ART. II.-HAS FREEDOM IN HAYTI PROVED A FAILURE? HAYTI is the original Indian name of the most beautiful of the West India Islands. Its twenty-eight thousand square miles are charmingly variegated with lofty mountains and extensive plains, and the fertile soil clothes their surface with all the richness of tropical verdure. It has immense natural resources of every kind, and with its adjacent islands is capable of supporting a population of eight millions. We are informed by a Haytien historian* that at the time of its discovery by Columbus in 1492 its native Indian population amounted to three millions. The Spaniards, who claimed it as one of their colonies, finding gold in the country soon after their arrival, speedily reduced the native tribes to such labor as ultimately exhausted them. At the present day it is doubtful whether there is a solitary descendant of its numerous aboriginal inhabitants left upon the whole island. We are informed by the author already quoted, who has written very interestingly on the primitive races of Hayti, that they were divided into tribes and had a certain type of civilization, being by no means savages. But white men bearing the name of Christ have long since driven them into oblivion by mere lust of wealth and power. History assures us, however, that among the Spanish Roman Catholic priests who came over to Hayti soon after its discovery there were some who sincerely deplored a state of things which they had not the power to control. During the seventeenth century the French appeared in these regions, first settling as adventurers and buccaneers in the small island of La Tortue, which is about a league from the northern coast of the main island. The rapacity of the white man having exterminated the Indian races of this large island, all eyes were turned upon Africa. The slave-trade with all its horrors was soon in operation, and in 1737 there was an African slave population in St. Domingo, the French part of the island, of nearly six hundred thousand. *E. Nau. After a great many sanguinary struggles in a border warfare between the Spanish possessors of the island and the newlyarrived French, the two European governments of these nations finally came to an understanding with each other, and decided on a frontier line between them, which placed the French in possession of about one third of the island, the Spanish government still retaining the remainder. The African slave-trade and slavery prospered in St. Domingo for upward of a hundred years, and there were fearful deeds of savage brutality practiced with impunity under the shelter of slavery. It has generally been admitted that French slavery in St. Domingo was of no ordinary cruelty. Wealth was so rapidly wrung out of the labor of the masses by the land and slave-owners that it became at last a proverb among the French, "St. Dominique, c'est le paradis des Français." Even at the present day some idea may be formed of the great wealth of this French colony by the remains of ancient mansions still to be seen in the northern part of the island, and though they are in ruins, they fully indicate the pomp and grandeur of the days of bondage. In no age of the world, however, has injustice been persevered in with impunity. A day of reckoning in some shape has invariably formed the climax of every continuous violation of truth and right. In St. Domingo this retribution was brought on by the white planters themselves. Notwithstanding their own fancied superiority over the victims of their oppression, a numerous population of mixed blood appearing in the community proclaimed the vices of the whites. Certainly, if these masters really did believe their slaves to be anything less than human, they themselves upon their own principles must have been guilty of something much worse than ordinary immorality in the choice of such mothers for their children. These unhappy offspring were frequently not only cruelly treated, but also disowned by their own fathers and sold. In the French colony of St. Domingo, however, there were cases in which white fathers sent their children, born of their black slaves, to France for education; still the grand anomaly of prejudice against their own children on the subject of color would prevail on their return home, when education had made them in many cases superior to their own slave-owning fathers. Such was the power of this strange and unchristian hate of color that if any of these mulattoes should at any time presume to speak of equal rights with the white man the extreme penalty of the law might be the result. This was fearfully illustrated in the case of Ogé, of whom we have the following brief account from a Haytien historian.* He was the son of a white planter, and had received a good European education, and having on his return home demanded an equality with men who, many of them, were doubtless his inferiors, was for this tried and condemned at the bar of his country, in the name of justice, to suffer the penalty of death. On the day of execution, which was the 25th of February, 1791, this man, with another, was led before the Church, barefoot, bareheaded, and in their shirts, with cords round their necks, and bearing each one a lighted torch. In the center of the "Place d'Armes" was erected a scaffold sustaining two wheels, to which they were bound with their faces upward; and in this position their thighs, legs, arms, and loins were broken by blows from iron bars, nor did a murmur escape their lips. This was solemnly done in the name of law and right. The flames of discord were lighted in the name of peace, and who can wonder that so flagrant a deed should have stirred up the fiercer passions of our nature. It is, and ever will be, a humiliating fact, that what are