Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence | Page 7

witness the
disembarkation of the troops.
Christophe, one of the generals of Toussaint, commanding at Cape
François, having resisted the menaces and the flattery of Leclerc,
reduced that ill-fated town to ashes, and retired with his troops into the
mountains, carrying with him 2,000 of the white inhabitants of the
Cape, who were protected from injury during the fierce war which
ensued.
Having full possession of the plain of the Cape, Leclerc, with a
proclamation of liberty in his hand, in March following re-established
slavery with all its former cruelties.
This treacherous movement thickened the ranks of Toussaint, who
thenceforward so vigorously pressed his opponent, that as a last resort,
Leclerc broke the shackles of the slave, and proclaimed "Liberty and
equality to all the inhabitants of Santo Domingo."
This proclamation terminated the conflict for the time. Christophe and
Dessalines, general officers, and at length Toussaint himself,
capitulated, and, giving up the command of the island to Leclerc, he
retired, at the suggestion of that officer, to enjoy rest and the sweet

endearments of his family circle, on one of his estates near Gonaives.
At this place he had remained about one month, when, without any
adequate cause, Leclerc caused him to be seized, and to be placed on
board of a ship of war, in which he was conveyed to France, where,
without trial or condemnation, he was imprisoned in a loathsome and
unhealthy dungeon. Unaccustomed to the chill and damp of this
prison-house, the aged frame of Toussaint gave way, and he died.
In this meagre outline of his life I have presented simply facts, gleaned,
for the most part, from the unwilling testimony of his foes, and
therefore resting on good authority. The highest encomium on his
character is contained in the fact that Napoleon believed that by
capturing him he would be able to re-enslave Hayti; and even this
encomium is, if possible, rendered higher by the circumstances which
afterward transpired, which showed that his principles were so
thoroughly disseminated among his brethren, that, without the presence
of Toussaint, they achieved that liberty which he had taught them so
rightly to estimate.
The capture of Toussaint spread like wild-fire through the island, and
his principal officers again took the field. A fierce and sanguinary war
ensued, in which the French gratuitously inflicted the most awful
cruelties on their prisoners, many of whom having been hunted with
bloodhounds, were carried in ships to some distance from the shore,
murdered in cold blood, and cast into the sea; their corpses were thrown
by the waves back upon the beach, and filled the air with pestilence, by
which the French troops perished in large numbers. Leclerc having
perished by pestilence, his successor, Rochambeau, when the conquest
of the island was beyond possibility, became the cruel perpetrator of
these bloody deeds.
Thus it will be perceived that treachery and massacre were begun on
the side of the French. I place emphasis on these facts in order to
endeavor to disabuse the public mind of an attempt to attribute to
emancipation the acts of retaliation resorted to by the Haytians in
imitation of what the enlightened French had taught them. In two daily
papers of this city there were published, a year since, a series of articles

entitled the "Massacres of Santo Domingo."
The "massacres" are not attributable to emancipation, for we have
proved otherwise in regard to the first of them. The other occurred in
1804, twelve years after the slaves had disenthralled themselves.
Fearful as the latter may have been, it did not equal the atrocities
previously committed on the Haytians by the French. And the massacre
was restricted to the white French inhabitants, whom Dessalines, the
Robespierre of the island, suspected of an attempt to bring back slavery,
with the aid of a French force yet hovering in the neighborhood.
And if we search for the cause of this massacre, we may trace it to the
following source: Nations which are pleased to term themselves
civilized have one sort of faith which they hold to one another, and
another sort which they entertain towards people less advanced in
refinement. The faith which they entertain towards the latter is, very
often, treachery, in the vocabulary of the civilized. It was treachery
towards Toussaint that caused the massacre of Santo Domingo; it was
treachery towards Osceola that brought bloodhounds into Florida!
General Rochambeau, with the remnant of the French army, having
been reduced to the dread necessity of striving "to appease the calls of
hunger by feeding on horses, mules, and the very dogs that had been
employed in hunting down and devouring the Negroes," evacuated the
island in the autumn of 1803, and Hayti thenceforward became an
independent State.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I have now laid before you a concise view