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PREFACE

        THE life which is described in the following pages has both a permanent interest and a permanent value. But the efforts which are now made to effect the abolition of slavery in the United Sates of America, seem to render the present moment specially fit for the appearance of a memoir of TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE. A hope of affording some aid to the sacred cause of freedom, specially as involved in the extinction of slavery, and in the removal of prejudices on which servitude mainly depends, has induced the author to prepare the present work for the press. If apology for such a publication were required, it might be found in the fact that no detailed life of TOUISSAINT L'OVERTURE is accessible to the English reader, for the only memoir of him which exists in our language has long been out of print.

        The sources of information on this subject are found chiefly in the French language. To several of these the author acknowledges deep obligation.

        The tone taken on the subject of negro freedom in Hayti, by

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recent writers in two French reviews, is partial and unjust. Possibly this may be attributable to a mulatto pen. The blacks have no authors; their cause, consequently, has not yet been pleaded. In the authorities we possess on the subject, either French or mulatto interests, for the most part, predominate. Specially predominant are mulatto interests and prejudices, in the recently published Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, by SAINT REMY, a mulatto: this writer obviously values his caste more than his country or his kind.

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CONTENTS

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustration

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THE LIFE
of
TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE.

BOOK I.

FROM THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY
IN HAYTI TO THE FULL ESTABLISHMENT OF TOUSSAINT
L'OUVERTURE'S POWER.

CHAPTER I.

Description of Hayti--its name, mountains, rivers climate, productions, and chief cities and towns.

        I AM about to sketch the history and character of one of those extraordinary men, whom Providence, from time to time, raises up for the accomplishment of great, benign, and far-reaching results. I am about to supply the clearest evidence that there is no insuperable barrier between the light and the dark-coloured tribes of our common human species. I am about to exhibit, in a series of indisputable facts, a proof that the much misunderstood and downtrodden negro race are capable of the loftiest virtues, and the most heroic efforts. I am about to present a tacit parallel between white men and dark men, in which the latter will appear to no disadvantage. Neither eulogy, however, nor disparagement is my aim, but the simple love of justice. It is a history--not an argument--that I purpose to set forth. In prosecuting the narrative, I shall have to conduct the reader through scenes of aggression, resistance, outrage, revenge, bloodshed, and cruelty, that grieve and wound the hear, and exciting the deepest pity for

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the sufferers, raise irrepressible indignation against ambition, injustice and tyranny--the scourges of the world, and specially the sources of complicated and horrible calamities to the natives of Africa.

        The western portion of the North Atlantic Ocean is separated from the Caribbean Sea on the south, and the Gulf of Mexico on the north, by a succession of islands which, under the name of the West India Isles, seem to unite in a broken and waving line, the two great peninsulas of South and North America. Of these islands, which, under the general title of the Antilles, are divided into several groups, the largest and the most important are, Porto Rico on the east, Cuba on the west, and St. Domingo between the two, with Jamaica laying on the western extremity of the latter. Situated between the seventeenth and twentieth degree of north latitude, Saint Domingo stretches from east to west about 390 miles, with and average breadth, form north to south, of 100 miles, and comprises about 29,000 square miles, or 18,816,000 square acres;--being four times as large as Jamaica, and nearly equal in extent to Ireland. Its original name, and that by which it is now generally known, Hayti--which, in the Caribbean tongue, signifies a land of mountains--is truly descriptive of its surface and general appearance. From a ventral point, which near the middle of the island rises to the height of some 6,000 feet above the level of the sea, branches, having parallel ranges on the north and on the south, run through the whole length of the island,-- giving it somewhat the shape and aspect of a huge tortoise. The mountain ridges for the most part extend to the sea, above which they stand in lofty precipices, forming numerous headlands and promontories; or, retiring before the ocean, give place to ample and commodious bays. Of these bays and harbours, three deserve mention; not only for their extraordinary natural capabilities, but for the frequency with which two of them, at least, will appear in these pages. On the north-west of Hayti, is the Bay of Samana, with its deep recesses and curving shores, terminating in Cape Samana on the north, and Cape Raphail on the south. At the opposite end of the country, is the magnificent

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harbour called the Bay Port au Prince, enclosing the long and rocky isle Gonave--on the north of which is the channel St. Marc, and on the south the channel Gonave. Important as is the part which this harbour sustains in the history of the land, scarcely, if at all less important, is the bay which has Cape François for its western point, and Grange for its eastern, comprising on the latter side the minor, but well-sheltered Bay of Mancenille; and in the former, the large roadstead of Cape François.

        The mountains running east and west break asunder, and sink down, so as to form three spacious valleys, which are watered by the three principal rivers. The River Youna, having its sources in Mount La Vega, in the north-east of the island, and receiving many tributaries from the north and the south, issues in the Bay of Samana. The Grand Yaque, rising on the western side of the Watershed--of which La Vega may be considered as the dividing line,--flows through the lengthened plain of St. Jago, until it reaches the sea in the Bay of Mancenille. The chief river is the Artibonite, on the west, which, having its ultimate springs in the central group of mountains, waters the valleys of St. Thomas, of Banica, of Goave; and turning suddenly to the north, along the western side of the mountains of Cahos, falls into the ocean a little south of the Bay of Gonaives, after a long and winding course. While these rivers run from east to west and west to east, innumerable streams flow in a northern and southern direction, proceeding at right angles from the branches of the great trunk. Hayti is a well-watered land; especially is it so in the west, where several lakes and tarns adorn and enrich the country. The more eastern districts are rugged as well as lofty, but the other parts are beautifully diversified with romantic glens, prolific vales, and rank savannahs. Though so mountainous, the surface is overspread with vegetation, the highest summits being crowned with forests. Placed with the tropics, Hayti has a hot yet humid climate, with a temperature of very great variations--so that while in the deep valleys the sun is almost intolerable, on the loftiest mountains of the interior, a

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fire is often necessary to comfort. The ardour of the sun is on the coast moderated by the sea and land breezes, which blow in succession. Heavy rains fall in the months of May and June. Hurricanes are less frequent in Hayti than the rest of the Antilles. The climate, however, is liable to great and sudden changes, which bringing storm, tempest, and sunshine, with the intensity of tropical lands, now alarm and now enervate the natives, and often prove very injurious to Europeans. On so rich a soil human life is easily supported, and the inducements to the labours of industry are neither numerous nor strong. Yet, in auspicious periods of its history, Hayti has been made abundantly productive.

        At the time when the hero and patriot whose career we have to describe first appeared on the scene, the island was divided between two European powers; the east was possessed by the Spaniards, the west and south by the French. It is with the latter portion that this history is mostly concerned. Of the Spanish possessions, therefore, it may suffice to direct attention to two principal cities. The oldest European city is Santo Domingo, which had the honour of giving a name to the whole island. It was founded by Bartholomew, the brother of Columbus, who is said to have so called it in honour of his father, who bore that name. Santo Domingo stands in the south-eastern part of the island, at the north of the River Ozama. Santiago holds a fine position in the plain of that name, near the northern end of a line passing somewhere about the middle of the island. The French colony was divided into three provinces--that of the north, that of the west, and that of the south. At the beginning of the French Revolution of 1789, these provinces were transformed into three corresponding departments. The three provinces, or departments, were subdivided into twelve districts, each bearing the name of its chief city. The twelve districts were--in the north, the Cape, or Cap François, Fort Dauphin, Port-de-Paix, Môle Saint Nicholas; in the west, Port-au-Prince, Leogane, Saint Marc, Petit Goave; and in the south, Jérémie, Cape Tiburon, Cayes and St., Louis. The district of the Cape

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comprised the Cape, La Plaine-du-Nord, just above the Cape, Limonade, between the two; Acul, west of the Cape, and on the coast, Sainte Suzanne; with Morin, La Grande Rivière, Dondon, Marmelade, Limbé, Port Margot, Plaisance, and Borgne--thirteen parishes. The district Fort Dauphin, in the east of the northern department, comprised Fort Dauphin itself, Ouanaminthe, on the South of it, Vallière, Terrier Rouge, and Trou--five parishes. The district of the Port-de-Paix comprised, Port-de-Paix, Petit-Saint-Louis, Jean Rabel, and Gros Morne--four parishes. The district of the Mole Saint Nicholas comprised Saint Nicholas and Bombarde, two parishes. There were thus four-and-twenty parishes in the northern department. The district Port-au-Prince comprised, Port-au-Prince, Croix-des-Bosquets, on the north, Arcahaye on the north-west, and Mirebalais on the north-east --four parishes. The district of Léogane was identical with the parish of the same name. The district of Saint Marc comprised, Saint Marc, Petite Rivière, Gonaives--three parishes. The district of Petit-Goave comprised Petit Goave, Grand Goave, Baynet, Jacmel, and Cayes-Jacmel--five parishes. Fourteen parishes made up the western province. The district Jérémie comprised Jérémie and Cap Dame-Marie--two parishes. The district of Tiburon comprised Cape Tiburon and Coteaux--two parishes. The district of Cayes comprised Cayes and Torbeck --two parishes. The district of Saint Louis comprised, Saint Louis, Anse-Veau, Fond-Cavaillon and Acquin--five parishes. There were eleven parishes in the south.

