constantly sent to the sea-shore thousands of innocent

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and unfortunate creatures to whom death would have been a happy lot. In the year 1778, not fewer than one hundred thousand of its black inhabitants were forcibly and cruelly carried away from Africa.
        Driven on board the ships which waited their arrival, these poor wretches, who had been accustomed to live in freedom, and roam at large, were thrust into a space scarcely large enough to receive their coffin. If a storm arose, the ports were closed as a measure of safety. The precaution shut out light and air. Then, who can say what torments the negroes underwent? Thousands perished by suffocation,--happily, even at the cost of life, delivered from their frightful agonies. Death, however, brought loss to their masters, and therefore it was warded off, when possible, by inflictions, which, in stimulating the frame, kept the vital energy in action. And when it was found that grief and degradation proved almost as deadly as bad air, and no air at all, the victims were forced to dance, and were insulted with music. If, on the ceasing of the tempest and the temporary disappearance of the plague, things resumed their ordinary course, lust and brutality outraged mothers and daughters unscrupulously, preferring as victims the young and innocent. When any were overcome by incurable disease, they were thrown into the ocean while yet alive, as worthless and unsalable articles. In shipwreck, the living cargo of human beings was ruthlessly abandoned. Fifteen thousand, it has been calculated,--fifteen thousand corpses every year scattered in the ocean, the greater part of which were thrown on the shores of the two hemispheres, marked the bloody and deadly track of the hateful slave-trade.
        Hayti every year opened its markets to twenty thousand slaves. A degradation awaited them on the threshold of servitude. With a burning-iron they stamped on the breast of each slave, women as well as men, the name of their master, and that of the plantation where they were to toil. There the new-comer found everything strange,--the skies, the country, the language, the labor, the mode of life, the visage of his master,--all

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was strange. Taking their place among their companions in misfortune, they heard them speak only of what they endured, and saw the marks of the punishments they had received. Among the "old hands," few had reached advanced years; and of the new ones, many died of grief. The high spirit of the men was bowed down. For the two first years the women were not seldom struck with sterility. In earlier times, the proprietors had not wanted humanity; but riches had corrupted their hearts now; and giving themselves up to ease and voluptuousness, they thought of their slaves only as sources of income, whence the utmost was to be drawn.
        The evils consequent on slavery are not lessened by the incoming of one or two stray rays of light. If the slave becomes conscious of his condition, and aware of the injustice under which he suffers, if he obtains but a faint idea of these things; and if the master learns that a desire for liberty has arisen in the slave's mind, or that free men are asserting anti-slavery doctrines, then a new element of evil is added to those which before were only too powerful. Hope on one side, and distrust and fear on the other, create uneasiness and disturbance, which may end in commotion, convulsion, cruelty, and blood. In the agitation of the public mind of the world, which preceded the first French Revolution, such feelings could not be excluded from any community on earth. They entered the plantations of Hayti, and they aided in preparing the terrific struggle, which, through alarm, agitation, and slaughter, issued in the independence of the island.
        The white population was made up of diverse, and in a measure conflicting elements. There were first, the colonists or planters. Of these, some lived in the colony, others lived in France. The former, either by themselves or by means of stewards, superintended the plantations, and consumed the produce in sensual gratifications; the latter, deriving immense revenues directly or indirectly from their colonial estates, squandered their princely fortunes in the pleasures and vices of the less moral society of Paris. Possessed of opulence, these men generally

