It is not difficult to see why the revolts of peasants in the Middle Ages were marked by horrible excesses,—why diplomatic Catholicism prepared a St. Bartholomew's Eve for Paris,—why Dutch and Scotch Protestants defaced and trampled under foot ecclesiastical Art,—why German princes proclaimed a crusade against budding Protestantism and Pan-slavism under Ziska and Procopius in Bohemia,—why the fagots were fired at Constance, Prague, and Smithfield, and Pequod wigwams in New England. All dreadful scenes, by simply taking place, show that they have reason for it. But will they take place again? A Black Douglas did undoubtedly live, and he was the nursery-threat for fractious Scotch children during several generations; the Douglas never caught one of them, but the threat did. So we are plied with stock-phrases, such as "the Reign of Terror" and "the Horrors of San Domingo," and History is abjectly conjured not to repeat herself, as she certainly will do, if she goes on in the old way. Of course she will. But does she propose to furnish a fac-simile of any critical epoch which haunts the imaginations of mankind? That depends upon circumstances. The same barrel will play a fresh tune by a hair's-breadth shifting of a spring. Two epochs may seem to be exactly alike, and the men who only remember may seek to terrify the men who hope by exposing the resemblance. But unless they can show that all the circumstances are identical, they have no right to infect the morning with their twilight fears. History insensibly modifies her plan to secure the maximum of progress with the minimum of catastrophes, and she repels the flippant insinuation that her children win all their fresh advantages at the expense of the old crimes.
The story of Hayti is worth telling, apart from its bearing upon questions connected with the emancipation of slaves. It is a striking record of the degradation of fine races and the elevation of inferior ones, and shows with what ease Nature can transfer her good points from her gifted children and unexpectedly endow with them her neglected ones,—thus affording us a hint of something that is more permanent and irreversible than ethnological distinctions, by repeating within our own time her humane way with her old barbarians whose hair was long. From them sprang the races which never could have dominated by cunning and force alone, and which have to lay down their dominion when they have exhausted everything but force and cunning. It is a story of the desolation in which the avarice and wrath of man must always travel: colonial prosperity was nothing but a howling war-path blazed directly across stately and beautiful human nature. It shows the blood which the fine hands of luxury never could wash off; the terrible secret at last betrayed itself. In telling this story, the horrors of San Domingo are accounted for, and whatever was exceptional in the circumstances is at the same time marked, to prevent them from being applied without discrimination to the present condition of America. But the story must be told from the beginning, for its own sake; otherwise it will be a bad story, without a moral. If the main features of it are carefully preserved, it will make its own application.
That, however, is fatal to any attempt to infect minds with the Haytian bug-bear, now that political discussion threatens to ravage the country which our arms are saving. It has been used before, when it was necessary to save the Union and to render anti-slavery sentiment odious. The weak and designing, and all who wait for the war to achieve a constitutional recurrence of our national malady, will use it again to defeat the great act of justice and the people's great necessity.
Slavery is a continual conspiracy. Its life depends upon intrigue, aggression, adroit combinations with other forms of human selfishness. The people at the North who at this moment hate to hear the word Emancipation mentioned, and who insist that the war shall merely restore things to their original position, are the people who always hated the phrase "Anti-Slavery," who will be ready to form a fresh coalition with Slavery for the sake of recovering or creating political advantages, and whom the South will know how to use again, by reviving ancient prejudices, and making its very wounds a cause for sympathy. Slavery will be the nucleus of political combinations so long as it can preserve its constitutional and commercial advantages,—while it can sell its cotton and recover its fugitives. Is the precious blood already spilled in this war to become, as it congeals, nothing but cement to fugitive-slave bills, and the basis of three-fifths, and the internal slave-trade? For this we spend three millions a day, and lives whose value cannot be expressed in dollars,—for this anguish will sit for years at thousands of desolate hearths, and be the only legacy of fatherless children. For what glory will they inherit whose fathers fell to save still a chance or two for Slavery? It is for this we are willing to incur the moral and financial hazards of a great struggle,—to furnish an Anti-Republican party of reconstructionists with a bridge for Slavery to reach a Northern platform, to frown at us again from the chair of State. The Federal picket who perchance fell last night upon some obscure outpost of our great line of Freedom has gone up to Heaven protesting against such cruel expectations, wherever they exist; and they exist wherever apathy exists, and old hatred lingers, and wherever minds are cowed and demoralized by the difficulties of this question. In his body is a bullet run by Slavery, and sent by its unerring purpose; his comrades will raise over him a little hillock upon which Slavery will creep to look out for future chances,—ruthlessly scanning the political horizon from the graves of our unnamed heroes. This, and eight dollars a month, will his wife inherit; and if she ever sees his grave, she will see a redoubt which the breast of her husband raises for some future defence of Slavery. The People, who are waging this war, and who are actually getting at the foe through the bristling ranks of politicians and contractors, must have such a moral opinion upon this question as to defeat these dreadful possibilities. Let us be patient, because we see some difficulties; but let us give up the war itself sooner than our resolution, that, either by this war, or after it, Slavery shall be stripped of its insignia, and turned out to cold and irretrievable disgrace, weaponless, fangless, and with no object in the world worthy of its cunning. We can be patient, but we must also be instant and unanimous in insisting that the whole of Slavery shall pay the whole of Freedom's bill. Then the dear names whose sound summons imperatively our tears shall be proudly handed in by us to History, as we bid her go with us from grave to grave to see how the faith of a people watched them against the great American Body Snatcher, and kept them inviolate to be her memorials. We feel our hearts reinforced by the precious blood which trickled from Ball's Bluff into the Potomac, and was carried thence into the great sea of our conscience, tumultuous with pride, anger, and resolve. The drops feed the country's future, wherever they are caught first by our free convictions ere they sink into the beloved soil. Let us be instant, be incisive with our resolution, that peace may not be the mother of another war, and our own victory rout ourselves.
