Part 135

LIBERTY. EQUALITY.

PROCLAMATION.

On board the Ocean, off the Cape, the 15th of Pluviose, 10th year of the French Republic, (Feb. 6, 1802.)

Le Clerc, General-in-chief of the Army of St. Domingo, Captain General of the Colony, to the inhabitants of St. Domingo:

Inhabitants of St. Domingo! Read the proclamation of the First Consul of the Republic. It assures to the blacks that liberty for which they have so long fought; to commerce and to agriculture that prosperity without which there can be no colonies. His promises will be faithfully fulfilled; to doubt it would be a crime.

The General-in-chief,

LE CLERC, Captain General.

By order of the General-in-chief,

LENOIR.

* * * * *

Extract from the Register of the Deliberations of the Consuls of the Republic, Paris, the 17th Brumaire, 10th year of the French Republic, one and indivisible, (November 8, 1801.)

PROCLAMATION.

The Consuls of the Republic to the Inhabitants of St. Domingo.

Inhabitants of St. Domingo! Whatever may be your origin and your color, ye are all Frenchmen; ye are all free, and all equal before God and the Republic.

France, like St. Domingo, has been a prey to factions, and torn by civil and foreign wars. But all is changed! Every people have embraced Frenchmen, and have sworn to them peace and friendship! All Frenchmen have likewise embraced each other, and have sworn to be all friends and brothers. Come ye, also, and embrace Frenchmen, and rejoice to see your friends and your brothers of Europe.

The Government sends you the Captain General, Le Clerc. He carries with him great forces to protect you against your enemies, and against the enemies of the Republic. If it should be told you these forces are intended to tear from you your liberty, answer, the Republic has given us liberty. The Republic will not suffer that it should be taken from us. Rally round the Captain General; he restores you abundance and peace. Rally round him; he who shall dare to separate himself from the Captain General will be a traitor to his country, and the vengeance of the Republic shall devour him as fire devours your dried canes.

Given at Paris, in the palace of Government, the 17th Brumaire, 10th year of the French Republic.

BONAPARTE.

By the First Consul,

H. B. MARET, Secretary.

A true copy,

LE CLERC, Captain General.

This, sir, is proof irresistible; after which it can never be said that the liberation of those people has been the rash act, or the mere ebullition, of the heat and convulsion of a revolution. We have here their liberty solemnly recognized and proclaimed to the world eight years afterwards by the man who was then and still is at the head of the French Government; or rather, who is now the Government itself. I cite these papers to show that the French have now no claim, either in right, in justice, or in law, to any portion of the people of St. Domingo as slaves; that they are individually free, if the highest authorities in France could constitute them so, which will surely not be questioned; and in order to rebut a fallacious idea that has been taken up, and urged by some, that our merchants are conducting this commerce with slaves, the property of freemen, and not with freemen themselves, thus ingeniously endeavoring to draw a distinction between the situation of St. Domingo and that of any other colony that has ever heretofore attempted to separate itself from the mother country; to make theirs, according to the language of the gentleman from Virginia, (Mr. MOORE,) a totally new, unprecedented case, and in this manner to take them out of the humane provisions of the laws of nations. I grant, sir, their case does form a distinction from any other, and in this it consists: the people of St. Domingo are fighting to preserve not only their independence as a community, but their liberty as individuals; to prevent a degradation from the exalted state of freemen to the debased condition of slaves, struggling against the manacles that have been forged for them by the lawless ambition of power. We are told, however, they are at least not free as a people, as a body politic; but in such a state of rebellion that no nation has a right to trade with them.

Let us now, Mr. President, attend to the present state of St. Domingo; but first to the circumstances that have led to it, and see how far this doctrine will apply. After the bands of the political society that had connected France and her colonies together were broken asunder; when the old Government of that country was completely dissolved, and one usurpation succeeded day after day to the places and to the vices of another; when the axe of the guillotine had extinguished the magic lustre of royalty, and even that grace and beauty, [a very superb likeness of the late Queen of France was hanging directly before him,] that had reigned so long unrivalled, the pride and idol of the nation, had to yield herself to the rudeness of a common executioner, and was humbled in death before a scoffing multitude; when the constitution that had been recently established by the voice of the nation, and under which it was hoped they would flourish and be happy, had fallen into the ruthless fangs of the Jacobins, and the patriots who supported it had found refuge in exile, or mingled their blood upon the scaffold; when all rightful, civil, and legal authority was at an end, and the Revolutionary sabre alone gave law, the people of St. Domingo, as did the people of these States under other circumstances, declared themselves free and independent, determined to take their stand among the nations of the world, and now refuse allegiance to any foreign power. They have organized a Government for themselves; they are de facto the governors of the country, and in every respect act as an independent people. They have waged, and carried on with France, for many years, a most serious war, in defence of what they say are their rights; and the French, by force of arms, have been endeavoring to subjugate them. And now let me ask if the United States, or any other power upon earth, is competent to decide this great controversy between them? They each claim to be free and independent, and therefore acknowledge no superior; the struggle is between themselves, and no other nation has a right to interfere by direct acts of hostility, or by any commercial restrictions that can go to effect injuriously either of the parties, and to do so is a departure from neutral ground, and an infraction of the laws of nations, as I think will be within my power to show from the most incontestable authorities. For this purpose I will advert again to Vattel.

