Page:The rising son, or, The antecedents and advancement of the colored race (IA risingsonthe00browrich).pdf/178

 various enough. The colonists counselled and encouraged more vengeance. Children, women, and old men were confined in sacks, and thrown into the sea; this was the punishment of parricides among the Romans, ten centuries before; and now resorted to by these haters of liberty.

Rochambeau put five hundred blacks, prisoners whom he had taken in battle, to death in one day. Twenty of Toussaint's old officers were chained to the rocks and starved to death.

But the blacks were gradually getting possession of the strongholds in the islands.

"To arms! to arms!" was the cry all over the island, until every one who could use even the lightest instrument of death, was under arms.

Dessalines, Belair, and Lamartiniere, defeated the French general at Verettes; in no place was the slaughter so terrible as there. At a mere nod of Dessalines, men who had been slaves, and who dreaded the new servitude with which they were threatened, massacred seven hundred of the whites that Dessalines had amongst his prisoners.

The child died in the arms of its sick and terrified mother; the father was unable to save the daughter, the daughter unable to save the father. Mulattoes took the lives of their white fathers, to whom they had been slaves, or whom, allowing them to go free, had disowned them; thus revenging themselves for the mixture of their blood. So frightful was this slaughter, that the banks of the Artibonite were strewn with dead bodies, and the waters dyed with the blood of the slain. Not a grave was dug, for Dessalines had prohibited interment, in order that