Blow, North-wind, blow! Keep that bearded field of bayonets levelled southward! Rustle, robes of Liberty, who art walking terribly over the land, with sombre countenance, and garments rolled in blood! See, she advances with one hand armed with Justice, while the other points to that exquisite symmetry half revealed, as if beckoning thitherward her children back again to the pure founts of life! "Be not afraid," she cries, "of the noise of my garments and their blood-stains; for this is the blood of a new covenant of Freedom, shed to redeem and perpetuate a chosen land."
CHAPTER II.
THE PLACE—THE CLIMATE—NATIVES—SETTLERS.
This old haunted house of Hayti had many occupants, who left as heirlooms generation upon generation of hateful memories. Their dreams, their deeds, their terrific tempers, lurked for the newcomers, and harried them forth or made them kin. It is a cumulative story of dire and fateful proceedings, like the story of the family of Pelops. It must be told with deliberation. So the place, the climate, the aborigines, the early atrocities, the importation of new races and characteristics, command consideration as inevitable elements of the narrative.
This spot of the New World was the first to ache beneath the white man's greedy and superstitious tread. A tenacious Gothic race, after its long blockade by Moors in the northern mountains of the Iberian Peninsula, had lately succeeded in recovering the last stronghold of Arab power and learning. Fresh from the atrocities of that contest, its natural bigotry deepened by its own struggle for national existence, sombre, fanatical, cruel, and avaricious, but enterprising and indomitable, it is wafted across the ocean by Columbus, to expend its propensities unchecked against a weaker and less characteristic barbarism. What might be expected, when a few noble men succeed in transporting the worst features of their own country, in such numbers of intractable people, the raking of seaports, with little on board in the way of religion, save the traditions of the Church and the materials for exhibiting the drama of the Mass! This is the contingent which civilization detaches for the settlement of another world. It effaces a smiling barbarism by a saturnine and gloomy one, as when a great forest slides from some height over a wild gay meadow. These capable, cruel men went sailing among the Bahamas, soothed by the novelty and delight of finding land, and tried to behave at first as men do among artless children who measure every thing by their own scantiness; for they compelled themselves to be very mild and condescending, till, after various mischances and rebuffs by sea and land, the temper breaks forth in rage at disappointments, and Hayti is the first place which is blasted by that frightful Spanish scowl. The change was as sudden as that from calm weather to one of her tempests. The whole subsequent history seems as if it were the revenge of Columbus's own imagination, when the sober truth was discovered instead of Cipango and the King of India. Thus was the New World unsettled, and the horrors of San Domingo committed to the soil.
Nearly the whole of Hayti lies between the eighteenth and twentieth degrees of latitude, and the sixty-ninth, and seventy-fifth of longitude. Its greatest length is three hundred and forty miles, its greatest breadth, one hundred and thirty-two. It has a surface of somewhat more than twenty-seven thousand square miles, or about eighteen million square acres. The greater part of this is mountain-land. There are three extensive plains,—La Vega in the east, Santiago in the north, and Les Plaines in the southeast. These are distinct from the Savannas.[A] The island is about the size of the State of Maine. Its shape is peculiar, as it widens gradually from its southeastern end to nearly the centre of its greatest length, whence the southern coast trends rapidly to the north and west and stretches into a peninsula, like a long mandible, corresponding to which on the northern coast is another half as long, like a broken one, and between these lies a great bay with the uncultivated island of Gonaive. The eastern part of the island has also the small peninsula of Saniana, lying along the bay of that name. The surface is covered by mountains which appear at first to be tossed together wildly, without system or mutual relation, but they can be described, upon closer inspection, as four ranges, with a general parallelism, extending nearly east and west, but broken in the centre by the Cibao ridge, which radiates in every direction from two or three peaks, the highest in the island. Their height is reputed to be nine thousand feet, but they have not yet been accurately measured. The mountains of La Hotte, which form the long southern tongue of land, rise to the height of seven thousand feet. They are all of calcareous formation, and abound in the caverns which are found in limestone regions. Some of these have their openings on the coast, and are supposed to extend very far inland; they receive the tide, and reject it with a bellowing noise, as the pent air struggles with it under their arched roofs. These were called by the Spaniards baxos roncadores, droning or snoring basses. The French had a name, le gouffre, the gulf, to describe these noises; but they also applied it to the subterranean rumbling, accompanied with explosions and violent vibrations of the ground, which is caused by the heavy rains soaking through the porous stone, after the dry season has heated the whole surface of the island. The steaming water makes the earth groan and shake as it forces its way through the crevices, feeling for an outlet, or thrown back upon its own increasing current. These mysterious noises filled with awe the native priests who managed the superstition of the island before the Spaniards introduced another kind: no doubt they served for omens, to incite or to deter, voices of Chthonian deities, which needed interpreting in the interest of some great cacique who would not budge upon his business without the sanction of religion. Many a buccaneer, in after-times, who quailed before no mortal thunders made by French or Spanish navies, was soundly frightened by the gigantic snoring beneath his feet into reviewing his career, and calculating the thickness of the crust between himself and his impatient retribution.