If a woman was fortunate enough to lose her babe, she was often thrown into a cell till she chose to have another. Madame Bailly had a wooden child made, which she fastened around the necks of her negresses, if their children died, until they chose to replace them. These punishments were devised to check infanticide, which was the natural relief of the slave-mother.
Venault de Charmilly, a planter of distinction, afterwards the accomplished agent of the emigrant-interest at the court of St. James, used to carry pincers in his pocket, to tear the ears or tongues of his unfortunate slaves, if they did not hear him call, or if their replies were unsatisfactory. He pulled teeth with the same instrument. This man threw his postilion to the horses, literally tying him in their stall till he was beaten by their hoofs to shreds. He was an able advocate of slavery, and did much to poison the English mind, and to create a party with the object of annexing San Domingo and restoring the colonial system.
Cocherel, a planter of Gonaïves, had a slave who played upon the violin. After terrible floggings, he would compel this man to play, as a punishment for having danced without music. He found it piquant to watch the contest of pain and sorrow with the native love of melody. The cases where French planters watched curiously the characteristics of their various expedients for torture are so common that they furnish us with a trait of French Creolism. A poor cook, for instance, was one day thrown into an oven with a crackling heap of bagasse, because some article of food reached the table underdone. As the lips curled and shrivelled away from the teeth, his master, who was observing the effects of heat, exclaimed,—"The rascal laughs!"
But the most symbolical action, expressive of the colony's whole life, was performed by one Corbierre, who punished his slaves by blood-letting, and gave a humorous refinement to the sugar which he manufactured by using this blood to assist in clarifying it.
Let these instances suffice. The pen will not penetrate into the sorrows which befell the slave concubine and mother. The form of woman was never so mutilated and dishonored, the decencies of fetichism and savageism were never so outraged, as by these slaveholding idolaters of the Virgin and the Mother of God.
The special cruelties, together with the names of the perpetrators, which have been remembered and recorded, would form an appalling catalogue for the largest slaveholding community in the world. But this recorded cruelty, justly representative of similar acts which never came to the ears of men, was committed by only forty thousand whites of both sexes and all ages upon an area little larger than the State of Maine. There was agony enough racking the bosoms of that half-million of slaves to sate a hemisphere of slaveholding tyrants. But the public opinion of the little coterie of villains was never startled. It is literally true that not a single person was ever condemned to the penalties of the Code Noir for the commission of one of the crimes above mentioned. One would think that the close recurrence, in time and space, of these acts of crime would have beaten through even this Creole temperament into some soft spot that belonged to the mother-country of God, if not of France. Occasionally a tender heart went back to Paris to record its sense of the necessity of some amelioration of these colonial ferocities; but the words of humanity were still spoken in the interest of slavery. It was for the sake of economy, and to secure a natural local increase of the slave population, that these vague reports of cruelty were suggested to the government. The planting interest procured the suppression of one of the mildest and most judicious of the books thus written, and had the author cast into prison. When the crack of the planter's lash sounded in the purlieus of the Tuileries itself, humanity had to wait till the Revolution had cleared out the Palace, the Church, and the Courts, before its clear protest could reverberate against the system of the colony. Then Grégoire, Lameth, Condorcet, Brissot, Lafayette, and others, assailed the planting interest, and uttered the bold generalization that either the colonies or the crimes must be abandoned; for the restraining provisions of the Code Noir were too feeble for the sugar exigency, and had long ago become obsolete. There was no police except for slaves, no inspectors of cultivation above the agents and the overseers. He was considered a bon blanc, and a person of benignity, whose slaves were seldom whipped to death. There could be neither opinion nor economy to check these things, when "La côte d'Afrique est une bonne mère" was the planter's daily consolation at the loss of an expensive negro.
Such slavery could not be improved; it might be abolished by law or drowned in blood. There is a crowd of pamphlets that have come down to us shrieking with the ineptitude of this period. It was popular to accuse the society of the Amis des Noirs of having ruined the colony by inspiring among the slaves a vague restlessness which blossomed into a desire for vengeance and liberty. But it is a sad fact that neither of those great impulses was stirring in those black forms, monoliths of scars and slave-brands. Not till their eyes had grown red at the sight of blood shed at other suggestions, and their ears had devoured the crackling of the canes and country-seats of their masters, did the guiding spirit of Liberty emerge from the havoc, and respond with Toussaint to the call of French humanity, by fighting for the Republic and the Rights of Man. Suicide was the only insurrection that ever seemed to the slave to promise liberty; for during the space of a hundred years nothing more formidable than the two risings of Padre Jean and Makandal had thrilled the consciences of the planters. If the latter had preserved the unity of sentiment that belonged to the atrocious unity of their interest, and had waived their pride for their safety, they might have proclaimed decrees of emancipation with every morning's peal of the plantation-bell, and the negroes would have replied every morning, "Vous maître."
There is but one other folly to match the accusation that the sentiment of French Abolitionism excited the slaves to rise: that is, the sentiment that a slave ought not to be excited to rise against such "Horrors of San Domingo" as we have just recorded. The men who are guilty of that sentimentality, while they smugly enjoy personal immunity and the dear delights of home, deserve to be sold to a Caradeux or a Legree. Let them be stretched upon the quatre-piquet of a great people in a war-humor, whose fathers once rose against the enemies that would have bled only their purses, and hamstrung only their material growth.
In the two decades between 1840 and 1860 the American Union was seldom saved by a Northern statesman without the help of San Domingo. People in cities, with a balance at the bank, stocks floating in the market, little children going to primary schools, a well-filled wood-shed, and a house that is not fire-proof, shudder when they hear that a great moral principle has devastated properties and sent peaceful homes up in the smoke of arson. Certainly the Union shall be preserved; at all events, the wood-shed must be. Nothing shall be the midnight assassin of the country until slavery itself is ready for the job. So the Northern merchant kept his gold at par through dread of anti-slavery, and saved the Union just long enough to pay seventy-five per cent, for the luxury of the "Horrors." Did it ever once occur to him that his eminent Northern statesman was pretending something that the South itself knew to be false and never hypocritically urged against the anti-slavery men? Southern men of intelligence had the best of reasons for understanding the phenomena of San Domingo, and while the "Friends of the Black" were dripping with innocent French blood in Northern speeches, the embryo Secessionists at Nashville and Savannah strengthened their convictions with the proper rendering of the same history. Take, as a specimen of their tranquil frame of mind, the following view, which was intended to correct a vague popular dread that in all probability was inspired by Northern statesmen. It is from a wonderfully calm and judicious speech delivered before the Nashville Convention, a dozen years ago, by General Felix Huston of Mississippi.
"This insurrection [of San Domingo] having occurred so near to us, and being within the recollection of many persons living, who heard the exaggerated accounts of the day, has fastened itself on the public imagination, until it has become a subject of frequent reference, and even Southern twaddlers declaim about the Southern States being reduced to the condition of St. Domingo, and Abolitionists triumphantly point to it as a case where the negro race have asserted and maintained their freedom.