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This text has been proofread but is not guaranteed to be free from errors. Corrections to the original text have been left in place.
Title: Haiti, an electronic edition
Author: Chapman, Maria Weston, 1806-1885
Publisher: The Liberty Bell
Place published: 
Date: 1842
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The Liberty Bell
HAÏTIBY MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN."Je renaitrai de mes cendres"THIS second American Republic has a history that would fill 
volumes; and, as the past is the parent of the present, some 
knowledge of that history is necessary to a just estimate of 
the position of Haïti as a nation, and to a true understanding 
of the character of its people. Its history is a warning-a rebuke-a 
proud, triumphal peal of warlike jubilee-oppression's funeral knell. 
But here is no room for its resonance. One can only refer to one or 
two absolutely essential particulars.All human judgments are but acts of comparison. In forming an 
opinion of Haïti we

must in fairness do as we have done in estimating our own national character. We compare ourselves with those from whom we are descended; and we are thus helped to the solution of many a problem and to the better understanding of many a fact. We consider the manner of life of the generations immediately preceding our present race of New Englanders, and we are enabled to comprehend the New England character-to see the reasons for its peculiar excellencies and defects, and therefore to avoid undue eulogy or dispraise.So we must do in considering the Haïtians, if we would be wise and just. The frugal, industrious, exact, and moral descendant of the free puritans must not approach the mingled blood of southern Europe and central Africa, expecting to find its flow as measured as that of his own. For the effects of climate there must be great allowance. Divine Providence has not laid upon the Haïtian that inevitable ne-

cessity to labor, which, in the process of ages, makes the character of a people so enterprising and so strong. His pilgrim fathers were the Buccaneers. Of course no scions of courtly and refined nobility accompanied them in deep devotion to religious freedom to the new clime, to be the mothers of the future race. For many years there were no women at all to help onward that settlement on the northern coast of the then island of St. Domingo, which was the terror of Spanish America. When at length, the freebooters were assured of a foothold, women of the most despicable Parisian class were sent out, and, " to encourage industry and prevent quarrels," as the first historians say, they were sold to the colonists,1The Banns of this sort of marriage were made by the Buccaneers as follows: "I take thee without knowing or caring whence thou art. If any body from whence thou comest would have had thee, thou wouldst not have come in quest of me. But that does not signify. I do not ask account of thee for thy past conduct, because I have no right to be offended at it, at the time when thou wast at liberty to behave well or ill at thine own pleasure. I need not be ashamed of anything thou wast guilty of, when thou didst not belong to me. Give me only thy word for the future-I acquit thee of the past" Then striking his musket he added, "this will revenge me of thy breach of faith. Though thou shouldst prove false, this will certainly be true to my aim." for a term of years.
A century after, when the plunderers had become planters, and had found their way to the coast of Africa for laborers, another motive strengthened the hereditary prejudice against marriage. The Parisian, who had been tempted hither as to a miser's and to a sensualist's paradise at once, left his wife and family in France, and supplied their place by some beautiful slave, despising her caste and color, yet dreading that she might not share his feeling of contempt. Thus originated the jealous fierceness which edged the scorn of the white colonist, and thus freedom and slavery have both contributed to the licentiousness which is the grand sin of