        The study of the map will show that these, the districts under the dominion of France, covered only the west of the island. As, however, they contained the chief centres of civilization, and the

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chief places which occur in this history, our end is answered by the geographical details now given.

        The appearance of the island from the ocean is thus described by an eye-witness:--"The bold outlines of the mountains, which in many places approached to within twenty miles of the shore, and the numerous stupendous cliffs which beetled over it, casting their shadows to a great distance in the deep,--the dark retreating bays, particularly that of Samana, and extensive plains opening inland between the lofty cloud-covered hills, or running for uncounted leagues by the sea side, covered with trees and bushes, but affording no glimpse of a human habitation,--presented a picture of gloom and grandeur, calculated deeply to impress the mind; such a picture as dense solitude, unenlivened by a single trace of civilization, is ever apt to produce. Where, we inquire of ourselves, are the people of this country? Where its cultivation? Are the ancient Indian possessors of the soil all extinct, and their cruel conquerors and successors entombed with them in a common grave? For hundreds of miles, as we swept along its shores, we saw no living thing, but now and then a mariner in a solitary skiff, or birds of the land and ocean sailing in the air, as if to show us that nature had not wholly lost its animation, and sunk into the sleep of death."*


*"Brief Notes on Hayti," by John Candler. London, 1842.

        The interior of Hayti, however, lacks neither inhabitants nor natural beauty. The mountains rise in bold and varying outline against the brilliant skies, and in almost every part form a background of great and impressive effect. Broken by deep ravines, and appearing in bare and rugged precipices, they present a continued variety of imposing objects which sometimes rise into the sublime. The valleys and plains are rich at once in verdure and beauty, while from elevated spots you may enjoy the sight of the great centres of civilization, Cap-Français, Port-de-Paix, Saint-Marc, Port-au-Prince, &c., busy in the various pursuits of city and commercial life. Alas! that scenes so attractive should, at the time our narrative commences, have been disturbed and

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made repulsive by the forced labour of myriads of human beings occupied on the numerous plantations, which , but for greed, and oppression, and cruelty, would themselves have multiplied the natural charms of the island.

        The wealth of Hayti comes from its soil. It is an essentially agricultural country. Cereal products are not cultivated; but maize or Indian corn grows there; and rice flourishes in the savannahs. The negro lives on manioc chiefly, and obtains other breadstuffs from the United States and from Canada. There are, however, other substances which supply him with food when corn fails--such as bananas, yams, and potatoes. Plantation tillage is the chief occupation. This culture embraces sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo, and cotton. In 1789, the French portion of the island contained 793 sugar plantations, 3,117 coffee plantations, 789 cotton plantations, and 182 establishments for making rum, besides other minor factories and workshops. In 1791, very large capitals were employed in carrying on these cultivations; the capitals were sunk partly in slaves and partly in implements of husbandry; in the cultivation of sugar there was employed a capital of above fifty millions of livres;*
*A livre, or franc, is worth about ten pence of our money.
forty-six millions in coffee, and twenty-one millions in cotton; and in 1776, there was employed a capital of sixty-three millions in the cultivation of indigo. The total value of the plantations was immense, as may be learnt from the fact, that the value of the products of the French portion was estimated,

        The last value is the highest. The sum represents the supreme pressure of servitude, and is consequently a measure of the injury done to the black dwellers in Saint Domingo. Already, in 1801, the value fell to 65,352,039--in other words, the slave-masters

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were, at the end of two years, punished for their injustice and tyranny by the immediate loss of nearly two-thirds of their property; so uncertain is the tenure of ill-gotten gain. Among the territorial riches of Hayti, its beasts of burden and oxen must take a high position. In 1789, the soil supported 57,782 horses; 48,823 mules, and 247,612 horned cattle.

        Hayti possesses an abundant source of opulence in its numerous forests, which produce various kinds of precious wood employed in making and decorating furniture and articles of taste.

        In 1791, goods exported from Hayti to France to the value of 133, 534, 423 francs--that is, above five millions sterling. The entire value of the territorial riches of the chief plantations, including slaves, amounted to no less a sum than 991,893,334 francs. Curious is it in the statistical table issued by authority, whence we learn these particulars, to see "negroes and animals employed in husbandry" put into the same class. Observe, too, the items. The value of the "negroes old and new, large and small" is set down at 758,333,334 francs, while the other animals are worth 5, 226,667 francs. We thus learn, that three-fourths of the wealth of the planters consisted in their slaves. Such was the stake which was at issue in the struggle for freedom of which we are about to speak.

        The population of Hayti was, in the year 1824, accounted to amount to 935,335 individuals. This is not a large number for so fertile a land. But it has been questioned whether more than 700,000 dwelt on the soil. Doubtless, the wars which have successively agitated the country for more than half a century, have greatly thinned the population. There has, however, been a constant immigration to Hayti from neighbouring islands, and even from the continent of America. Of the total number of inhabitants just given, there were, in 1824,

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        This mass, viewed in regard to origin, was divided thus:--

        The small number of whites was occasioned by the strict enforcement of the law which declared "No white of any nation whatever shall set his foot on this territory, in the quality of a master or proprietor."

        The language prevalent in the west and north is the French; that generally used in the East is the Spanish. Neither is spoken in purity. Not only has the French the ordinary grammatical faults which belong to the uneducated, but out of the peculiar relations in which they have stood in social and political life, as well as the nature of the climate and the products of the soil, a Haytian patois has been formed which can scarcely be understood by Frenchmen exclusively accustomed to their pure mother tongue. And while the educated classes speak and write what in courtesy may be called classic French, the few authors whom the island has produced do not appear capable of imitating, if they are capable of appreciating, the purity, ease, point, and flow which characterize the best French prose writers.

        The religion of Hayti is the Roman Catholic. This form of religion is established by law. Under former governments other systems were tolerated. At present the spirit of exclusiveness predominates. The religion of Rome exists among the people in a corrupt state, nor are the highest functionaries free from a gross superstition, which takes much of its force from old African traditions and observances, as well as from the peculiar susceptibilities of the negro temperament. As soon as the native chiefs began to obtain political power in their struggle for freedom

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they practically recognised the importance of general education, well knowing that only by raising the slaves into men could they accomplish their task and perpetuate their power. Accordingly educational institutions have, from time to time, been set up in different parts of the island. These establishments have received favour and encouragement according to the spirit of the government of the day. At present they receive a support less liberal than that which is bestowed on the army.

        The ensuing narrative will show the various forms of government which have established themselves in Hayti since the yoke of the planters and of France was broken. With a tendency to exaggeration, which is a marked feature in the negro character, the present ruler, not content with the title of president or with even that of king, enjoys the high-sounding dignity of emperor.

CHAPTER II.

Columbus discovers Hayti--under his successors, the Spanish colony extirpate the natives--The Buccaneers lay in the west the basis of the French colony--its growth and prosperity.

        WE owe the discovery of Hayti to Columbus. When on his first voyage he had left the Leucayan islands, he, on the fifth of December, 1492, came in sight of Hayti, which at first he regarded as the Continent. Having, under the shelter of a bay, cast anchor at the western extremity of the island, and named the spot Saint Nicholas, in honour of the saint of the day, he sent men to explore the country. These, on their return, made to Columbus a report, which was the more attractive, because they had found in the new country resemblances to their native land. A similar impression having been made on Columbus,

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especially by the songs which he heard in the air, and by fishes which had been caught on the coast, he named the island Espagnola, (Hispaniola,) or Little Spain. Forthwith on his arrival, Columbus began to inquire for gold; the answers which he received, induced him to direct his course towards the south. On his way, he entered a port which he called Valparaiso, now Port-de-Paix; and in this and a second visit occupied and named other spots, taking possession of the country on behalf of his patrons Ferdinand and Isabella, sovereigns of Spain. The return of Columbus to Europe, after his first voyage, was accompanied by triumphs and marvels which directed the attention of the civilised world to the newly-discovered countries; and, exciting ambition and cupidity, originated the movement which precipitated Europeans on the American shores, and not only occasioned there oppression and cruelty, but introduced with African blood worse than African slavery, big with evils the most multiform and the most terrible.