called the "horrors of St. Domingo" originated not with the savage African, as has been frequently represented, but with the civilized white man, whose madness and folly, excused by the plea of rights and property, led him on to crime and cruelty rarely known in the annals of history. During the French Republic of the latter end of the last century slavery was abolished in all the French colonies. This at least was consistent, and may be regarded as a declaration of the French Republicans of that day to those on the opposite side of the Atlantic of the present, that true liberty and slavery cannot exist together, the very word liberty among slaves being an exceedingly dangerous thing. But the living property in human beings, although condemned by the French Republic, was not to be given up without a struggle. When the first Napoleon reached the throne he was soon surrounded by West Indian influence, The former slave-owners and their friends induced him to send * T. Madion. out an army of upward of twenty thousand men under his brother-in-law, General Le Clerc, to fight for the re-establishment of slavery, which had then been abolished for several years in the French West Indies. A more treacherous and degrading enterprise could scarcely be conceived. A noble army fighting for freedom one might understand; but a well-equipped, welltrained, brave and intelligent army leaving their homes for the sole purpose of reducing the free communities of the French West India Islands to slavery is surely one of the most flagrant crimes that was ever committed by any human government. The crime indeed succeeded at Martinique and Guadaloupe; and in these small communities the chains were refastened, and remained so until within the last few years under the present Napoleon. But by the perpetration of this deed in these smaller islands, the slave population of St. Domingo learned the fate preparing for them and determined to live or die free. The troops of Le Clerc landed, and the great and terrible struggle came on. The brave black general, Toussaint L'Ouverture, at the head of the black army of freedom, was treacherously taken by his enemies and thrown into a dungeon in France, where he ungenerously, and to the perpetual shame of a brave people, was left to perish of hunger and cold. Yet the righteous cause of liberty was in the end triumphant. It will be seen, therefore, that the great revolt of St. Domingo was not undertaken in order to abolish slavery; that had been done by the French Republican government. It was done to maintain a lawful and honorably acquired freedom. This is a fact which deserves special attention, the more particularly as the friends of slavery in the present day have by much misrepresentation induced the belief that the insurrection of St. Domingo was a mere wanton outbreak on the part of the slaves, and unprovoked on the part of the whites. But history has faithfully recorded the truth; and the guilt of the massacres of St. Domingo will rest upon the heads of the whites, who had basely stooped to the lowest order of treachery, and whose bones were left upon the field on which their crimes had been perpetrated. It is a striking fact that but few of Le Clerc's army ever returned to France. It is not at all intended to enter here into any of the details of those struggles which took place at St. Domingo. Suffice it to say for the present that the white inhabitants of that afflicted island having by their crimes involved their own and other interests in ruin, and drawn forth rivers of blood, thus filling up the measure of their iniquities, the black general, Dessalines, on the 1st of January, 1804, boldly, in defiance of France, declared the liberty and independence of Hayti. He had already led on its once enslaved people to victory in the maintenance of their lawful freedom, contending at different times with some thirty thousand Frenchmen. At the time of the declaration of independence the name of St. Domingo was abolished forever, as a name associated with the treachery and crime of white men, and the original name of Hayti was re-established. It has often been asserted that the liberation of thousands of slaves would be dangerous both to themselves and to others; and a pretended humanity has inquired, What would become of them if, in their entire unfitness for freedom, they should be immediately emancipated? From this query the inference is drawn that it is for their own benefit to keep them as they are. Yet it is an incontrovertible fact that the half million of slaves in Hayti knew well how to provide for themselves in their newly acquired liberty. They did it much better than their former masters had done it for them, and that too under circumstances of the greatest embarrassment. The colored Haytiens knew well, not only how to provide for their wants, but how, at the same time, like the Jews of old under Nehemiah, to defend their liberties against a powerful foe, of whom for a time they had the utmost to fear. The instinctive ability of the newly liberated slave to take care of himself was also strikingly illustrated in the British West Indies, where so many thousands of slaves were suddenly set free. The ancient Britons when given up by the Romans implored their former masters in mercy to come back again to their help; but such strange prayers were never uttered by these long enchained beings, who had been thought so utterly helpless. Nor did there seem to be even the slightest danger of revenge for the innumerable wrongs of the past from the newly liberated slaves. On the contrary, universal gratitude and thanks rose to heaven from all hearts, and the former slave-masters were perfectly shielded by the religious element which was thus developed around them. Experience |