IX.

San Domingo proved this.  Fifty thousand black slaves rose in one night at the instigation, and under the command, of the mulattoes, or men of colour.  The men of colour, the intermediary race, springing from white colonists and black slaves, were not slaves, neither were they citizens.  They were a kind of freedmen, with the defects and virtues of the two races; the pride of the whites, the degradation of the blacks:  a fluctuating race who, by turning sometimes to the side of the slaves, sometimes to that of the masters, inevitably produced those terrible oscillations which inevitably superinduce the overthrow of society.

The mulattoes, who themselves possessed slaves, had begun by making common cause with the colonists, and by opposing the emancipation of the blacks more obstinately than even the whites themselves.  The nearer they were to slavery, the more doggedly did they defend their share in tyranny.  Man is thus made:  none is more ready to abuse his right than he who, with difficulty, has acquired it; there are no tyrants worse than slaves, and no men prouder than parvenus.

The men of colour had all the vices of parvenus of liberty.  But when they perceived that the whites despised them as a mingled race, that the Revolution had not effaced the tinge of their skin, and the injurious prejudices which were attached to their colour; when they in vain claimed for themselves the exercise of civil rights, which the colonists opposed, they passed with the impetuosity and levity of their conduct from one passion to another, from one party to the other, and made common cause with the oppressed race.  Their habits of command, fortune, intelligence, energy, boldness, naturally pointed them out as the leaders of the blacks.  They fraternised with them, they became popular amongst the blacks, from the very tinge of skin for which they had recently blushed, when in company with the whites.  They secretly fomented the germs of insurrection at the nightly meetings of the slaves.  They kept up a clandestine correspondence with the friends of the blacks in Paris.  They spread widely in the huts, speeches and papers from Paris, which instructed the colonists in their duties and informed the slaves of their indefeasible rights.  The rights of man, commented upon by vengeance, became the catechism of all dwellings.

The whites trembled; terror urged them to violence.  The blood of the mulatto Oge and his accomplices, shed by M. de Blanchelande, governor of San Domingo and the colonial council, sowed every where despair and conspiracy.

X.