Having followed De Wimpffen to this point, the reader is entitled to hear his parting epigrams. "The more I know," he said, of the inhabitants of Saint Domingo, "the more I felicitate myself on quitting it. I came hither with the noble ambition of occupying myself solely in acquiring a fortune; but destined to become a master, and consequently to possess slaves, I saw, in the necessity of living with them, that of studying them with attention to know them, and I depart with much less esteem for the one, and pity for the other. When a person is what the greater part of the planters are, he is made to have slaves; when he is what the greater part of the slaves are, he is made to have a master."

Whether Jean Audubon's long experience would have confirmed all that has just been said is doubtful, for he was primarily a merchant or dealer and thus belonged to the favored class. But what especially interests us now is that both he and De Wimpffen were owners of plantations in the southern province of Santo Domingo at the same time. The one who wished to retain a valuable property followed the custom of the time by confiding the management of his affairs to an agent, either at a fixed salary or on a profit-sharing basis; while the other, who stayed long enough to discern the trend of events, was glad to sell his land and his slaves and shake the dust of the island from his feet forever.[34]

Before resuming the intimate details of our narrative, we must follow the whirlwind of political events already set in motion in the island colony. In the spring of 1789 the white colonists of Santo Domingo took administrative matters into their own hands, and without vestige of legal authority, elected and dispatched eighteen deputies to the States-General, then sitting in France. These men reached Versailles in June, a month after that body had declared itself the National Assembly, but only six were ever admitted to its counsels. For a long time opposition to the planters had been fomented in Paris by the "Friends of the Blacks," the abolition society to which we have referred; stories of cruelty to the slaves, colored and intensified in passing from mouth to mouth, as invariably happens when atrocity tales are used as partisan weapons, added to the arrogance and extravagant habits of many planters when resident in the mother country, did not tend to soften the prejudice of the public towards their class. The planters could get no consideration at home, and, as we have seen, the Declaration of Rights followed promptly in August, while a legislative Assembly was ordered in September. Meantime the mulattoes on the island were clamoring for the political rights which the decree had promised them, and, to make matters worse, some of the influential whites espoused their cause, even preaching the enfranchisement of the blacks, from whom up to this time little had been heard. In short, the whites were divided as effectually as were blacks and mulattoes.

The dominant party in Santo Domingo, led by the Governor-General, were determined to uphold the old despotic régime, while the General Assembly, which met at Saint Marc in obedience to orders from the mother country, on April 16, 1790, drafted a new constitution. The clash came in July of this year, and in the northern province, where the first blood of the revolution was drawn at Port-au-Prince. On October 12, 1790, James Ogé, a mulatto, inspired, financed and equipped by the "Friends of the Blacks" in Paris, landed secretly in Santo Domingo, established a military camp at Cap François and called all mulattoes to arms. His plan was to wage war on the whites as well as upon all mulattoes who refused to join his standard of revolt; but Ogé and his company were quickly suppressed, and this incompetent leader, who fled to Spanish territory, was later extradited and broken on the wheel. This episode naturally infuriated the whites against all mulattoes, who took up arms at Les Cayes and at other points. The whites also armed, and a skirmish occurred at Les Cayes, Jean Audubon's old home, where fifty persons on both sides lost their lives, but a temporary truce was immediately effected. This was the first serious incident in which the town of Les Cayes figured in the bloody revolution of Santo Domingo; it occurred, we believe, in the late autumn of 1790. Audubon's mother had then been dead four years, and her son, the future naturalist, had left the country in the fall of 1789; in order to bring out these facts clearly it has seemed necessary to enter into this detail.

Later events in Santo Domingo now moved in a direction and with a velocity which few then were able to comprehend. The danger and the potency of the volcano that had long been muttering beneath their feet needed but a few touches from without to reveal its full explosive power. These were furnished not only by the mulattoes, many of whom, after having fought under French officers in the American Revolution, had returned to the island and there spread wide the spirit of disaffection and revolt; but also by the National Assembly in France, which by its vacillating policies destroyed every hope of reconciliation. In March, 1790, this Assembly granted to the citizens of Santo Domingo the right of local self-government, but only a year later, on May 15, 1791, tore up this decree and emancipated the mulattoes. When the news reached the island six weeks later, the colony was thrown into the utmost consternation; the whites as a class refused point-blank to accept the decision and summoned an Assembly of their own, which met in August. The mulattoes again took up arms, and the blacks, who by this time had been won to their side, started a general revolt which had its origin on a plantation called "Noé," in the parish of Acul, nine miles from Cap François. They began by burning the cane fields and the sugar houses and murdering their white owners. Thenceforth Santo Domingan history becomes an intricate and disgusting detail of conspiracies, treacheries, murders, conflagrations, and atrocities of every description. The only ray of light comes from the first genuine leader of the blacks, the gallant but unfortunate Toussaint, in 1793.

As has already been intimated, Jean Audubon's Santo Domingo property suffered long after he left the island, and certainly after 1792 when, as we shall soon see, revolutions were demanding his attention and all his energies at home.

CHAPTER IV
AUDUBON'S BIRTH, NATIONALITY, AND PARENTAGE

Les Cayes—Audubon's French Creole mother—His early names—Discovery of the Sanson bill with the only record of his birth—Medical practice of an early day—Birth of Muguet, Audubon's sister—Fougère and Muguet taken to France—Audubon's adoption and baptism—His assumed name—Dual personality in legal documents—Source of published errors—Autobiographic records—Rise of enigma and tradition—The Marigny myth.

Santo Domingo, though repeatedly ravaged by the indiscriminate hand of man, is a noble and productive land, which, for the diversity and grandeur of its scenery and the rare beauty of its tropical vegetation, was justly regarded as one of the garden spots of the West Indies and worthy to be in truth a "Paradise of the New World." For every lover of birds and nature this semi-tropical island, and especially Les Cayes, upon its south-westerly verge in what is now Haiti, will have a peculiar interest when it is known, that there, amid the splendor of sea and sun and the ever-glorious flowers and birds, the eyes of America's great woodsman and pioneer ornithologist first saw the light of day.