the French part of the Island. The Spanish part, though the form of marriage is more general there, can hardly lay claim to superior virtue. It is only characterized by greater hypocrisy. Comparing in this respect the mass of the inhabitants with those of New England, appearances are greatly to their disadvantage. Comparing them in the same manner with the Southern States, the comparison is greatly in their favor. M. Monteil, a highly intelligent Parisian, who has been travelling for ten years in South America, and whose travels will probably be soon published, assures me that Haïti is far in advance of any South American State in civilization; and that the Haitian city of the Cape, is in a superior moral condition to the French city of Paris. The educated Haïtian, no less than the foreign observer, is liable to form a wrong estimate of his own people, and undervalue the progress they have made, unless he carefully surveys the point from which they started.
France and Spain have lost their foothold in this most beautiful land-this Queen of the Antilles, as they were fond of calling it when it was their own; but their impress is strong upon the people, who are but slightly modified Frenchmen and Spaniards. By their color only they hold to Africa. Their birth and languages make them European and American. What a shock to the tyrant-what joyful triumph to the lovers of Freedom does their possession of this island give! I cannot express the satisfaction with which I look upon its unequalled beauty, and think of it as the home, the possession, the heritage of a people so unjustly despised, and so cruelly oppressed, as are these children of the Sun among the pale Americans.I shall never lose the impression of its splendid beauty, as we approached it from the North, having left behind us the low-lying shores of iron-bound New England, covered with their January snows. A whole day we sailed against

its blue mountains, after having caught the first sight of them, as of distant clouds, from the deck. Nearer and nearer we came and more and more beautiful it grew-higher and higher in stature-deeper and deeper in coloring it stood before us;-the giant Cape, in all its grandeur and its beauty. But one loses the idea of the grand as one looks upon it, so clothed with loveliness,-" an island of the blest."As we slowly floated towards it before a four-knot breeze, watching its blue darken into purple, and its purple, gradually roughening, become flecked with vivid green, new mountain peaks and islands on either hand became visible, as if the coming paradise were spreading abroad Its arms to receive us. The ocean, too, took tints new and beautiful as we neared the shore, growing of an emerald green in its clearness, except where shadows of purple stretched like bars, far across its surface, to where it seemed

almost to wash the inland mountains, at whose foot, and actually touching it, lies that fertile plain of the Cape of an extent and fertility that would supply New England with coffee and sugar if under cultivation. In front of all stand the eternal guardians of the harbor, protecting it from the violence of the ocean, and making foreign invasion more difficult;-those sunken rocks or reefs all of the rich and valued coral, a single branch of which those, who come to our Antislavery Fair, look upon with admiration. Over these wonderful rocks the water breaks white at frequent intervals, with an effect to the eye like the manes of giant horses,-to the ear like the roar of an impatient populace. On all this the citadel of Christophe, crowning the loftiest mountain-top of the more distant chain, looks down from its blue distance, shaming those who say that the black man has no genius. This kingly-minded man, the Napoleon, or rather the Peter the Great of Haiti, had that loftiest genius

-the power to discover and avail himself of the ability of others. Unfortunately, like. Napoleon and Peter, his tyranny equalled his genius.And now, as we swing nearer, show the masts of shipping bearing the flags of every European and American nation, and behind them shoots up from the plain the noble palm, -that token of the tropics. And now the town itself,-the old Cape-Français,-the Cape-Henry of the fleeting monarchy, the present Cape Haïtien, starts into visibility round the base of the foremost mountain Repeatedly destroyed, as far as its buildings of fire-proof brick and stone could be so, by the storm of civil war, it has been as often rebuilt, and is now so far restored as to leave on the eye, that sees it from the water, no images of desolation, but those few crumbling arches and that roofless masonry that lend an added charm to the scene of beauty by suggesting the associations of a splendid past.
And one's reminiscences even of tyranny are unmingled with aught save pity, as
"Each crumbling arch, each fallen stone 
Pleads haughtily for glories gone."
Here are no wharves, vexing the "Long-stepping" billows ; (old Hesiod must have been well acquainted with sea-nymphs to have characterized them so happily,) but the town runs a mile and three quarters along the water's edge, faced in part by; a stone battlement, which in peace is a delightful promenade, and in war a platform for cannon. From beneath this you see a silver thread which seems to join the city to the sea. It is the outlet of those bright mountain-streams, which, after supplying the public fountains, thus pour their riches into the watercasks of New England top-sail schooners, and the tanks of British packets; and whose springs the inhabitants will poison, at the first gun fire of invasion, as they retreat into the mountains, leaving their blazing cities behind them.
How lovely are the dwellings notched into the mountain-side, a thousand feet above the thin blue smoke of the city. No coal or wet wood are burnt here,-the very charcoal smoke seems to obey the law of the spirit of beauty, and hides no aloe or acacia-tree overrun with convolvulus and passion-flower, of all that rich growth that so thickly clothes the mountain. The whole scene seems Faery; or rather it enters now into our hearts to conceive how "the verdurous wall of Paradise upsprung." The soft splendors of the tropical skies, the genial airs, that seem from whatever point they blow to come straight from heaven, bearing healing,-this emerald and amethyst sea,- these hills that look fit haunt of angels,-how joyfully the soul receives their bright impressions, made brighter still by the thought, that here, too, is the dwelling of FREEDOM; which even to earth's most desolate places "is as the sun of the sea, the mountain, and the air."
At the peace of Ryswick, in 1697, Spain acknowledged the claim of the French to the western part, which the Buccaneers had settled, and from that day to this, the island has been spoken of as French Part and Spanish Part. The French were aware of the importance of this cession of the most fertile part of the island. They formed companies to extend its cultivation and increase its population. The slave-trade went briskly on. All was activity and enterprise. The French were lively as a brood of serpents in spring. The Spaniards, having glutted themselves with the destruction of the whole aboriginal race, were torpid, as if benumbed by winter. All the old Spanish writers speak of the difference between the two divisions of the island, and attribute the prosperity of the French to the slave-trade. Isabella had done all in her power to prevent slavery; and so a shadow of disrepute rested upon it in the Spanish part. Then a quarrel sprung up between the followers

