"You will not be Caradeux, if you pardon me."
"What do you say?" cried the master, in a rage.
"If you do not kill me, I swear by my god-mother that I will kill you."
At this, Caradeux seized a huge stone, and hurled it at his head, and
the other blacks hastened to put an end to his suffering.
Burning the negro alive was an occasional occurrence. Burying him alive
was more frequent. A favorite pastime was to bury him up to his neck,
and let the boys bowl at his head. Sometimes the head was covered with
molasses, and left to the insects. Pitying comrades were found to stone
the sufferer to death. One or two instances were known of planters who
rolled the bodies of slaves, raw and bloody from a whipping, among the
ant-hills. If a cattle-tender let a mule or ox come to harm, the animal
was sometimes killed and the man sewed up in the carcass. This was done
a few times in cases where the mule died of some epizoötic malady.
Hamstringing negroes had always been practised against marooning, theft,
and other petty offences: an overseer seldom failed to bring down his
negro with a well-aimed hatchet. _Coupe-jarret_ was a phrase applied
during the revolutionary intrigues to those who were hampering a
movement which appeared to advance.
Cutting off the ears was a very common punishment. But M. Jouanneau, who
lived at Grande-Riviére, nailed one of his slaves to the wall by the
ears, then released him by cutting them off with a razor, and closed
the entertainment with compelling him to grill and eat them. There was
one overseer who never went out without a hammer and nails in his
pocket, for nailing negroes by the ear to a tree or post when the humor
struck him.
Half a dozen cases of flaying women alive, inspired by jealousy, are
upon record; also some cases of throwing negroes into the furnaces with
the _bagasse_ or waste of the sugar-cane. Pistol-practice at negroes'
heads was very common; singeing them upon cassava plates, grinding them
slowly through the sugar-mill, pitching them into the boiler, was an
occasional pastime.
If a woman was fortunate enough to lose her babe, she was often thrown
into a cell till she chose to have another. Madame Bailly had a wooden
child made, which she fastened around the necks of her negresses, if
their children died, until they chose to replace them. These punishments
were devised to check infanticide, which was the natural relief of the
slave-mother.
Venault de Charmilly, a planter of distinction, afterwards the
accomplished agent of the emigrant-interest at the court of St. James,
used to carry pincers in his pocket, to tear the ears or tongues of his
unfortunate slaves, if they did not hear him call, or if their replies
were unsatisfactory. He pulled teeth with the same instrument. This man
threw his postilion to the horses, literally tying him in their stall
till he was beaten by their hoofs to shreds. He was an able advocate of
slavery, and did much to poison the English mind, and to create a party
with the object of annexing San Domingo and restoring the colonial
system.
Cocherel, a planter of Gonaïves, had a slave who played upon the violin.
After terrible floggings, he would compel this man to play, as a
punishment for having danced without music. He found it piquant to watch
the contest of pain and sorrow with the native love of melody. The cases
where French planters watched curiously the characteristics of their
various expedients for torture are so common that they furnish us with a
trait of French Creolism. A poor cook, for instance, was one day thrown
into an oven with a crackling heap of _bagasse_, because some article of
food reached the table underdone. As the lips curled and shrivelled away
from the teeth, his master, who was observing the effects of heat,
exclaimed,--"The rascal laughs!"
But the most symbolical action, expressive of the colony's whole life,
was performed by one Corbierre, who punished his slaves by
blood-letting, and gave a humorous refinement to the sugar which he
manufactured by using this blood to assist in clarifying it.
Let these instances suffice. The pen will not penetrate into the sorrows
which befell the slave concubine and mother. The form of woman was never
so mutilated and dishonored, the decencies of fetichism and savageism
were never so outraged, as by these slaveholding idolaters of the Virgin
and the Mother of God.
The special cruelties, together with the names of the perpetrators,
which have been remembered and recorded, would form an appalling
catalogue for the largest slaveholding community in the world. But this
recorded cruelty, justly representative of similar acts which never came
to the ears of men, was committed by only forty thousand whites of both
sexes and all ages upon an area little larger than the State of Maine.
There was agony enough racking the bosoms of that half-million of slaves
to sate a hemisphere of slaveholding tyrants. But the public opinion of
the little coterie of villains was never startled. It is literally true
that not a single person was ever condemned to the penalties of the
_Code Noir_ for the commission of one of the crimes above mentioned. One
would think that the close recurrence, in time and space, of these acts
of crime would have beaten through even this Creole temperament into
some soft spot that belonged to the mother-country of God, if not of
France. Occasionally a tender heart went back to Paris to record its
sense of the necessity of some amelioration of these colonial
ferocities; but the words of humanity were still spoken in the interest
of slavery. It was for the sake of economy, and to secure a natural
local increase of the slave population, that these vague reports of
cruelty were suggested to the government. The planting interest procured
the suppression of one of the mildest and most judicious of the books
thus written, and had the author cast into prison. When the crack of the
planter's lash sounded in the purlieus of the Tuileries itself, humanity
had to wait till the Revolution had cleared out the Palace, the Church,
and the Courts, before its clear protest could reverberate against the
system of the colony. Then Grégoire, Lameth, Condorcet, Brissot,
Lafayette, and others, assailed the planting interest, and uttered the
bold generalization that either the colonies or the crimes must be
abandoned; for the restraining provisions of the _Code Noir_ were too
feeble for the sugar exigency, and had long ago become obsolete. There
was no police except for slaves, no inspectors of cultivation above the
agents and the overseers. He was considered a _bon blanc_, and a person
of benignity, whose slaves were seldom whipped to death. There could be
neither opinion nor economy to check these things, when "_La côte
d'Afrique est une bonne mère_" was the planter's daily consolation at
the loss of an expensive negro.
