[Footnote 33:  Calendar of State Papers, America and West Indies, 1689-1692, p. 101.]

[Footnote 34:  R.C.  Dallas, History of the Maroons (London, 1803).]

[Footnote 35:  Gentleman’s Magazine, XXXVI, 135.]

[Footnote 36:  Niles’ Register, XLIV, 124.]

[Footnote 37:  Calendar of State Papers, America and West Indies, 1701, pp. 721, 722.]

[Footnote 38:  South Carolina Gazette (Charleston), Jan. 29, 1837.]

[Footnote 39:  Gentleman’s Magazine, XXII, 477.]

[Footnote 40:  Ibid., XXXV, 533.]

[Footnote 41:  Charleston, S.C., Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, Jan. 26, 1786.]

[Footnote 42:  Henry Bolinbroke, Voyage to the Demerary (Philadelphia, 1813), pp. 200-203.]

[Footnote 43:  Louisiana Gazette, Oct. 12, 1825.]

[Footnote 44:  New Orleans Bee, Aug. 7, 1848.]

[Footnote 45:  Ibid., Aug. 16 and Dec. 15, 1848.]

Everything else of such nature, however, was eclipsed by the prodigious upheaval in San Domingo consequent upon the French Revolution.  Under the flag of France the western end of that island had been converted in the course of the eighteenth century from a nest of buccaneers into the most thriving of plantation colonies.  By 1788 it contained some 28,000 white settlers, 22,000 free negroes and mulattoes, and 405,000 slaves.  It had nearly eight hundred sugar estates, many of them on a huge scale.  The soil was so fertile and the climate so favorable that on many fields the sugar-cane would grow perennially from the same roots almost without end.  Exports of coffee and cotton were considerable, of sugar and molasses enormous; and the volume was still rapidly swelling by reason of the great annual importations of African slaves.  The colony was by far the most valued of the French overseas possessions.

Some of the whites were descendants of the original freebooters, and retained the temperament of their forbears; others were immigrant fortune seekers.  The white women were less than half as numerous as the men, and black or yellow concubines were common substitutes for wives.  The colony was the French equivalent of Jamaica, but more prosperous and more self-willed and self-indulgent.  Its whites were impatient of outside control, and resolute that the slaves be ruled with iron hand and that the colored freemen be kept passive.

A plentiful discontent with bureaucracy and commercial restraint under the old regime caused the planters to welcome the early news of reform projects in France and to demand representation in the coming States General.  But the rapid progress of radical republicanism in that assembly threw most of these into a royalist reaction, though the poorer whites tended still to endorse the Revolution.  But now the agitations of the Amis des Noirs at Paris dismayed all