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, 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.