        At the time of its discovery, Hayti was occupied by--if we may trust the reports--a million of inhabitants, of the Caribbean race: they were dark in colour, short and small in person, and simple in their modes of life. Amid the abundance of nature, they easily gained a subsistence, and passed their many leisure hours either in unthinking repose, or in dances, enlivened by drums and varied with songs. Polygamy was not only practised but sanctioned. A petty sovereign is said to have had a harem of two-and-thirty wives. Standing but a few degrees above barbarism, the natives were under the dominion of five petty kings or chiefs, called Caciques, who possessed absolute power; and were subject to the yet more rigorous sway of priests or Butios, to whom superstition lent an influence which was the greater because it included the resources of the physician as well as those of the enchanter. Under a repulsive exterior, the Haytians, however, acknowledged a supreme power--the Author of all things, and entertained a dim idea of a future life, involving rewards and punishments correspondent to their low moral condition and gross conceptions.

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        On the arrival of Columbus, the natives, alarmed, withdrew into their dense forests. Gradually won back, they became familiarized with the new-comers, of whose ulterior designs they were utterly ignorant. With their assistance, Columbus erected, near Cap François, a small fortress which he designated Navidad, (nativity,) from the day of the nativity, (December 25th,) on which it was completed. In this, the first edifice built by Europeans on the Western Hemisphere, he placed a garrison of eight-and-thirty men. When (on the 27th of October, 1493) he returned, he found the settlement in ruins, and learned that his men, impelled by the thirst for gold, had made their way to the mountains of Cibao, reported to contain mineral treasures. He erected another stronghold on the east of Cape Monte Christo. There, under the name of Isabella, arose the first city founded by the Spaniards, who thence went forth in quest of the much coveted precious ore. Meanwhile the new colony had serious difficulties to struggle with. Barely were they saved from the devastations of a famine. Their acts of injustice drove the natives into open assault, which it required the skill and bravery of Columbus to overcome. His recall to Europe set all things in confusion. Restrained in some degree by his moderation and humanity, the natives on his departure rose against his brother and representative, Bartholomew; and receiving support from another of his officers, namely, Rolando Ximenes, they aspired to recover the dominion of the island. They failed in their undertaking, the rather that Bartholomew knew how to gain for himself the advantage of a judicious and benevolent course. The love of a young Spaniard, named Diaz, for the daughter of a native chief, led Bartholomew to the mouth of the river Ozama. Finding the locality very superior, he built a citadel and founded a city there, which, under the name of Santo Domingo, he made his head quarters, intending it to be the capital of the country. Meanwhile Ximenes, at Fort Isabella, carried on his opposition to the Government. Columbus's return to the island in 1498 did not bring back the traitor to his duty. Meanwhile, in Spain a storm had broken forth against Columbus, which occasioned

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his recall in 1499. The discoverer of the new world was put in chains and thrown into prison by his successor, Bovadillo. With the departure of Columbus, the spirit of the Spanish rule underwent a total change. The natives, whom he and his brother had treated as subjects, were by Bovadillo treated as slaves. Thousands of their best men were sent to extract gold from the mines, and when they rapidly perished in labours too severe for them, the loss was constantly made up by new supplies. In 1501, Bovadillo was recalled. His successor, Ovando, was equally unmerciful. On the death of Queen Isabella, and Columbus, the Haytians lost the only persons who cared to mitigate their lot. Then all consideration towards them disappeared. They were employed in the most exhausting toil, they were misused in every manner; torn from the bosom of their families, they were driven into the remotest parts of the island, unprovided with even the bare necessaries of life. In 1506, a royal decree consigned the remainder as slaves to the adventurers, and Ovando failed not to carry the unchristian and inhuman ordinance into full effect, especially in regard to those who were at work in the mines, four of which were very productive. A rising which took place in 1502, had no other result than to rivet the chains under which the natives groaned and perished. Another in 1503, brought Anacoana, a native queen, to the scaffold. In 1507, the number of the Haytians had by toil, hunger, and the sword, been reduced from a million down to sixty thousand persons. Of little service was it that about this time, Pedro d'Atenza introduced the sugar-cane from the Canaries, or that Gonzalez, having set up the first sugar-mill, gave an impulse to agriculture; there were no hands to carry on the work, for the master laboured not, and the slave, was beneath the sod. Ovando made an effort to procure labourers from the Leucayan isles. Forty thousand of these victims were transported to Hayti; they also sank under the labour. In 1511, there were only fourteen thousand red men left on the island; and they disappeared more and more in spite of the exertions for their preservation made by the noble Las Casas. In 1519, a young

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Cacique put himself at the head of the few remaining Haytians, and after a bloody war of thirteen years' duration, extorted for himself and followers a small territory on the north-east of Saint Domingo, where their descendants are said to remain to the present day.

        Greatly did the island suffer by the loss of its native population; the working of the gold mines ceased, or was carried on to a small extent, and with inconsiderable results; agriculture proceeded only here and there, and with tardy steps; the colony declined constantly more and more on every side. The metropolis alone withstood the prevalent causes of decay, for it had become a commercial entrepôt between the old world and the new. Its prosperity, however, was, in 1586, seriously shaken by the English commander, Francis Blake, who, having seized the city, did not quit it until he had laid one half in ruins. A still greater calamity impended. The reputed riches of the new world, and the wide spaces of open sea which its discovery made known, invited thither maritime adventurers from the coasts of Europe. Men of degraded character and boundless daring, finding it difficult to procure a subsistence by piracy and contraband trade in their old eastern haunts, now, from the newly-awakened spirit of maritime enterprise, frequented, if not scoured by the vessels of England, Holland and France, hurried away with fresh hopes into the western ocean, and swarmed wherever plunder seemed likely to reward their reckless hardihood.

        Of these, known in history as the buccaneers, a party took possession (1630) of the isle of Tortuga, which lies off the northwest of Hayti. With this, as a centre of operation, they carried on ceaseless depredations against Hayti, the coasts of which they disturbed and plundered, putting an end to its trade and occupying its capital. The court of Madrid, being roused in self-defence, sent a fleet to Tortuga, who, taking possession of the island, destroyed whatever of the buccaneers they could find; but the success only made the pirates more wary and more enterprising. When the fleet had quitted Tortuga,

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they again, in 1638, made themselves masters there, and after fortifying the island and establishing a sort of constitution, made it a centre of piratical resources and aggressions, whence they at their pleasure sallied forth to plunder and destroy ships of all nations, wreaking their vengeance chiefly on such as came from Spain. In time, however, these corsairs met with due punishment at the hands of civilised nations.

        A remnant of the buccaneers, of French extraction, effected a settlement on the south-western shores of Hayti, the possession of which they successfully maintained against Spain, the then recognised mistress of the island. In their new possessions they applied to the tillage of the land; but becoming aware of the difficulty of maintaining their hold without assistance, they applied to France. Their claim was heard. In 1661, Dageron was sent to Hayti, with authority to take its government into his hands, and accordingly effected there, in 1665, a regularly constituted settlement. At this time the Spanish colony, which was scattered over the east of the island, consisted only of fourteen thousand free men, white and black, with the same number of slaves: two thousand maroons, moreover, prowled about the interior, and were in constant hostility with the colonists.

        As yet, the French colony in the west was very weak. Its chief centre was in Tortuga, It had other settlements at Port de Paix, Port Margot, and Léogane. When Dageron came to Hayti with the title of governor, the Spaniards became more attentive to what went on in the west of the island. They proceeded to attack the French settlements, but with results so unsatisfactory, that the new French governor, Pouancey, drove them from all their positions in the west. His successor, Cussy, who took the helm in 1685, was less successful. The Spaniards made head against him, and the French power was nearly annihilated. In 1691, France made another effort. The new governor, Ducasse, restored her dominion, and in the peace of Ryswick, Spain found itself obliged to cede to France the western half of Hayti. With characteristic enterprise and

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application, the French soon caused their colony to surpass the Spanish portion in the elements of social well-being; and in the long peace which followed the wars of the Spanish succession, Saint-Domingue, (so the French called their part of the island,) became the most important colony which France possessed in the West Indies. It suffered, indeed, from Law's swindling operations, and from other causes, but on the whole it made great and rapid progress until the outbreak of the first revolutionary troubles in the mother country.

        Side by side with the advance of agriculture, opulence spread on all sides, and poured untold treasures into France, In a similar proportion the population expanded, so that in 1790, there were in the western half of the island 555,825 inhabitants, of whom only 27,717 were white men, and 21,800 free men of colour, while the slaves amounted to 495,528.

