gs in the town of
Cap Francais--festivities among the French and Creole inhabitants, who
were as ready to rejoice on appointed occasions as the dulness of
colonial life renders natural, but who would have been yet more lively
than they were if the date of their festival had been in January or May.
There was no choice as to the date, however. They were governed in
regard to their celebrations by what happened at Paris; and never had
the proceedings of the mother-country been so important to the colony as
now.

During the preceding year, the white proprietors of Saint Domingo, who
had hailed with loud voices the revolutionary doctrines before which
royalty had begun to succumb in France, were astonished to find their
cries of Liberty and Equality adopted by some who had no business with
such ideas and words. The mulatto proprietors and merchants of the
island innocently understood the words according to their commonly
received meaning, and expected an equal share with the whites in the
representation of the colony, in the distribution of its offices, and in
the civil rights of its inhabitants generally. These rights having been
denied by the whites to the freeborn mulattoes, with every possible
manifestation of contempt and dislike, an effort had been made to wring
from the whites by force what they would not grant to reason; and an
ill-principled and ill-managed revolt had taken place, in the preceding
October, headed by Vincent Oge and his brother, sons of the proprietress
of a coffee plantation, a few miles from Cap Francais. These young men
were executed, under circumstances of great barbarity. Their sufferings
were as seed sown in the warm bosoms of their companions and adherents,
to spring up, in due season, in a harvest of vigorous revenge. The
whites suspected this; and were as anxious as their dusky neighbours to
obtain the friendship and sanction of the revolutionary government at
home. That government was fluctuating in its principles and in its
counsels; it favoured now one party, and now the other; and on the
arrival of its messengers at the ports of the colony, there ensued
sometimes the loud boastings of the whites, and sometimes quiet, knowing
smiles and whispered congratulations among the depressed section of the
inhabitants.

The cruelties inflicted on Vincent Oge had interested many influential
persons in Paris in the cause of the mulattoes. Great zeal was
exorcised in attempting to put them i