of St. Dominic and St. Francis, which was better founded than the generality of religious quarrels, for it was about the nature of slavery. The Spanish Saint, Dominic, was made to throw his influence against slavery; while St. Francis, the favorite French Saint, was declared by his followers to be clearly of opinion, that the whole traffic and system was religious. So the Spanish part languished for want of labor, while, for a hundred years longer, the French part was as prosperous as sin could make it. The emblem of the land, now the royal palm, or tree of Liberty, might then have been the Psalmist's green bay tree. They planted-they builded-they sent whole fleets of merchandise to France-the fruit of compulsory labor. They staked out the vast luxuriant plains into habitations, and the nobility of France, who owned them, named them after their own names. They made temporary establishments on the coast of Africa, and encouraged the same process in every other

nation, buying up the imprisoned inhabitants of whole villages, and transporting them to their own habitations. They could buy a cargo of human beings, and pay for them out of the next year's crop the cargo would raise. The continent of Europe rung with the noise of their exulting prosperity. Their St. Domingo was a garden. Cities were built up with beautiful regularity. On every estate noble piles of buildings were raised. The reign of the magnificent Louis the Fourteenth was illustrated here, as well as in France, by the architects of the planters. The rich red earth abounded on every plantation, and the work of the French slave, like that of the Egyptian, often lay much in the making of bricks. A thousand able-bodied men wrought on the cane fields of Gallifet, now owned by a friend of ours, a merchant of the Cape, whose high intelligence the merchant of any other land would find it difficult to overlook, be. cause of his color. We, passed a week at his

friendly mansion, and rejoiced in the new order of things, by which he finds it difficult to procure sixty laborers under the code rural. The old dungeons of these estates are useless-the chains and the scourges lie mouldering on their deserted doors, only brought forth occasionally from their long obscurity, to prove the horrors of the Frenchman's yoke. There is no other witness of the toils and sufferings of that period. Those sufferers were brought dumb from Africa; and if they died by thousands under the lash that compelled their vast toils, or the avarice that grudged them the needful plantain-field, they were replaced by fresh thousands, and none of them were skilled in the learning of their conquerors, so as to be able to chronicle the tale. They were the victims of avarice and lust, as are the slaves of our sister States of the South this day. And then, and there, as now at the South the reckless youth, who wantonly caused his slave to be scourged to labor