Such slavery could not be improved; it might be abolished by law or
drowned in blood. There is a crowd of pamphlets that have come down to
us shrieking with the ineptitude of this period. It was popular to
accuse the society of the _Amis des Noirs_ of having ruined the colony
by inspiring among the slaves a vague restlessness which blossomed into
a desire for vengeance and liberty. But it is a sad fact that neither of
those great impulses was stirring in those black forms, monoliths of
scars and slave-brands. Not till their eyes had grown red at the sight
of blood shed at other suggestions, and their ears had devoured the
crackling of the canes and country-seats of their masters, did the
guiding spirit of Liberty emerge from the havoc, and respond with
Toussaint to the call of French humanity, by fighting for the Republic
and the Rights of Man. Suicide was the only insurrection that ever
seemed to the slave to promise liberty; for during the space of a
hundred years nothing more formidable than the two risings of Padre Jean
and Makandal had thrilled the consciences of the planters. If the latter
had preserved the unity of sentiment that belonged to the atrocious
unity of their interest, and had waived their pride for their safety,
they might have proclaimed decrees of emancipation with every morning's
peal of the plantation-bell, and the negroes would have replied every
morning, "_Vous maître_."
There is but one other folly to match the accusation that the sentiment
of French Abolitionism excited the slaves to rise: that is, the
sentiment that a slave ought not to be excited to rise against such
"Horrors of San Domingo" as we have just recorded. The men who are
guilty of that sentimentality, while they smugly enjoy personal immunity
and the dear delights of home, deserve to be sold to a Caradeux or a
Legree. Let them be stretched upon the _quatre-piquet_ of a great people
in a war-humor, whose fathers once rose against the enemies that would
have bled only their purses, and hamstrung only their material growth.
In the two decades between 1840 and 1860 the American Union was seldom
saved by a Northern statesman without the help of San Domingo. People in
cities, with a balance at the bank, stocks floating in the market,
little children going to primary schools, a well-filled wood-shed, and a
house that is not fire-proof, shudder when they hear that a great moral
principle has devastated properties and sent peaceful homes up in the
smoke of arson. Certainly the Union shall be preserved; at all events,
the wood-shed must be. Nothing shall be the midnight assassin of the
country until slavery itself is ready for the job. So the Northern
merchant kept his gold at par through dread of anti-slavery, and saved
the Union just long enough to pay seventy-five per cent, for the luxury
of the "Horrors." Did it ever once occur to him that his eminent
Northern statesman was pretending something that the South itself knew
to be false and never hypocritically urged against the anti-slavery men?
Southern men of intelligence had the best of reasons for understanding
the phenomena of San Domingo, and while the "Friends of the Black" were
dripping with innocent French blood in Northern speeches, the embryo
Secessionists at Nashville and Savannah strengthened their convictions
with the proper rendering of the same history. Take, as a specimen of
their tranquil frame of mind, the following view, which was intended to
correct a vague popular dread that in all probability was inspired by
Northern statesmen. It is from a wonderfully calm and judicious speech
delivered before the Nashville Convention, a dozen years ago, by General
Felix Huston of Mississippi.
"This insurrection [of San Domingo] having occurred so near
to us, and being within the recollection of many persons
living, who heard the exaggerated accounts of the day, has
fastened itself on the public imagination, until it has
become a subject of frequent reference, and even Southern
twaddlers declaim about the Southern States being reduced to
the condition of St. Domingo, and Abolitionists triumphantly
point to it as a case where the negro race have asserted and
maintained their freedom.
"Properly speaking, this was not a slave insurrection,
although it assumed that form after the island was thrown
into a revolutionary state.
"The island of St. Domingo, in 1791, contained about seven
hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, about fifty thousand
of whom were whites, more than double that number of
mulattoes and of mixed blood, and the balance were negroes.
"The French and Spanish planters had introduced a general
system of concubinage, and the consequence was a numerous
progeny of mulattoes, many of whom associated with the
whites nearly on terms of equality, were educated at home or
sent to Europe to be educated, and many of them were
wealthy, having been freed by their parents and their
property left to them. These things had lowered, the
character of the white proprietors, gradually bringing them
down to the level of the mulattoes, and lessening the
distance between them and the blacks; and in addition to
this, there were a number of the white population who were
poor and enervated, and rendered vicious by the low state of
social morals and influence of the climate.
"In this state of affairs, when the French Revolution broke
out, the wild spirit of liberty caught to the island and
infected the mulattoes and the lower class of white
population, and they sought to equalize themselves with the
large proprietors. The foundations of society were broken up
by this intermediate class, and in the course of the
struggle they called in the blacks, and the two united,
exceeding the whites in the proportion of twelve to one,
expelled them from the island. Since that time a continual
struggle has been going on between the mulattoes and the
negroes, the latter having numbers and brute force, and the
former sustaining themselves by superior intelligence.
"There never has been a formidable slave insurrection,
considered purely as such; and a comparison of our situation
with slavery as it has existed elsewhere ought to relieve
the minds of the most timid from any apprehension of danger
from our negroes, under any circumstances, in peace or war."
This generally truthful statement, which needs but little modification,
shows that San Domingo was helping to destroy the Union at the South
while it was trying to save it at the North. The words of the
Secessionist were prophetic, and Slavery will continue to be the great
unimpaired war power of Southern institutions, till some color-bearer,
white or black, in the name of law and order, shakes the stars of
America over her inland fields.