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 baneful between classes that are nearest each other.

From the mixture of black blood and white blood arose a new class, designated men of colour. On the part of the planters, passion and lust were subject to no outward restraint, and rarely owned any strong inward control. African women sometimes possess seductive attractions. If in any case these were employed to mitigate the penalties of servitude, the blame must chiefly be imputed to the degraded condition in which the system held them; and if when they had obtained power over their paramours, they, in pride and jealousy, inflicted on them humiliating punishments, they did but serve as effectual ministers of well-merited retribution. Content to live in a state of concubinage, the proprietors could not expect the peaceful and refining satisfactions of a home; and alas! only too readily took the consequences of their licentious course in imperious mistresses, and illegitimate offspring. But vice is its own avenger. 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 colour 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 colour 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 honourable professions and pursuits of private life. 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 colour 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 colour. 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 colour. 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 colour, labouring 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 colour. Haughty and disdainful towards the blacks, whom they despised, they were scornful 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

See note A at the end.

and social influence enough to make them formidable. By their alliance with their fathers they were tempted to seek for every thing 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 ascendancy of the negroes; and while they plotted against the former, were the open, bitter, and irreconcileable 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 colour, and five hundred thousand slaves. Thus the advantage of numbers and of physical strength was on the side of the oppressed.

CHAPTER IV.

Family, birth and education of Toussaint L'Ouverture-His promotions in servitude, his marriage; reads Raynal, and begins to think himself the providentially-appointed liberator of his oppressed brethren.

IN the midst of these conflicting passions and threatening disorders, there was a character quietly forming, which was to do more than all others, first to gain the mastery of them, and then to conduct them to issues of a favourable nature. This superior mind gathered its strength and matured its purposes in a class of Haytian society where least of all ordinary men would have looked for it. Who could suppose that the liberator of the slaves of Hayti, and the great type and pattern of negro excellence, existed and toiled in one of the despised gangs that pined away on the plantations of the island?

The appearance of a hero of negro blood was ardently to be wished, as affording the best proof of negro capability. By what other than a negro hand could it be expected that the blow would be struck which should show to the world that Africans could not only enjoy but gain personal and social freedom? To the more deep-sighted, the progress of events and the inevitable tendencies of society had darkly indicated the coming of a negro liberator. The presentiment found expression in the words of the philosophic Abbé Raynal, who, in some sort, predicted that a vindicator of negro wrongs would ere long arise out of the bosom of the negro race. That prediction had its fulfilment in Toussaint L'Ouverture.

Toussaint was a negro. We wish emphatically to mark the fact that he was wholly without white blood. Whatever he was, and whatever he did, he achieved all in virtue of qualities which in kind are common to the African race. Though of negro extraction, Toussaint, if we may believe family traditions, was not of common origin. His great grandfather is reported to have been an African king. Whatever position his ancestors

held, certain it is that Toussaint had in his soul higher qualities than noble or royal descent can guarantee.

The Arradas were a powerful tribe of negroes, eminent for mental resources, and of an indomitable will, who occupied a part of Western Africa. In a plundering expedition undertaken by a neighbouring tribe, a son of the chief of the Arradas was made captive. His name was Gaou-Guinou. Sold to slavedealers, he was conveyed to Hayti, and became the property of the Count de Breda, who owned a sugar manufactory some two miles from Cap François. More fortunate than most of his race in their servitude, he found among his fellow-slaves fellowcountrymen by whom he was recognised, and from whom he received tokens of the respect which they judged due to his rank. The Count de Breda was a humane man; as such he took care to entrust his slaves to none but humane superintendants. At the time the plantation of the Count de Breda was directed by M. Bayou de Libertas, a Frenchman of mild character, who, contrary to the general practice, studied his employer's interests without overloading his hands with immoderate labour.

Under him Gaou-Guinou was less unhappy than his companions in misfortune. It is not known that his master was aware of his superior position in his native country, but facts stated by Isaac, one of Toussaint L'Ouverture's sons, make the supposition not improbable. His grandfather, he reports, enjoyed full liberty on the states of his proprietor. He was also allowed to employ five slaves to cultivate a portion of land which had been assigned to him. He became a member of the Catholic Church, the religion of the rulers of Western Hayti, and married a woman who was not only virtuous but beautiful. The husband and the wife died nearly at the same time, leaving five male children and three female. The eldest of his sons was ToussaintL'Ouverture.

These particulars illustrative of the superiority of Toussaint's family, are neither without interest nor without importance. If, strictly speaking, virtues are not transmissible, virtuous tendencies, and certainly intellectual aptitudes, may pass from