till he died, and seized his wife or daughter for the gratification of a savage licentiousness, would feel a touch of humanity when he looked upon his child, and would provide for its freedom and livelihood. He could not degrade himself to marry the slave mother, but he educated and portioned the son and daughter. Three generations of brilliant prosperity, as it was called, went on thus, and the third was the most guilty and the most prosperous of all. The mixed race thus sprung up, as it is now doing at the South, numerous and hated, attracting, yet repelled,-often educated, yet shut out from all the prizes of life,-rich, yet despised-free, yet oppressed,-the sons of whites, yet unacknowledged in civil and social existence-the sons of blacks, yet aspiring to a more honorable position, and therefore ashamed of their parental stock;-ever in a false position, and suffering all the agonies of a wounded spirit, as their African progenitors had

done the no less intense tortures of the body. Their wealth often enabled them to vie with their European parents in vice and magnificence, but they might not be priests or lawyers, physicians or schoolmasters, or exercise any honorable employ. The law struck off the hand of the richest man of color that was raised against a white of the lowest condition, while the assailing white would only be punished With a slight fine. Upon this some of our Southern States improve in severity, making the offence, on the part of the man of color, death.The year 1789 witnessed in St. Domingo what the year 1842 witnesses in our own land; a mixture of princely magnificence, sustained by rigorous bondage,-of pomp and festivity with unutterable suffering,-of all that the world has to show of prosperity and of misery, in their greatest extremes.But the halo of this world's glory obscures the real forms of things, and so dazzles the eye,

that even their most fearful outlines take a touch of the false splendor, that deludes the judgment of the beholder, and destroys the foresight that is given to all for the direction of their course.An undazzled eye could not have failed to foresee that four hundred thousand slaves, ten thousand masters, and forty thousand free men of color, as a torch to light the pile, must soon exhibit conflagration. These fated men had not even the foresight of our Southrons, to forbid a foreign slave trade and seek a temporary safety valve by devising a colonization society, and modifying their laws, so as to force away their free colored progeny. But our farthest sighted Southrons fail to perceive that all their pains-taking with Liberia does but keep the fast creeping flame for an hour from their thresholds.Little was it in your day, oh doomed ten thousand of St. Domingo, that your funeral pyre was made of things so precious! Heap up your

possessions high upon your three thousand plantations of cane, coffee, cotton, indigo, cocoa, with all their superincumbent weight of palace dwellings, distilleries, slave-barracks, refining. houses, sugar-mills, and great aqueducts;- your lime-kilns, your brick-yards, and your potteries-your tanneries and your great herds of horses and horned cattle-your four hundred and fifty thousand human cattle, the valuation of the whole of which will not go in hundreds of millions. No:-one billion four hundred and eighty seven millions eight hundred and forty thousand is its valuation, all told in livres of colonial currency. You pile it up with exultation, sons of that island, queen of the Antilles. Just so bound the haughtiest hearts of Charleston, and Savannah, and New Orleans, when the cotton-crop and the cane-crop mount highest! Oh, blinded by pride and sin;-it is but the readier for the flames! They foresaw nothing the very hour before their destruction.

But the thoughtful observer saw their end then as clearly as he does that of the Southern Republics this day. Before them also, by the everlasting order of the universe, lies the same termination, unless they repent. An everlasting note of warning to the South is the fate of St. Domingo. Other voices are vouchsafed to her too, but the voice of conscience once stifled- can the human soul be awakened by any other ?* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *"Why have you been so many years in restoring the Cape? a city which under the French had eighteen thousand inhabitants, and is now only half rebuilt and has but nine thousand ? "- is the question speered at the people of Haiti by stray Englishmen, Germans, and Americans, who pass them by. " Because," might the people reply, " we were, when we destroyed this city, a horde of doubly barbarized barbarians, whom oppression had made mad, as it will even a wise man; and we have had an education to

