Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/283

 coffee, cotton and indigo had been laid waste, and their mills and houses consumed to ashes. The negroes, in the wantonness of their fury, left nothing undestroyed that was not in itself indestructible. The thick walls of edifices, which remained standing after the tire had consumed all enclosed within them, were by painful manual effort razed to the ground. The iron kettles of the boiling houses, and the bells which called them to their labors, were crushed into atoms, as if to destroy from the very face of the earth all memorials of former servitude. Twelve hundred families, once opulent and happy, were reduced to utter poverty, and driven in their destitution to subsist on public charity or private hospitality in their own or foreign countries. More than ten thousand of the rebels also had perished by the sword or by famine, and many hundreds of them had met their fate from the hands of the public executioner.

Meanwhile strange proceedings relative to the colonies were occurring in the mother country. The news of the insurrection of the blacks had not had time to reach Paris; but the intelligence of the manner in which the decree of the 15th of May had been received by the whites in St. Domingo, had created great alarm. We are afraid we have been too hasty with that decree of ours about the rights of the mulattoes; it is likely, by all accounts, to occasion a civil war between them and the whites; and if so, we run the risk of losing the colony altogether." This was the common talk of the politicians of Paris. Accordingly, they hastened to undo what they had done four months before, and on the 24th of September the national assembly actually repealed the decree of the 15th of May by a large majority. Thus the mother country and the colony were at cross purposes; for at the very moment that the colony was admitting the decree, the mother country was repealing it.

The flames of war were immediately rekindled in the colony. "The decree is repealed," said the whites; "we need not have been in such a hurry in making concessions to the mulattoes." "The decree is repealed," said the mulattoes; "the people in Paris are playing false with us; we must depend on ourselves in future. There is no possibility of coming to terms with the whites; either they must exterminate us, or we must exterminate them."

Hostilities were renewed in the streets of Port-au-Prince. A battery of twenty cannons opened its fire upon the ranks of the armed mulattoes, who retreated from the city and gained the road to the mountains. Scarcely had they departed, when both the north and south portions of the city were discovered to be on fire, and in an incredibly short space of time the whole city was wrapt in conflagration. The fire made such progress that no exertions could arrest it, and it continued to rage for forty-eight hours, when it began to abate for want of further materials to minister to its fury, and twenty-seven out of thirty squares of the town were utterly destroyed.

Affright, disorder and pillage augmented the horrors of the calamity. The fire was of course attributed to the mulattoes; and their wives and children, two thousand in number, found themselves obliged to fly, not only from their burning habitations, but from the sword with which, in the blindness of vengeance, the whites were pursuing them. Driven by this two-fold terror, they