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were agitated with ambition, and sought office and titles as the only good things on earth left them to pursue. If debarred from entering the ranks of the French nobility, they could aspire to official distinction in Hayti, and in reality held the government of the colony very much in their own hands, partly in virtue of their property, partly in virtue of their influence with the French court.
        There were other men of European origin in the island. Some were servants of the Government; others members of the army; both lived estranged from the population which they combined to oppress. Below these were les petits blancs (the small whites), men of inferior station, who conducted various kinds of business in the towns, and who, despised by white men more elevated in station, repaid themselves by contemning the black population, on the sweat of whose brows they depended for a livelihood. Contempt is always most intense and baleful between classes that are nearest each other.
        From the mixture of black blood and white blood arose a new class, designated men of color. On the part of the planters, passion and lust were subject to no outward restraint, and rarely owned any strong inward control. From the blood sprung from this mixed and impure source came the chief cause of the troubles and ruin of the planters.
        Some of the men of color were proprietors of rich possessions; but neither their wealth, nor the virtues by which they had acquired it, could procure for them social estimation. Their prosperity excited the envy of the whites in the lower classes. Though emancipated by law from the domination of individuals, the free men of color were considered as a sort of public property, and, as such, were exposed to the caprices of all the whites. Even before the law they stood on unequal ground. At the age of thirty, they were compelled to serve three years in a militia instituted against the Maroon negroes; they were subject to a special impost for the reparation of the roads; they were expressly shut out from all public offices, and from the more honorable professions and pursuits of private life.

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When they arrived at the gate of a city, they were required to alight from their horse; they were disqualified for sitting at a white man's table, for frequenting the same school, for occupying the same place at church, for having the same name, for being interred in the same cemetery, for receiving the succession of his property. Thus the son was unable to take his food at his father's board, kneel beside his father in his devotions, bear his father's name, lie in his father's tomb, succeed to his father's property,--to such an extent were the rights and affections of nature reversed and confounded. The disqualification pursued its victims until during six consecutive generations the white blood had become purified from its original stain.
        Among the men of color existed every various shade. Some had as fair a complexion as ordinary Europeans; with others, the hue was nearly as sable as that of the pure negro blood. The mulatto, offspring of a white man and a negress, formed the first degree of color. The child of a white man by a mulatto woman was called a quarteroon,--the second degree; from a white father and a quarteroon mother was born the male tierceroon,--the third degree; the union of a white man with a female tierceroon produced the metif,--the fourth degree of color. The remaining varieties, if named, are barely distinguishable.
        Lamentable is it to think that the troubles we are about to describe, and which might be designated the war of the skin, should have flowed from diversities so slight, variable, evanescent, and every way so inconsiderable. It would almost seem as if human passions only needed an excuse, and as if the slightest excuse would serve as a pretext and a cover for their riotous excesses.
        On their side, the men of color, laboring under the sense of their personal and social injuries, tolerated, if they did not encourage in themselves, low and vindictive passions. Their pride of blood was the more intense the less they possessed of the coveted and privileged color. Haughty and disdainful toward the blacks, whom they despised, they were scornful

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toward the petits blancs, whom they hated, and jealous and turbulent toward the planters, whom they feared. With blood white enough to make them hopeful and aspiring, they possessed riches and social influence enough to make them formidable. By their alliance with their fathers they were tempted to seek for everything which was denied them in consequence of the hue and condition of their mothers. The mulattoes, therefore, were a hot-bed of dissatisfaction, and a furnace of turbulence. Aware by their education of the new ideas which were fermenting in Europe and in the United States, they were also ever on the watch to seize opportunities to avenge their wrongs, and to turn every incident to account for improving their social condition. Unable to endure the dominion of their white parents, they were indignant at the bare thought of the ascendency of the negroes; and while they plotted against the former, were the open, bitter, and irreconcilable foes of the latter. If the planters repelled the claims of the negroes' friends, least of all could emancipation be obtained by or with the aid of the mulattoes.
        Such in general was the condition of society in Hayti, when the first movements of the great conflict began. On that land of servitude there were on all sides masters living in pleasure and luxury, women skilled in the arts of seduction, children abandoned by their fathers, or becoming their cruellest enemies, slaves, worn down by toil, sorrow, and regrets, or lacerated and mangled by punishments. Suicide, abortion, poisoning, revolts, and conflagration--all the vices and crimes which slavery engenders--became more and more frequent. Thirty slaves freed themselves together from their wretchedness the same day and the same hour; meanwhile, thirty thousand whites, freemen, lived in the midst of twenty thousand emancipated men of color and five hundred thousand slaves. Thus the advantage of numbers and of physical strength was on the side of the oppressed.