of sugar canes, were the standards which guided these hordes, not to combat, but to carnage.  The outrages of so many centuries, committed by the whites on the blacks, were avenged in one night.  A rivalry of cruelty seemed to arise between the two colours.  The negroes imitated the tortures so long used upon them, and invented new ones.  If certain noble and faithful slaves placed themselves between their old masters and death, they were sacrificed together.  Gratitude and pity are virtues which civil war never recognises.  Colour was a sentence of death without exception of persons; the war was between the races, and no longer between men.  The one must perish for the other to live!  Since justice could not make itself understood by them, there was nothing but death left for them.  Every gift of life to a white was a treason which would cost a black man’s life.  The negroes had no longer any pity:  they were men no longer, they were no longer a people, but a destroying element which spread over the land, annihilating every thing.

In a few hours eight hundred habitations, sugar and coffee stores, representing an immense capital, were destroyed.  The mills, magazines, utensils, and even the very plant which reminded them of their servitude and their compulsory labour, were cast into the flames.  The whole plain, as far as eye could reach, was covered with nothing but the smoke and the ashes of conflagration.  The dead bodies of whites, piled in hideous trophies of heads and limbs, of men, women, and infants assassinated, alone marked the spot of the rich residences, where they were supreme on the previous night.  It was the revenge of slavery:  all tyranny has such fearful reverses.

Some whites, warned in time of the insurrection by the generous indiscretion of the blacks, or protected in their flight by the forests and the darkness, had taken refuge at the Cape Town; others, concealed with their wives and children in caves, were fed and attended to by attached slaves, at the peril of their lives.  The army of blacks increased without the walls of the Cape Town, where they formed and disciplined a fortified camp.  Guns and cannons arrived by the aid of invisible auxiliaries.  Some accused the English, others the Spaniards; others, the “friends of the blacks,” with being accomplices of this insurrection.  The Spaniards, however, were at peace with France; the revolt of the blacks menaced them equally with ourselves.  The English themselves possessed three times as many slaves as the French:  the principle of the insurrection, excited by success, and spreading with them, would have ruined their establishments, and compromised the lives of their colonists.  These suspicions were absurd; there was no one culpable but liberty itself, which is not to be repressed with impunity in a portion of the human race.  It had accomplices in the very heart of the French themselves.

The weakness of the resolutions of the Assembly on the reception of this news proved this.  M. Bertrand de Molleville, minister of marine, ordered the immediate departure of 6000 men as reinforcement for the isle of San Domingo.