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. Having been stolen from their native land, they were transplanted in the island to become beasts of burden to their masters. The infamous slave-trade was then at its height. Nations and individuals who stood at the head of the civilised world, and prided themselves in the name of Christian, were not ashamed to traffic in the bodies and the 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 the ships, a prey to desolation

Illustration

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and despair. In vain had the laws and usages of Africa, less unjust and cruel 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 debt 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 organised system came into operation, which constantly sent to the sea-shore thousands of innocent 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 inflections 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 the innocent. When

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any were overcome by incurable disease, they were thrown into the ocean while yet alive, as worthless and unassailable articles. In shipwreck, the living cargo of human beings were 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 newcomer found everything strange,--the skies, the country, the language, the labour, the mode of life, the visage of his master,--all was strange. Taking their place among their companions in misfortune, they heard 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. It is not meant that the slaves of the French Haytian planters were worse treated than other slaves. Their condition, on the whole, was slightly better. But the inherent evils of slavery are very baneful and very numerous. Those evils prevailed in Hayti. The slave is helpless, ignorant, morally low, and almost morally dead--reduced as nearly as may be to a tool, a mere labouring machine, yet endued with strong emotions and burning passions. The master is all-powerful, self-willed, capricious, greedy of gain, and given to pleasure. In such a social condition vice and misery must abound; wherever such a social condition has existed, vice and misery have abounded.

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        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 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 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

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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.*


* See note A at the end.

        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

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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 cruelest 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.

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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 fulfillment 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

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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 slave-dealers, 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 fellow countrymen 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 Toussaint-L'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

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parents to children. And the facts narrated may serve to show how it was that Toussaint was not sunk in that mental stagnation and moral depravity of which slavery is commonly the parent.

        As might be expected, the exact day and year of Toussaint's birth are not known. It is said to have been the 20th of May, 1743. What is of more importance is that he lived fifty years of his life in slavery before he became prominent as the vindicator of his brethren's rights. In that long space he had full time to become acquainted with their sufferings as well as their capabilities, and to form such deliberate resolutions as, when the time for action came, should not be likely to fail of effect. Yet does it seem a late period in a man's life for so great an undertaking; nor could any one endowed with inferior powers have approached to the accomplishment of the task.

        Throughout his arduous and perilous career, Toussaint L'Ouverture found great support himself, and exerted great influence over others, in virtue of his deep and pervading sense of religion. We might almost declare that from that source he derived more power than from all others. The foundation of his religious sentiments was laid in his childhood.

        There lived in the neighbourhood of the Gaou-Guinou family a black esteemed for the purity and probity of his character, and who was not devoid of knowledge. His name was Pierre Baptiste. He was acquainted with French, and had a smattering of Latin, as well as some notions of Geometry. For his education he was indebted to the goodness of one of those missionaries who, in preaching the morality of a Divine religion, enlighten and enlarge the minds of their disciples. Pierre Baptiste became the godfather of Toussaint. Holding that relation to the child, he thought it his duty to communicate to him the instructions and impressions he had received from his own religious teacher. Continuing to speak his native African tongue, which was used in his family, Toussaint acquired from his godfather some acquaintance with the French, and aided by the services of the Catholic Church, made a few steps in the knowledge of the Latin. With a love of country which ancestral recollections

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and domestic intimacies cherished, he took pleasure in reverting to the traditional histories of the land of his sires. From these Pierre-Baptiste laboured to direct his young mind and heart to loftier and purer examples consecrated in the records of the Christian Church.

        This course of instruction was of greater value than any skill in the outward processes which are too commonly identified with education. The young negro, however, seems to have made some progress in the arts of reading, writing and drawing. A scholar, in the higher sense of the term, he never became; and at an advanced period of life, when his knowledge was great and various, he regarded the instruction which he received in boyhood as very inconsiderable. Undoubtedly, in the pure and noble inspirations of his moral nature, Toussaint had instructors far more rich in knowledge and impulse than any pedagogue could have been. Yet in his youth were the foundations laid in external learning of value to the man, the general, and the legislator. It is true, that in the composition of his letters and addresses, he enjoyed the assistance of a cultivated secretary. Nevertheless, if the form was another's, the thought was his own; nor would he allow a document to pass from his hands, until, by repeated perusals and numerous corrections, he had brought the general tenour, and each particular expression, into conformity with his own thoughts and his own purpose. Nor is there required anything more than an attentive reading of his extant compositions, to be assured of the superior mental powers with which he was endowed.

        In his mature years, and in the days of his great conflict, Toussaint possessed an iron frame and a stout arm. Capable of almost any amount of labour and endurance, he was terrible in battle, and rarely struck without deadly effect. Yet in his childhood he was weak and infirm to such a degree, that for a long time his parents doubted of being able to preserve his existence. So delicate was his constitution that he received the descriptive appellation of Fatrâs-Baton, which might be rendered in English by Little Lath. But with increase of years the stripling hardened and strengthened his frame by the severest labours

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and the most violent exercises. At the age of twelve he surpassed all his equals in the plantation in bodily feats. Who so swift in hunting? who so clever to swim across a foaming torrent? who so skilful to back a horse in full speed, and direct him at his will? The spirit of the man was already working in the boy.

        The duty of the young slaves was definite and uniform. They were entrusted with the care of the flocks and herds. As a solitary and moral occupation, a shepherd's life gives time and opportunity for tranquil meditation. By nature Fatras-Bâton was given to thought. His reflective and taciturn disposition found appropriate nutriment on the rich uplands and under the brilliant skies of the land of his birth. Accustomed to think much more than he spoke, he acquired not only self-control, but also the power of concentrated reflection and concise speech, which, late in life, was one of his most marked and most serviceable characteristics.

        Pastoral occupations are favourable to an acquaintance with vegetable products. Toussaint's father, like other Africans, was familiar with the healing virtues of many plants. These the old man explained to his son, whose knowledge expanded in the monotonous routine of his daily task. Thus did he obtain a rude familiarity with simples, of which he afterwards made a practical application. In this period, when the youth was passing into the man, and when, as with all thoughtful persons, the mind becomes sensitively alive to things to come as well as to things present, Toussaint may have formed the first dim conception of the misery of servitude, and the need of a liberator. At present he lived with his fellow-sufferers in those narrow, low, and foul huts where regard to decency was impossible; he heard the twang of the driver's whip, and saw the blood streaming from the negro's body; he witnessed the separation of parents and children, and was made aware, by too many proofs, that in slavery neither home nor religion could accomplish its purposes. Not impossibly, then, it was at this time that he first discerned the image of a distant duty rising before his mind's eye; and as the future liberator unquestionably lay in

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his soul, the latent thought may at times have started forth, and for a moment occupied his consciousness. The means, indeed, do not exist by which we may certainly ascertain when he conceived the idea of becoming the avenger of his people's wrongs; but several intimations point to an early period in his life. His good conduct in his pastoral engagements procured for him an advancement. Bayou de Libertas, convinced of his diligence and fidelity, made him his coachman. This was an office of importance in the eyes of the slaves; certainly it was one which brought some comfort and some means of self-improvement.

        Though Toussaint became every day more and more aware that he was a slave, and experienced many of the evils of his condition, yet, with the aid of religion, he avoided a murmuring spirit, and wisely employed his opportunities to make the best of the position in which he had been born, without, however, yielding to the degrading notion that his hardships were irremediable. Sustained by a sense of duty which was even stronger than his hope of improving his condition, he performed his daily task in a composed if not a contented spirit, and so, constantly, won the confidence of the overseer. The result was his promotion to a place of trust. He was made steward of the implements employed in sugar-making.

        Arrived at adult age, Toussaint began to think of marriage. His race at large he saw living in concubinage. As a religious man he was forbidden by his conscience to enter into such a relation. As a humane man he shrunk from the numerous evils which he knew concubinage entailed. Whom should he choose? Already had he risen above the silly preferences of form and feature. Reality he wanted, and the only real good in a wife, he was assured, lay in good sense, good feeling, and good manners. These qualities he found in a widow well skilled in husbandry, a house-slave in the plantation. The kind-hearted and industrious Suzan became his lawful wife according to "God's holy ordinance and the law of the land." By a man of colour Suzan had had a son, named Placide. Obeying the generous impulses of his heart, Toussaint adopted the youth,

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who ever retained the most lively sense of gratitude towards his benefactor.

        Toussaint was now a happy man, considering his condition as a slave--the husband of a slave--a very happy man. His position gave him privileges, and he had a heart to enjoy them. His leisure hours he employed in cultivating a garden, which he was allowed to call his own. In those pleasing engagements he was not without a companion. "We went," he said to a traveler, "we went to labour in the fields, my wife and I, hand in hand. Scarcely were we conscious of the fatigues of the day. Heaven always blessed our toil. Not only we swam in abundance, but we had the pleasure of giving food to blacks who needed it. On the Sabbath and on festival days we went to church--my wife, my parents, and myself. Returning to our cottage, after a pleasant meal, we passed the remainder of the day as a family, and we closed it by prayer, in which all took part." Thus can religion convert a desert into a garden, and make a slave's cabin the abode of the purest happiness on earth.