gain, a government to establish, and the weapon has been more in our hand than the building tools. We had one splendid and most nobly endowed soul among us, whose one thought it was to keep secure and bright the chain of friendly intercourse between us and France, while he cast away the chain of bondage. He saw how long our fair 'land of mountains,' as the first ancient people named her, must be in rising from her ashes, if once the flame of bloody revolt passed over her, and dried up and cut off the sources of improvement and civilization. But the French misunderstood Toussaint. We, his own people, misunderstood him, and he perished as all such mediators do, in the attempt to reconcile the selfish, the treacherous, and tyrannical with the wronged and the simple-hearted. His deliberate wisdom was not visible to our bodily eye, but even to that outward sense the French treachery was plain, and our souls rose up against it. The tyrant would

fain force even history to his ends. But he strives in vain to make ours serve his purposes. We rose against intolerable bondage, after having seen our children broken alive on the wheel, in the place d'armes yonder, because they claimed to be men like others. Shall any man, who means to draw the sword for his own and his children's life and liberty, dare to blame the deed ? Embarrassed by their foreign relations, our tyrants yielded to the stress of circumstances and gave us a sort of Freedom. Eight years we enjoyed it, and then, to purchase of England the freedom of their blockaded ports, they consented to quench again that flame of Liberty, which she feared might spread to her West Indian possessions. They strove to accomplish it in vain. Without knowledge, save the knowledge of our mountain fastnesses, without discipline or arms-save the barrelhoops of our Masters ground into Sabres, or the iron bars of their splendid gate-ways

sharpened to spear-heads, and with the instinct of freedom alone to aid us against the world, we attained our nationality through rivers of blood. Was not this a process to make us seek a bloody redress for the slightest injuries among ourselves, after the attainment of our object ? Is not civil war a process to scatter all those feelings of security and peace, under the influence of which only will a man till and plant and build? Situated as we have been, with enmity without and uncertainty and ignorance within, is it not the true wonder, that a single dwelling has been rebuilded? Or that a single field, trebly scathed as ours have been by battle, should have been reclaimed by agriculture? Or that the strong associations of regularity and labor with slavery should not have utterly prevented the organization of government and the return of industry ? That under such circumstances as ours, we should have won freedom and independence from one of the most

powerful of European nations, and overleaping feudalism and monarchy, those customary stages between personal slavery and civil freedom, should have founded a republic of which 'to do unto others as we would that they should do unto us,' and that slavery be forever abolished, are the constitutional maxims, and in which the people are directly represented,-to have done thus much (might not this people say) is it not somewhat? How many centuries was it before England had the shadow of a parliament? The standing Haitian apology--'nous sommes jeunes,'-may properly stand a few centuries yet, as nations reckon their ages. We have laid the moral foundations of a great nation. Do you ask for steam-boats and manufactures and white sugar also? Remember we were not like the colonists of New England,-at the climax of civilization, and with little else to do but carry it forward. We cannot show you white sugar, because if men can choose their occupations, the

severe, complicated sugar-making is one that a man, who can live and get rich, if he chooses, by the facile tobacco-planting, will not adopt. Instead of the thousand-handed gangs of former days, each man now sits down upon his own four-acre lot and raises coffee. Ourselves and our fathers were kept in brutal ignorance, lest we should become too wise for the yoke. Our children are not growing up thus. There are twelve schools at the Cape and fifteen at Port-au-Prince; and we hoard the fruit of our toil, that we may give our children the advantages of foreign travel. When they come upon the stage qualified for life, and when labor and slavery shall be wholly dissociated in the minds of our people, we may be able to show you the products which come but from forced labor or extensive mutual aid. When we trampled on the former system, we did it with a violence which incapacitated us for the adoption of the latter. Our children will show you a noble edifice, which we men of blood were not worthy to build.
We must live out our lives under that military yoke, which we took up to help us in breaking our slavish one. Comfort yourselves, you who care for Haïti when you hear rumors of revolt and disorder. Probably they will be false, for, as you have seen, the Haïtian is gentle and peaceful. If true, what then ? They are the triumphs of liberalism, for as you have seen, all our tendencies are onward. Do you doubt the intelligence of our government? Read Boyer's proclamations, Inginac's 'Etrennes à mes concitoyens;' or the reports of our various commissions. Do you say that our government is not true to the principles of our constitution? Show us the government, that is more so. The freest government yields to the tyrant, Expediency. Do you feel disposed to taunt us because we are behind our Sister Republic of the continent? Consider how few advantages we are allowed in the race. When she hears of the progress of other nations in the