Vattel, b. 2, ch. 4, sec. 56, says: “When the bands of the political society are broken, or at least suspended between the sovereign and his people, the contending parties may then be considered as two distinct powers; and since they are both equally independent of all foreign authority, nobody has a right to judge between them. Either may be in the right.” B. 3, ch. 15, sec. 295, says: “When a nation becomes divided into two parties absolutely independent, and no longer acknowledging a common superior, the State is dissolved, and the war between the two parties stands on the same ground in every respect as a public war between two different nations.” Again, sir, section 293 of the same book and chapter says: “A civil war breaks the bands of society and Government, or at least suspends their force and effect. It produces in the nation two independent parties, who consider each other as enemies, and acknowledge no common judge. Those two parties, therefore, must necessarily be considered as thenceforward constituting, at least for a time, two separate bodies, two distinct societies. Though one of the parties may have been to blame in breaking the unity of the State, and resisting the lawful authority, they are not the less divided in fact. Besides, who shall judge them? Who shall pronounce on which side the right or the wrong belongs? On earth they have no common superior. They stand, therefore, in precisely the same predicament as two nations who engage in a contest, and, being unable to come to an agreement, have recourse to arms.”

We have been exultingly told by Mr. Talleyrand, and it has been echoed from this Chamber by the gentleman from New York, (Mr. MITCHILL,) that even the British consider St. Domingo a colony of France, and upon this principle condemn our vessels for trading there. I grant that such a pretext, among many others, has been resorted to in order to destroy our commerce; I grant that such an infringement of our neutral rights has been committed, and the reasons that have induced it must be obvious to the most superficial observer. The British, with a monopoly of this commerce themselves, and those same Englishmen who now condemn our vessels for trading to St. Domingo, upon the ground of its being a French colony, heretofore, when it suited their purposes, so far acknowledged the independence of those very people as to enter into a Commercial Treaty with them, and are now not only in the constant practice of trading there themselves, but of granting licenses to others to do so. I hope, however, the day has not come when our commerce is to be under the control of the Lords of the Admiralty, or our national rights dependent upon the judicial opinions of Sir William Scott; and the learned gentleman from New York must indeed have been pressed with the barrenness of his case when he had to resort to such an argument, derived from such a source. The gentleman from New Jersey, (Mr. KITCHEL,) I must in candor say, has, in support of the present measure, assumed premises totally new and different. His reasons, like most of those we have been accustomed lately to hear, were in the true style of modern legislation, enveloped in all the mysteries of secrecy. He tells us that we had better give up this commerce, because it is not valuable. Where the gentleman obtained this piece of information is utterly beyond the comprehension of my understanding: none such, certainly, has ever been laid before us; nor did he condescend to give us a clue to its source; but as if sufficient to urge it upon our faith with all the confidence of apostolic inspiration--to us who doubted, he refused even an opportunity of acquiring knowledge through any other channel; voted against the propositions of my friend and colleague, which went to ask of the Executive the actual state of this commerce, and to ascertain its real value. To do strict justice to the gentleman’s argument, it is simply this, that whenever any foreign power may please to demand of us the surrender of a right, however just and honest it may be; however it may comport with the dignity of the Government to preserve it; if, in a pecuniary point of view, if upon a cool peddling calculation of risk, profit, and loss, it cannot be deemed of high value, we are at once to give it up. This argument, I will confess, is worthy of the bill. So striking, and of such a kind is their affinity, that they seem peculiarly calculated to expose each other, and to excite in every mind valuing the honor, the dignity, and the character of the nation, like sentiments of disgust. The case cited by the gentleman from Pennsylvania, (Mr. MACLAY,) of the Indians, I think in 1755, under the avowed authority, direction, and support of the French Government, ravaging our frontiers, surely can have no relation to the question before us. Has this Government ever furnished arms and ammunition, or done any other act in order to assist and encourage the people of St. Domingo in attacking the countries of their neighbors? I cannot conceive what subject that might have been before Congress during our present session, the gentleman must have had in his mind, to which he supposed this case could apply; certainly not the present; it is infinitely more distant in point of analogy than of date. I have been exerting my imagination to discern any object or bearing it can have, that I might endeavor to meet it, but the total impossibility of the one, will save me the trouble of the other.

I rejoice that the President has expressed, in his late Message, a disposition to take into the protection of the Government the commerce of the United States, though little has yet been done, or attempted. This project of the gentleman from Pennsylvania I hope forms no part of the new system, and he would have acted wisely before he submitted it to have examined better its consequences, and to have looked for a moment at the present condition of our commerce. What is it? Plundered upon every coast and in every sea, your flag, instead of being a protection against insult, seems to have become an invitation to injury. The British, the French, and the Spaniards, in the ratio of their force, treat us with like indignities; this is the only point in which they can agree. The former have adopted, and openly avow a system of measures that, if not counteracted, must go to deprive us of the most important of our neutral rights; while the two latter are anxiously rivalling each other in the most lawless and piratical depredations upon our defenceless trade; even the commissioned vessels of our Government have not been suffered to pass the high seas without insult and violence. The British and the French, whenever it suits their views, blockade our very ports; the British take their position off New York, so as to be convenient to the courts of Halifax; and our friends, the French, to whom the gentleman from Pennsylvania has told us we should be so particularly civil, take occasionally into their holy keeping, the commerce of Charleston and New Orleans, so as to be at a convenient distance from the British. Our trade with St. Domingo, indeed, the French have not been able to stop, nor have even the British yet assumed to themselves this maritime right; but the gentleman from Pennsylvania, in his great good faith and abundant charity, will now anticipate their wishes, and do it for them. This, indeed, surpasses even Christian meekness; it is not only, when smitten upon one cheek, turning the other also, but chastening ourselves with more than monkish severity, in the most vulnerable part.

On motion, by one of the majority, to reconsider the fourth section which restricts the operation of the law to one year, it passed in the negative.