        Bent as Toussaint was on the improvement of his condition, he yet did not employ the personal property which ensued from his own and his wife's thrift, in purchasing his liberty, and elevating himself and family into the higher class of men of colour. His reasons for remaining a slave are not recorded. He may have felt no attractions towards a class whose superiority was more nominal than real. He may have resolved to remain in a class whose emancipation he hoped some day to achieve.

        The virtues of his character procured for Toussaint universal respect. He was esteemed and loved even by the free blacks. The great planters held him in consideration. His intellectual faculties ripened under the effects of his intercourse with free and white men. As he grew in mind and became large of heart, he more and more was puzzled and distressed with the institution of slavery; he could in no way understand how the hue of the skin should put so great a social and personal distance between men whom God, he saw, had made essentially the same, and whom he knew to be useful if not indispensable to each

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other. Naturally he asked himself what others had thought and said of slavery. He had heard passages recited from Raynal.*
* Histoire Philosophique et Politique des Etablissemens et du Commerce des Européens dans les Deux Indes, par G. T. Raynal. Geneva; 1780.
He procured the work. And now he found how much is involved in the simple art of reading. Toussaint could read,-- Toussaint did read. He read passages similar to what follows, and he became the vindicator of negro freedom:--

        "Scarcely had domestic liberty revived in Europe, when it was entombed in America. The Spaniard, whom the waves first threw on the shores of the New World, believed himself under no obligation to its inhabitants, for they had not his colour, or his customs, or his religion. He saw in them only his instruments, and he loaded them with chains. Those feeble men, unused to toil, soon perished from the vapours of the mines, and other occupations almost as baneful. Then arose a demand for slaves from Africa. Their numbers increased in proportion as cultivation extended. The Portuguese, the Dutch, the English, the French, the Danes--all nations, whether free or in serfdom, remorselessly sought an augmentation of fortune in the sweat, in the blood, in the despair of these poor wretches;--what a frightful system!

        "Liberty is everyone's own property. There are three kinds of liberty--natural liberty, civil liberty, political liberty; that is to say, the liberty of the man, the liberty of the citizen, and the liberty of the community. Natural liberty is the right, which nature has given to every one to dispose of himself according. to his own will. Civil liberty is the right which society ought to guarantee to every citizen to do all that is not contrary to the laws. Political liberty is the condition of a people which has not alienated its own sovereignty, and which makes its own laws, or which is in part associated in its legislation.

        "The first of these liberties is, next to reason, the distinctive characteristic of man. We subdue and enchain the brute, because it has no notion of justice or injustice--no idea of greatness and degradation. But in me liberty is the principle of my

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vices and my virtues. It is only the free man who can say, I will, or, I will not; and who can, consequently, be worthy of praise and blame. Without liberty, or the possession of one's own body and the enjoyment of one's own mind, there is neither husband, father, relation nor friend; we have no country, no fellow-citizen, no God. The slave, an instrument in the hands of wickedness, is below the dog which the Spaniard let loose against the American; for conscience, which the dog lacks, remains with the man. He who basely resigns his liberty, devotes himself to remorse and to the greatest misery that a sensible and thinking creature can experience. If there is no power under heaven that can change my organisation, and convert me into a brute, there is none that can dispose of my liberty. God is my Father and not my master. I am his child, not his slave. How, then, could I accord to political power that I which I refuse to Divine omnipotence?

        "These are immovable and eternal truths--the foundation of all morality, the basis of all government will they be contested? Yes! and it will be a barbarous and sordid avarice which will commit the audacious homicide. Cast your eye on that ship-owner, who, bent over his desk, regulates, with pen in hand, the number of crimes which he may commit on the coast of Guinea; who, at his leisure, examines what number of muskets will be needed to obtain a negro, what number of chains to hold him bound on board his vessel, what number of whips to make him work: who coolly calculates how much will cost him each drop of the blood with which his slave will water his plantation who discusses whether the negress will give more or less to his estate by the labours of her feeble hands than by the dangers of child-birth. You shudder?--ah! if there existed a religion which tolerated, which authorized, if only by its silence, horrors like these; if, occupied with idle or contentious questions, it did not ceaselessly thunder against the authors or the instruments of this tyranny; if it made it a crime for the slave to break his chains; if it suffered in its bosom the unjust judge who condemned the fugitive to death;--if this religion existed, would it not be necessary that its altars should be broken down and left

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in ruins? Who are you who will dare to justify crimes against my independence, on the ground that you are the stronger? What! he who makes me a slave not guilty? He makes use of his rights? What, then, are those rights? Who has given them a character sacred enough to put my rights to silence? I hold from nature the right of self-defence; she has not given you the right to attack me. If you think yourself authorized to oppress me because you are stronger and more alert than I, do not complain when, after my hand becomes vigorous, it shall plant a dagger in your heart; do not complain when you shall feel in your veins that death which I shall have mingled with your food. Now I am the stronger and the more alert, it is your turn to be the victim; expiate the crime of having been an oppressor.

        " 'But,' it is said, 'slavery has been generally established in all countries and in all ages.' True;--but what consequence is it what other nations have done in other ages? Ought the appeal to be to customs or to conscience? Is it interest, blindness, barbarity, or reason and justice, that we ought to listen to? If the universality of a practice proved its innocence, the apology of usurpations, conquests, and oppression of all kinds would irrefutably be completed.

        " 'But the ancients,' you say, 'thought themselves masters of the lives of their slaves; we, having become more humane, dispose only of their liberty and their labour.' It is true, the progress of knowledge has on this important point given light to modern legislators. All codes, without an exception, have taken precautions to guard the life of even the man who pines away in servitude. They have put his existence under the protection of the magistrate. But has this, the most sacred of social institutions, ever had its due force? Is not America peopled with colonists who, usurping sovereign rights, inflict death on the unfortunate victims of their avarice? But suppose the law observed, would the slave materially gain thereby? Does not the master who employs my strength, dispose of my life, which depends on the voluntary and moderate use of my faculties? What is existence for him who has no property in it? I cannot kill my slave, but I may cause his blood to flow drop by drop under the drivers whip; I may overwhelm him with

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labours, privations, and pains; I may on all sides attack and slowly undermine the resources of his life; I may stifle by slow punishments the wretched embryo that a negress bears in her womb. It might be said that the laws protect the slave against a speedy death, only to leave to my cruelty the right of killing him in the course of time. In truth, the right of slavery is the right to commit crimes of all kinds.

        " 'But the negroes are a sort of men born for slavery: they are of narrow minds, mischievous, deceitful; they themselves own the superiority of our intelligence, and almost recognise the justice of our dominion!'

        "The negroes are of narrow minds because slavery destroys all the springs of the soul. They are mischievous,--not mischievous enough with you. They are deceitful, because they owe no fidelity to their tyrants. They acknowledge the superiority of our intelligence, because we have perpetuated their ignorance; the justice of our dominion, because we have abused their weakness. In the impossibility of maintaining our superiority by force, a criminal policy has had recourse to guile. You have almost got so far as to persuade them that they are an exceptional race, born for subjection and dependence, for labour and punishment. You have neglected nothing to degrade those unhappy creatures, and you reproach them with being vile.

        "'But these negroes were born slaves.'--Whom will you cause to believe that a man can be the property of a sovereign? a son the property of a father? a woman the property of a husband? a domestic the property of a master? a negro the property of a planter? The contempt with which you treat them falls back upon yourself. You have no ground of self-respect but what is common to you with them. A common Father, an immortal soul, a future life--here is your true glory, and here is their glory.

        " 'But the government itself authorizes the sale of slaves.'-- Whence this right? However absolute the magistrate, is he the proprietor of the subjects of his empire? Has he any other authority than such as he derives from the citizens? And can any nation give the privilege of disposing of its liberty?

        "'But the slave sold himself of his own accord.'--If he belongs

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to himself, he has the right to dispose of himself. If he is master of his life, why should he not be master of his liberty? Man has not the right to sell himself, because he has not the right to accede to whatever an unjust, violent, and depraved master may exact from him. He belongs to his first master--God, by whom he has never been emancipated. He who sells himself enters into an illusory agreement with his purchaser; for thereby he loses all his value. At the moment when he receives the price and the money become the property of the buyer. The very act of selling yourself, vitiates the bargain. He who sells himself is a fool, not a slave.

        "'But those slaves were taken in war, and but for us would have been slaughtered.'

        "'But for you would there have been fighting? Are not the dissensions of those tribes your work? Did you not carry to them murderous arms? Did you not give them the blind desire to employ them? And why did you not allow the conqueror to use his victory as he pleased? Why become his accomplice?