arts of life and in the path of civilization, she can open wide her gates to the artisan and the philosopher, without the fear of finding that the guests are enemies. She can send her sons abroad to study stupendous public works and national improvements, without exposing them to ignominy or danger. No deadly prejudice prevents the interchange of benefits. But we must close our doors against the knowledge, that can only enter with those, who think habitually of the man of color as a slave, and not as a pupil.'Aucun blanc, quelle que soit sa nation, ne pourra mettre les pieds sur ce territoire à titre de mâitre ou de proprietaire.'2*Constitution d'Haiti. tit. ler, art. 38cme This is what will make our progress as a nation as slow as that of France or England during those earlier times, when they took no lessons from without. Until the white man's heart changes towards our

               
race, attrition with his hard and tyrannous nature will but crush and rend,-not polish us. Until that time his presence among us is not improvement but destruction."Eastward from the Cape as one penetrates into the island, the stronger grows the united charm of beauty in the clime, and of hospitality in the people. How many of its charming landscapes and family-pieces I shall always remember! the good peasants at quartier Morin and Limonade who so kindly entertained us with their steaming coffee and naïve conversation, telling us all we wanted to know about their habits of mind and of life;-how carefully they slung our hammocks, and spread a rush-mat over our saddles on the earth-floor, if we should prefer a steadier pillow;-with what interest they inquired if we had left children behind us " au continent;"  how softly they stepped through the apartment to gratify their curiosity with a look at the white people

as they slept, unsuspecting that we too were gratifying ours by looking through our half-closed eyes, and taking the marks and numbers of the rustic menage.How brightly gleamed over us those strange Southern Heavens, as we mounted at midnight, and keeping the southern cross over our right shoulder, pushed on over plain and through river till day break! How suddenly rushed the day upon us as we rode, lighting up the Savanna Larga, with its rich clumps of trees, so like the smoothest park-scenery of England, and showing, at distant intervals, the belted and sworded herdsman or laborer galloping across, greeting us with a courteous "buenos dias" which spoke his Spanish ancestry, and raised in our imaginations a vision of '` old Castile and Arragon."Then the little paradise of Escalente, spotted with shining cattle, and shaded with great tamarind trees, putting one in mind of the plain of

Mamre; and where, as the people sat round their doors at night-fall,
"Depainted seemed the patriarchal age,
What time Dan Abraham left the Chaldee land!"
The illusion was dispelled by the kind offer of a cigar, which I accepted as a kindness, though I suspect it would have been a matter of great astonishment to the youth, who offered it, to have learned that there was a se-ora on earth to whom it could be unacceptable for itself alone.I must hasten by Santiago, a city of ten thousand inhabitants, where we passed a month, and learned much about laws, manners, morals, customs, &c., though not without a tribute to the refinement, courtesy and intelligence, we found there, and the general air of comfort and happiness observable in the whole people.There are but few whites in the island. Since 1822, the date of the union of the Spanish part with the Republic, (a union effected, as Boyer's

proclamation upon the occasion exultingly declares, without the shedding of a drop of blood or a tear,) they have been emigrating to Spain, Cuba, or South America, till now, one can almost count them on one's fingers.We were glad to have witnessed the fine cultivation between Santiago and Moca. Great tabacco and plantain fields, neat cottages and habitations, from which the evening lamp gleamed pleasantly across the way, reminding us of home,-the plain before them covered with hundreds of the tall palmiste trees, and the hills behind, relieved against the blue, overtopping mountains, all that we saw filled the mind with happy images. On Palm Sunday we made a short excursion, still farther inland, and on our return to the house of the excellent old commandant of Moca, Medard Mathieu, whose pride in the prosperity of the place, and whose untiring hospitality, we remember with so much pleasure and gratitude, we fell into conversation

