ety.

With Brissot's return from a visit to America in 1788, the society
went seriously to work. In America he seems to have met some things
which clinched his convictions and determinations. Coincidental, the
National Assembly was about to meet, deputies were being elected,
cahiers were being written, and the country was stirred up over the
watchword liberty. This offered an exceptional advantage to the
society. What better opportunity could one anticipate to secure the
abolition of slavery and the slave trade, the most flagrant violations
of the principles of equality and liberty ever known? On February 3,
1789, Condorcet, at that time the President, addressed a circular
letter to all the bailiwicks of France, urging that there be inserted
in the cahiers a demand that the Estates-General destroy the slave
trade and make preparations for the ultimate abolition of slavery. The
results of this campaign were disappointing. As a whole the cahiers
made it perfectly clear to the Society and all concerned, that an
attack on slavery was not a matter vital to the mass of the nation,
and that success, if it came at all, must be due to the loyalty of the
Estates-General to the principles of equality and liberty, and to the
ability and energy of the little group of intellectual leaders who
made up the Society of Friends of the Blacks. This was the status of
the controversy. Anti-slavery agitation was confined to an
intellectual elite, promoted by an appeal to the mind.

In the National Assembly the contest between Friends of the Blacks and
defenders of slavery began in connection with the application of a
delegation for admission to the Estates-General as representatives of
San Domingo. Early in 1788 there was formed in Paris an organization,
the "colonial committee" by name, composed of certain colonial
proprietors residing in France, a few merchants interested in colonial
trade, and a small number of actual residents of San Domingo, which
began an agitation for representation of the colony in the
Estates-General, which had been promised for 1792. The committee
circulated pamphlets and the like. It made a formal request of the
king for representation of San Domingo. The request was refused by the
Council of State. The agitators boldly drew up and sent to the colony
a plan for electoral assemblies. These assemblies were held without
any legal sanction, and thirty-one deputies were elected.

The committee continued its work in F