        " 'But they were criminals condemned to death or slavery in their own country.' Are you, then, Africa's executioners. Besides, who were their judges? Do you not know that under a despotism there is only one criminal--the despot himself? The subject of a despot, like the slave, is in a condition contrary to nature. Whatever contributes to retain man in that condition, is a crime against his person. Every hand which binds man to the tyranny of a single person, is the hand of an enemy. Do you wish to know who are the authors and accomplices of this violence? Those who are around it. The tyrant can do nothing by himself.

        " 'But they are happier in America than they were in Africa.' Why, then, do they continually sigh for their native land? Why do they resume their liberty as soon as they can? Why do they prefer deserts and the society of wild beasts, to a state which appears to you so agreeable? Why does their despair induce them to put an end to themselves, or to poison you? Why do their wives so often procure abortion? When you tell us of the happiness of your slaves, you lie to yourselves, and you deceive us. It is the height of extravagance to attempt to transform so barbarous an act into an act of humanity.

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" 'But in Europe as in America the people are slaves. The sole advantage which we have over the negroes is the power of breaking one chain to fall under another.' Too true. Most nations are oppressed. Scarcely is there a country in which a man can flatter himself with being master of his person, of disposing of his inheritance at his will, of enjoying peaceably the fruits of his industry. But as morality and wise polity shall make progress, men will recover their rights. Why, in waiting for the happy day, should there be miserable races to whom you refuse even the consoling and honourable name of free men; from whom you snatch even the hope of obtaining it, notwithstanding the changeableness of events? No, whatever may be said, the condition of those unfortunate beings is not the same as ours.

        "The last argument employed to justify slavery says, that 'slavery is the only way of conducting the negroes to eternal blessedness by means of Christian baptism.'

        "Mild and loving Jesus! could you have foreseen that your benign maxims would be employed to justify so much horror? If the Christian religion thus authorized avarice in governments, it would be necessary for ever to proscribe its dogmas. In order to overturn the edifice of slavery, to what tribunal shall we carry the cause of humanity? Kings, refuse the seal of your authority to the infamous traffic which converts men into beasts. But what do I say? Let us look somewhere else. If self-interest alone prevails with nations and their masters, there is another power. Nature speaks in louder tones than philosophy or self-interest. Already are there established two colonies of fugitive negroes, whom treaties and power protect from assault. Those lightnings announce the thunder. A courageous chief only is wanted. Where is he? that great man whom Nature owes to her vexed, oppressed, and tormented children. Where is he? He will appear, doubt it not; he will come forth, and raise the sacred standard of liberty. This venerable signal will gather around him the companions of his misfortune. More impetuous than the torrents, they will everywhere leave the indelible traces of their just resentment. Everywhere people will bless the name

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of the hero, who shall have re-established the rights of the human race; everywhere will they raise trophies in his honour."*


* Vol. iii. p. 193-205. Some parts which breathe too much the spirit of revenge have been softened or omitted in the translation.

        These eloquent words must have produced a deep and pervading impression on a mind so susceptible as that of Toussaint. Here reason and feeling were harmonized into one awful appeal. Here philosophy joined with common sense and common justice, to proclaim negro wrongs, and to call for a negro vindicator. That call Toussaint heard; he heard its voice in his inmost soul; he heard it there first in low reverberations; he heard it there at last in sounds of thunder. Dwelling on those principles, pondering those words, consulting his own heart, and reflecting on his own condition, he came in time to feel that he was the man here designated, and that in the designation there was a call from Providence which he dared not disregard. But the time was not yet. Conviction must wait on opportunity. Besides, Toussaint was a religious man. Religion was his highest law. In one sense religion was his only law, for it comprehended every other form of law. What said religion? Read again, noble black; read with your own eyes; read the Bible for yourself and by yourself. Yes, if you will, consult the priest; but in retiring from the confessional, let Raynal's words echo in your ears, and fear lest you betray Christianity, even while striving to learn and obey its law.

CHAPTER V.

Toussaint's presumed scriptural studies--The Mosaic code--Christian principles adverse to slavery--Christ, Paul, the Epistle to Philemon.

        IT is not to be supposed that Toussaint read the sacred Scriptures with a critical eye. Unversed in the science of Biblical interpretation, he could do no more than receive such impressions as certain great outstanding facts were fitted to produce. Nor,

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however valuable for its own purposes a scientific acquaintance with the Divine Word may be, did he need more than he and every other sensible person could gather from the general tenour and prominent aims of the Bible. There might even be particular passages which he was unable to comprehend in the harmony of scriptural truth, and a religious disputant might have found no great difficulty in presenting to his mind considerations wearing on the surface an appearance adverse to his general convictions. But those convictions would rest on such broad and deep foundations, and occupy in his mind so large a space; they would in themselves be so full, and so vivid, and so far-reaching, that as he reflected on them more and more, and they thus became an integral element in his mind, he could in no way doubt that slavery was disallowed by the Bible, and was adverse to the genius, the aims, and the operation of the Gospel.

        Slavery, it is true, he found in the Scriptures. But how? Not as an institution of Divine origin. Moses found slavery in common practice; and unable to abolish it, did his best to mitigate its evils. And the system of servitude which he left rather than sanctioned, involved none of those atrocities which make American slavery so offensive and so baneful. The aim and tendency of slavery among the Hebrews, was the improvement of such as were under the yoke. Being of foreign extraction for the most part, slaves were permitted to enter 'the commonwealth of Israel,' by undergoing the distinctive rite of circumcision. (Gen. xvii. 23, 27.) Thus raised from a slave into a Hebrew, the slave had before him a brightening future, and could share in the privilege, and partake of the advantages, of worshipping the Creator of heaven and earth. Like England, Canaan was a land of refuge for slaves. The moment they touched that sacred soil they were free. Fugitive slaves could in no wise by delivered up to their masters, nor might they be reduced into bondage by Israelites. They chose their own residence, and followed their own pursuits. (Deut. xxiii. 16, et seq.) Expressly was it forbidden that a Hebrew should sell himself to a fellow-Hebrew as a bond-servant, and if one Hebrew hired himself to another Hebrew, he with his children obtained

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his liberty unconditionally at the end of six years at the furthest, or at the jubilee next ensuing after his service began. (Lev. xxv. 39,40.) And he might be redeemed at an earlier day by either himself or a relative. (Lev. xxv. 48,49.) Even thieves, who, when detected, were, in consequence of not being able to make compensation, put into servitude to Israelites, benefited by the laws regarding emancipation. As it was not permitted to send back or enslave a fugitive slave of foreign blood, so was it unlawful to sell a Hebrew to a foreign master. (Exod. xxi. 7--11)

        These facts are the more striking, when we take into account the general practice of the slave trade in the ancient Eastern world. Egypt, which lay on the borders of Palestine, was a great slave mart. The long sea-board of Palestine afforded peculiar facilities for the detestable traffic. Streams of wealth would have poured into the land, had Israel encouraged the trade. The temptation was great. But religion was too strong for cupidity, and the people of God disallowed the commerce in human flesh generally, and modified their prescriptive usages so as to abate the evils and diminish the observance of slavery in their own territories.

        Among the mitigations of their lot guaranteed to slaves by Moses were the following:--1. Entire rest from labour every seventh day. (Exod. xx. 10.) Noble recognition of man's religious nature and religious wants! 2. Immunity from deadly or cruel punishments. If a servant lost an eye or a tooth from a blow given by his master, he was thereon rendered free; if a slave died under a master's hand, the master underwent due retribution. (Exod. xxi. 20, et seq.) When advocates of slavery as it is in the United States cite in argument the Mosaic institutions, they would do well to give special attention to these merciful regulations. 3. Slaves were to join the Hebrew family in their rejoicings on occasions of religious festivity. (Deut. xii. 12, 18; xvi. 11, 14.) 4. Slaves recovered their freedom in the year of jubilee, and the bondman was not to go away with empty hands: "Thou shalt furnish him liberally our of thy flock, and out of thy flour, and out of thy winepress." The reason assigned is forcible; "Thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in

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the land of Egypt, and the Lord thy God redeemed thee. (Deut. xv. 13 et seq.; compare Exod. xxi. 2--4.) 5. A servant might not wish to leave his master's house; having been treated well, he had formed attachments and become one of the family: "If, therefore, he shall plainly say, I love my master, I will not go out free, then shall his master bring him unto the judges;" and his will being ascertained by a judicial investigation, he was permitted to remain in his own freely-chosen condition of domestic servitude. (Exod. xxi. 5,6.) 6. A Hebrew bondsman was allowed to acquire and hold property, with which he might purchase his freedom. (Lev. xxxv. 49.) 7. If a master had no sons, a Hebrew slave might aspire to his daughter's hand. (I Chron. ii., 35.)*

* Consult under the word bondage,"The People's Dictionary of the Bible," 2 vols. 8vo., third Edition, by the author.