with him and the préposé, Charles Brieux, upon the condition of the island." I thought of you," said the latter, " during mass this morning, and wished you had been present. Though you might not have entered into it as a religious service, I am sure you would have been gratified with the appearance of the people. From their tasteful dress and kind and graceful manners, you would not have failed to draw just inferences as to their abundant means of livelihood, and the peace and happiness in which they live." We had met the same population as we went, with their palm-branches over their shoulders, spurring their horses up the steep bridle-path to the church, the white mantillas of the women streaming back in the wind, showing the roses in their straight black hair, (when it is not straight they wear the gay madrass,) the satin shoe and silk stocking of some, compelling observation, and the neatness and taste of all, secured admiration; and we had not

failed to draw the desired inference. " Suffer me to inquire," said he, " if one among the numbers you met on your journey, looked at you as if he thought you had no business here. Were not all courteous and obliging and anxious to aid you, whenever you needed aid, and seemingly unconscious that your epiderme was unlike their own?" We gratefully bore testimony to the fact. "Pardon me," said he, "for the inquiry, and also for begging you to remember it, whenever In your own country, you see a Haitian struggling with all the disadvantages that prejudice throws in his way." It may be imagined that it was with satisfaction that we assured him that we had no need to feel ashamed to receive the kindness, which all we met in Haïti, from the richest to the poorest, had offered us as strangers; for, that we were, at that moment, actually identified with the proscribed race by our disregard of the prejudices of our fellow-citizens; and our friend expressed great satisfac-

tion that there existed exceptions to the general wrong feeling in the United States.On leaving Moca, as we advanced, the trees grew heavier and taller. We were penetrating directly into the heart of the island, the central chain of Cibao looming high in the southwest distance."This forest," we said, "remains evidently just as it was when Columbus first struck across its solitude from Caracole or Isabelique. These giant trees, the mighty ceybas, the trunks of which make canoes that will hold fifty men, these palmistes, sixty feet high before you reach the foliage, which grow straight upward, side by side, so closely that it seems at first as if your horse could not force an entrance,-just so this unbroken forest met Columbus." But not only was the way impeded by trees; the ground under- foot became rough and stony. At what sports has nature been playing here, in past ages, that there are so many rolling stones?

Has some river changed its bed? this is common enough with the rivers of Haïti. Grand Rivière at the Cape has done so since the revolution, and left the arches of the aqueduct, that once watered seven plantations, herb-covered and dry, of no value but to the landscape painter.But these are not all stones, we ascertain as we are speculating upon the causes of the strange appearance; there are moss-covered bricks among them; and "voila l'eglise de la Vega Real! " cries our pion, as its massive arches are imperfectly seen through the wood that overgrows them. "La-bas, vous voyez le fort qu'a battu Christophe Colomb, et derrière etait sa maison!" Not these then the trees that met the eye of Columbus. Vast and majestic as they are, they have overgrown his city of Conception de la Vega, since the earthquake that prostrated it. This, then, is that Royal Vega, whose fort be built in 1495. He was

not the first who had broken the stillness of this solitude. A numerous people had planted themselves in this immense plain, which as we saw it stretching away for two and thirty leagues, with its forest tops moving like a wind-swept sea, far below the eye that views it from the mountain of Santo Cerro, and the cloud-shadows chasing each other over its vast arena till they are lost in the ocean-like blue of the far extremity, took such forcible hold of our admiration. The name only remains of that kingdom, that here met the proud, astonished glance of Columbus, though its inhabitants were then more in number than now are to be found in the whole isle. Magua was its name; and just here, where the fort was built in such solid masonry that an earthquake has not destroyed it, dwelt Guarionex, the Cacique of the kingdom of the plain. His choice of a dwelling was a goodly one in the eyes of the Spaniards, and they made it their own "in the name of God

