work of death, thus completed with
such outbursts of unutterable brutality, constituted and closed the
first act in the grand drama of Haytien freedom.

But equality was not yet established. The colored men, or mulattoes,
beheld, with an eye burning with jealousy, the superior power and
ascendency of the blacks. Hence arose the horrors of a civil war.
Equality had been proclaimed, and anarchy produced. In this frightful
chaos, the ambitious mulattoes, whose insatiable desire of equality had
first disturbed the peace of the island, perished miserably beneath the
vengeance of the very slaves whom they had themselves roused from
subjection and elevated into irresistible power. Thus ended the second
act of the horrible drama.

This bloody discord, this wild chaos of disgusting brutalities, of
course terminated not in freedom, but in a military despotism. With the
subsequent wars and fearful destruction of human life our present
inquiry has nothing to do. We must confine our attention to the point
before us, namely, the kind of freedom achieved by the blacks of St.
Domingo. We have witnessed the two great manifestations of that freedom;
we shall now look at its closing scene. This we shall, for obvious
reasons, present in the language of an English author.

"An independent negro state," says he, "was thus established in Hayti;
but the people have not derived all the benefits which they sanguinely
expected. Released from their compulsory toil, they have not yet learned
to subject themselves to the restraints of regular industry. The first
absolute rulers made the most extraordinary efforts to overcome the
indolence which soon began to display itself. The _Code Rural_ directed
that the laborer should fix himself on a certain estate, which he was
never afterward to quit without a passport from the government. His
hours of labor and rest were fixed by statute. The whip, at first
permitted, was ultimately prohibited; but as every military officer was
allowed to chastise with a thick cane, and almost every proprietor held
a commission, the laborer was not much relieved. By these means Mr.
Mackenzie supposes that the produce of 1806 was raised to about a third
of that of 1789. But such violent regulations could not continue to be
enforced amid the succeeding agitations, and under a republican
_regime_. Almost all traces of laborious culture were soon obliterated;
large tracts, which had been one entire sugar garden, presented no