        On reviewing the features of the Mosaic slave code, could Toussaint for a moment identify its provisions with the Code Noir of Louis XIV., or with the system practised in Hayti? The contrast was too evident. Then did Toussaint see a slave, in some happy year of jubilee, going forth from bondage with a liberal supply from his master's flock, his master's barn, and his master's wine-cellar? Did he himself ever even think of asking for the hand, not of his master's daughter, but of his master's steward's daughter? Did he ever witness even a slave-driver punished for cruelly treating a slave? Could he point to a neighbouring land whose very air gave a slave his freedom the moment he breathed it? Did Spanish Hayti refuse to deliver up fugitive slaves to French Hayti, and did French Hayti refuse to deliver up fugitive slaves to Spanish Hayti?

        But, it is objected, Christianity finding slavery in existence, did not proscribe it. Christianity did more than proscribe slavery--it undermined slavery; and wherever it prevailed in deed rather than profession, it brought slavery to the ground. The objection, if rightly stated, is this, and nothing more--namely, that the original promulgators of the Gospel did not commence an active and open crusade against slavery. The reason is, that they had an object before them higher than any immediate good. They waged no war against Roman despotism. They left, even on

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their native hills, the degenerate family of Herod in undisturbed possession of power. Their mission was not to remodel institutions, but to reform society. Their work was not to reap a premature and perishing harvest, but to sow the seed of quickening principles and imperishable sympathies. Disregarding thrones, principalities, and dominions, they went forth to preach the word of a new individual life, well aware that the acorn, in due time, would become an oak. Nor were their efforts nugatory. Within three centuries slavery was abolished in the Roman empire. And at this moment--such is the extensive and ever-living power of the Gospel--slavery, throughout the world, is tottering to its fall.

        But chiefly, when he meditated on the words and the objects of the Saviour of the world, did Toussaint feel how incompatible slavery was with Christianity. Had he not, in those impressive words, "where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty." (2 Cor. iii. 17,) found the enunciation of a great Christian principle, and the announcement of a great Christian power, which must of necessity, as it was designed, break asunder every outward bond and emancipate every slave on earth? And in what terms did the Lord himself announce his mission? Toussaint, in thought, made one of his auditors in that small synagogue at Nazareth, where the Redeemer of men astounded his townsfolk and relatives by declaring, in words of the widest import, as he ushered in the grand spiritual jubilee, and so gave to all the subjects of His new kingdom liberty of body in giving them liberty of soul: "The Spirit of Jehovah is upon me, because He hath anointed me to preach glad tidings to the poor, He hath sent me to declare deliverance to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind; to set at liberty those that are oppressed; to proclaim the acceptable year of Jehovah." "To-day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears." (Luke iv. 18, et seq.) Unmistakable must Toussaint have found the import of these words. The great year of jubilee had come--the slave was free--slavery was abolished; not only that corporeal slavery which Moses tolerated, but the heavier slavery; which man, in consequence of sin, endured;-- slavery of soul and, consequently, slavery of body was abrogated and destroyed. The blow

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was struck, and the dark edifice would inevitably fall. How could Toussaint hear from the lips of Christ himself that he came expressly to deliver the captive, and set the oppressed at liberty, without feeling that if he yielded to the grand thought which already swelled his breast, and became the liberator of the negro race, he would thereby be not a follower only, but a fellow-worker with "the Lord from heaven?" How could he learn, on infallible authority, that God, who had "made of one blood all nations," (Acts xvii. 26,) had, in his Son, opened and proclaimed the year of universal jubilee, and therefore, inaugurated the period of universal emancipation; and yet, with his convictions and sympathies, fail to conclude that on him too had, by the hand of Providence, been devolved a share in the truly religious task of liberating and upraising a cruelly oppressed and deeply injured tribe?

        If from the Master, Toussaint turned to the greatest of his disciples, and asked Paul what, on this point, were the principles of the religion of Jesus, he learned that while the apostle urged no one in actual circumstances to hurry from the condition in which he was born, and judged that it was better to endure wrong than prematurely, and to the peril of the cause of Christ, disturb existing relations, and thereby convulse society already fearfully agitated, yet he recognised as equally members of the Christian church, and accessible to the same rights, immunities, and privileges, the bond and the free; (2 Cor. xii. 13;) and viewing the whole of human kind as divided into these two classes--in their high relations to God arid Christ and each other, declared that all outward distinctions had ceased, and must practically, in time, come to an end, for that there was no longer bond or free, any more than Barbarian or Scythian, but all were "one in Christ Jesus." (Gal. iii. 28; Col. iii. 11.) What! could the glowing terms in which the apostle--returning again and again to the subject, as if his soul was on fire with the thought--sets forth not only the equality of all the tribes of earth, but their essential unity;--could those terms be heard by the Roman slave in the primitive church, and not make his bosom swell and glow with the idea that he too was a man, that he too was free, that he too was comprehended

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in "the redemption which was in Christ Jesus?" And that idea once deep in his bosom, the rupture of his material bonds was merely an affair of time. Men, who know that they are men, cannot long be hold in bondage. Conscious children of God will not be slaves to selfish and brutal men. Those who feel that they have been purchased by Christ, the Son of God, may indeed "bide their time," but cannot be permanently held in the degrading and polluting condition of slavery. Yes, wisely for your own bad purposes, do ye, slave masters, keep the light of divine truth from your unhappy victims, or permit them to see it only through the discolouring medium of a ministration which stoops to make a gain of godliness; wisely for your own purposes do ye keep the Bible a scaled book on your plantations, or set hirelings to pervert its glorious and emancipating tidings; for otherwise your dominion would be shorter than in God's providence it is intended to be. But the day cometh; "the Lord is at hand."

        You point me to the conduct of Paul? You tell me that Paul sent back Onesimus into slavery? You ask me if Toussaint in his scriptural studies comprised the Epistle to Philemon? and you triumphantly intimate that, by that example, his emancipating ardour ought to have been checked. I reply that the Epistle to Philemon is a plea against slavery; that if Toussaint comprehended what he read, he would thereby be greatly confirmed and built up in his righteous and most Christian purposes; and that if your own eyes were only free from the scales of prejudice and mistaken self-interest, they too would discern, in that letter, principles which are utterly inconsistent with the continuance of the abominable system of which you are the supporters.

        The Epistle of Paul to Philemon is the most pregnant of compositions. Never was so much meaning compressed into so few words. And then, how weighty the topics. How much of doctrine is there in those few verses; how much of history. And the doctrine and the history are so presented, that while you cannot deny the history, you are encouraged to receive the doctrine. The letter is a series of implications;--implied facts,

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implied principles, implied duties, implied changes and triumphs, set forth in all the unconscious simplicity of a private and confidential communication, so as to conciliate attention and win belief. I hold this short Epistle to be of itself an antidote to scepticism and a confutation of slavery.

        The letter, I have intimated, is a series of implications. It is also a group of pictures. First mark that fugitive slave hurrying from Colossæ, in Asia Minor, down to the shores of the Mediterranean sea. What a fell expression of countenance he has, as of one who, if well-endowed by nature, had been made bad by servitude, and who had had long and varied practice in misdoing. How stealthy are his steps, how clownish, yet how timid his manner! Ever and anon he casts back his anxious eyes as if he feared pursuit, and from the face of every one whom he encounters, he turns away, as if he dreaded to be recognised. At last, reaching the sea, he hastens on ship-board, and concealing himself in the most secret part of the vessel, effects his escape, and is carried to Rome,--that city which the greatest of ancient historians has described as the common sink of the world.*


* Tac. Ann, xv. 44. Quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt, celebranturque.

        Let a few years pass, and you may see the same person on his way back from Rome to Asia Minor and Colossæ. No longer do his movements betray fear. No longer does his countenance betoken ferocity. His steps are equable and firm. His manner discloses self-respect. He is returning with as much composure as determination, and on his way be receives and returns greetings with gentleness and confidence, as if he feared none, and wished to be friendly with all. And now that he is again on ship-board, mark how pure and refined is the expression of his face, how manly his whole bearing, as, no longer shunning the light, he walks up and down the deck, and has a good word for every one. Is this indeed the same person? It is Onesimus, the runaway slave. And he is going back to his master of his own accord. Yes, hundreds of miles does he travel on foot and

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by sea in order to return into bondage. Observe, he is unaccompanied. He is unmanacled; not by force, but by his own free will, is he led back to his proprietor Philemon in Colossæ.