and for the honor of the Christian religion;" and the massive walls of the church still stand hard by the fortress. Great heaps of the disjointed brick work lie around, which once formed the sides, but the front is almost entire. Within and without are giant palms, bound together by the serpent-like vegetation of the tropics, which still continues to grow, so that time, for the next century, will strengthen rather than efface the ruins. From the branches of these trees the parasite fingers have reached downward, till they felt the ground, and thence, taking root, have ascended again, in such a sort, that the tree and the huge vines together encircle the clocher, almost hiding it from the view.From these very portals swelled the notes of the first grand mass that the new world ever heard. Just there, methinks, where the pool of stagnant water lies, within the wall, stood the high altar, where Bartholomew de las Casas displayed that "cathedral'd pomp of prayer."

High curled the incense-smoke, as the white stored enfans du chœur swung their censers. And here, by the chancel, stood the proud, pale Christopher, inwardly triumphing over the grandees of Spain, that gather round him, as the post of honor during the imposing service. These are they whom the thirst for gold has drawn into the scheme of profit, which they scorned when it was but a noble thought in embryo. Half-cracked, you said his brain was! Court-puppets! You stupid seven and twenty quartered De Castros, or whatever your names are! 't is through such cracks as these, that the light from a higher world than this gold-dust-hunting one you live in bursts through! "Two hundred and forty thousand crowns' worth of gold last year, from yonder Cibao!" thought the many-quartered Castilians. "A new world to Castile and Leon!" thought the high-souled Genoese;-"a jewel, that shall well replace those 

that Isabella bartered from her regal coronet to send forth my slender armament! "Sixty years, and the earthquake came, and left the city of the royal Vega, as we see it now, save the trees. Two hundred and fifty years more and this jewel was reft from the crown of Spain by the procession of events. Kings must lay aside their coronets. Each man has discovered that he too is a king,-nothing less. And amid deep mourning for pride of birth, and pomp of chivalry, and sentimentality of loyalty-(of which none, I feel, more truly understand the charm, than the ultra radical, upon conviction,)-kings have faded into pale phantoms before the uprising people. Woman, too, woe the while-each here in Haiti rushes to the field of labor, with whatever masculine implement lies nearest at hand. Is she not ashamed? Why should she be? She keeps house, shop, herds, or farms, as her occasions require, like any other body. The laws of the republic

uphold her in it "It is well done, and fitting for a princess!" she would exclaim, had she reading and writing enough. But she feels it, all the same; and the Haïtian priesthood, if it ever were contrary-minded, has long ago changed its mind; for to the priesthood it did not fail clearly to appear that where war has left seventeen women to one man, as was the case in the northern part of Haiti, the women must show themselves brave men, or there will be no tythes.The three millions of the harmless red people have entirely disappeared in the march of ages. Only a trace of them remains on a few countenances in the interior. They are superseded by that mixture of Norman, Gothic, Arabic, and Moresque, which calls itself French and Spanish, with the blood of Central Africa. The chivalric manners of one, and the gentle ones of the other line of progenitors have descended uncharged amid slavery and war. Although deprived of collision with more advanced peo-

ple, which operates so unfavorably upon their prospects for the future, they have, in the most complete, majestic, and philosophic of the European languages, a key to the riches of the past.3The French spoken among the peasantry, the Creole, as it is called, is a corrupted Patois; but the Spanish is far purer: while, by the cultivated portion of the people, both are well spoken.  With their schools, and their newspapers, their amateur dramatic representations, their increasing civil, and their decreasing military reliance, their growing industry, and enterprise,4Proposals for the formation of a Steamboat Company have just been issued. their orderly cities, and their safe and quiet country, they are showing, what a magic is "LIBERTY AND EQUALITY " for the creation of nations.