        Whence these changes? In order to understand them, you must form to yourselves another picture. There, in a small house in that narrow and secluded street of Rome, you behold an aged man, bound with a chain to that pretorian soldier, under whose custody he is night and day. That aged man is Paul the apostle of Jesus Christ; there, in that corrupt and guilty city, to answer, at the peril of his life, for daring to offer the Gospel to his countrymen in Jerusalem. Mean in person, and rude in speech, he has nevertheless preached Christ crucified with great success to the citizens. But he is oppressed with infirmities. His numerous sufferings, his long journeys, his ceaseless labours, have reduced him to that state of bodily endurance. And glad and thankful is he for humane attentions and ministries of Christian love. In that sacred work Onesimus has been engaged. Found by Paul,--and found, it may be, when the fugitive was in sickness,-- he was taken to the apostle's own abode, and there cared for in mind as well as in body, until he came to possess both the ability and the will to make a return in kind to his apostolic benefactor. The reciprocation of kind offices begat mutual attachment. Learning to love the preacher, Onesimus learned also to love and to espouse his doctrine. Now, therefore, is he a Christian,--a member of Christ's spiritual body, and a sharer with Paul himself in "the liberty wherewith Christ hath made him free." (Gal. v. 1.) So intimate do the two friends become, that the elder regards the younger as his "son," while the younger, loving and respecting the elder as his father, is as ready to obey as he is glad to serve him. But mark, as they sit there in that humble apartment, earnestly conversing with each other, mark the cloud that has fallen on the countenance of Onesimus. It is heavy and deep. In a moment it has disappeared. "You must return to Philemon." These are the words which darkened that face. "Return into chains? horrible." Shortly afterwards Onesimus is on the road.

        They are great changes with which we have to do in this group of events. At the time of the publication of the Gospel,

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slavery was universal. Philemon, a prominent and zealous member of the church at Colossæ, held a slave by name Onesimus. Having served his master badly, Onesimus ran away. But now of his own free will he is going back into bondage. This is the first great change. Ah, how many a footstep must he set between Rome and Colossæ, and for every footstep there was an act of the will. Every act of the will said, "return to servitude." Yet the will never faltered, and the slave's own feet brought him into the house of Philemon. But what reception might he meet with there? There would be the jeers and jibes of fellow slaves to endure. There were past neglects and misdeeds to atone for. There was an injured and an offended master to encounter. Nevertheless, of his own accord, Onesimus returns. At the first appearance, this would appear the height of folly. Masters held the power of life and death over their slaves. Onesimus had everything to fear. On what does he rely? Has be no safeguard? He has a few lines written by a poor decrepid man hundreds of miles distant. Is that all? That is all. But it is enough; Onesimus knows that it is enough. What a wonder-working power is writing! We have read of charms, magical forms, and incantations; we have read of them, and of the powers they were said to possess. But even their fancied efficacy has in it nothing surpassing the efficacy of these few Greek characters written by Paul and borne by Onesimus. Guards, prisons, and chains--they are of less potency than words. Onesimus eluded the former, and goes back under the influence of the latter. These words, a token of the apostle's will, conduct Onesimus back and protect him from the natural consequences of Philemon's wrath. Such is the sovereignty of thought. A morsel-- so to say--of Paul's mind, acts with supreme control beyond lands and seas.

        But the return indicates another great change. If, now, Onesimus sets his face towards the east, it is because his heart is changed. In a change of the affections, is found the cause of that change of his will. This is, indeed, a great change--a fugitive slave willingly goes back to bondage. There is no compulsion: there can be no compulsion. No spies, no catchpoles are

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at work. No law in Rome compels the emperor to apprehend and restore to the Colossians any of their slaves that might seek shelter in the metropolis of the world. Though slavery then prevailed throughout society, legislation had not reached the height of wickedness which compels the freeman to be a police-officer to the slaveholder. In safety, and perhaps in prosperity, might Onesimus have remained in Rome. But no! a power stronger than the imperial power itself, sends him back. Go he must, go he will, and go he does. Why? he must put that right which he left wrong; he had injured his master, he must make him compensation. And though in the matter of right, Onesimus belonged to himself and not to Philemon, yet, as the law recognised the institution of slavery, and every Christian ought to avoid even the appearance of evil, so would Onesimus return to Philemon in order to adjust their relations one with another. Those relations had assumed a new aspect. The two persons who had known each other only as master and slave, were now in Christ "brothers beloved." And as Christians, they recognised a higher law than the world's--a law which rendered slavery impossible, but which also commanded each to do unto others as he would be done unto. Relying on the former, and acting on the latter, hoping to be set at liberty, yet believing it his duty to give Philemon an opportunity of declaring his emancipation, Onesimus has set his feet within his master's home. This, I repeat, is indeed a great change. The fugitive is the returning slave, because the slave has become a Christian. And the Christian so highly values moral obligations, that in the thought of his duties he almost forgets his rights, and at least is as regardful of the legal claims of his master, as he is of his own natural and indefeasible privileges.

        Onesimus, I have intimated, regarded the legal claims of Philemon. There is no evidence that either Onesimus or Paul recognised any other claim. It was the general practice of the first disciples to pay obedience to the then existing civil laws.

        This respect for existing institutions, however, was merely outward and temporary. Having its origin in prudential consideration, it came to an end as soon as duty could safely supersede

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expediency. Meanwhile, it implied at the bottom a disallowal of existing evils, and a determination to take the most effectual course for their abatement and removal. Tolerating slavery because it wished to take safe steps for rendering slavery impossible, it in reality hated the abomination of property in man's body and soul, and was ever silently at work to convert the slave into a man, and so to break the yoke and set the captive free. That this was the view under which Paul acted, is obvious from the language he employs in his Letter to Philemon:--

        In that Letter there is first the distinct assertion of a right. It is the right of Paul to claim the freedom of Onesimus. On what was that right founded? On Christ. Paul, Philemon, and Onesimus were in Christ partners, they were sharers of a common Gospel, such is the meaning of the term "partner," employed by Paul in the 17th verse. As having, in common, "the redemption that was in Christ Jesus," they were alike free. Onesimus, as a Christian, was as free as Philemon, and both were equally free with Paul. Onesimus, in consequence, had a claim to be pronounced free. And that claim Paul was at full liberty to urge on Philemon.

        I make this statement on the authority of the apostle's own words, as they are found in the 8th verse of the epistle; "though I might be much bold in Christ to enjoin thee that which is convenient." This, the English version, very imperfectly represents the original. "Convenient," is a most inadequate expression, at least in the sense in which it is now understood. Convenient with us signifies that which is easy and pleasant, rather than that which is obligatory; that which is suitable to the occasion, rather than conformable to the everlasting laws of right. The Greek word used by Paul, however, denotes that which is fit and proper, and in the third chapter of the Epistle to the Colossians, v. 18, it is rendered by the English term fit. "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fitin the Lord." That, in this injunction, the apostle spoke of duty, of Christian obligation, and not of any temporary expediency, is clear from the corresponding passage in his Letter to the Ephesians, v. 22, where he says, "Wives, submit yourselves unto your

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own husbands as unto the Lord." It is, then, an obligation, a Christian obligation, which Paul had the right to urge on Philemon. And this right he intimates he might freely urge. It was a manifest right; a right about which there could be no dispute between Christians; a right which the apostle was justified in urging boldly, nay, very boldly; for thus, when exactly translated, do his words run--"having much boldness in Christ, to enjoin on thee that which is proper." Observe the term "enjoin,"--it is duties that are enjoined, not expediency. The act as described in the Greek is the act of a superior--of a general who gives a command, of a governor who issues a decree. The imperial power of duty it was, which was in the writer's mind. As an inspired expounder of Christian rights and duties, Paul declares that he might, with full freedom of speech, require Philemon to declare Onesimus free. But he would take a milder-- perhaps, for his purpose, a more effectual course; the assertion of rights sometimes revolts the wrong-doer. Certainly it would be more considerate, more kind, more Christian-like, to give Philemon the opportunity of doing what was right of his own accord, from his own sense of justice, from his own recognition of Christian principles; and therefore--to use Paul's own words-- "yet for loves sake I rather beseech thee," (v, 9,) "for without thy mind would I do nothing; that thy benefit should not be as it were of necessity, but willingly." (v. 14.) "No; do you by your own act pronounce his freedom, not as if constrained by duty enforced by me, but as prompted by Christian principle and Christian love, abounding in your own heart."

        Besides this unquestionable right which is not disallowed, but kindly thrown into the background, there is also in the Epistle the pleading of a claim grounded on the implication of a right. The claim is that of Onesimus who has a right to freedom. That claim and that right are now rather implied and intimated than declared. There is a sort of tac