ital, were destroyed. The mills, magazines,
utensils, and even the very plant which reminded them of their servitude
and their compulsory labour, were cast into the flames. The whole plain,
as far as eye could reach, was covered with nothing but the smoke and
the ashes of conflagration. The dead bodies of whites, piled in hideous
trophies of heads and limbs, of men, women, and infants assassinated,
alone marked the spot of the rich residences, where they were supreme on
the previous night. It was the revenge of slavery: all tyranny has such
fearful reverses.

Some whites, warned in time of the insurrection by the generous
indiscretion of the blacks, or protected in their flight by the forests
and the darkness, had taken refuge at the Cape Town; others, concealed
with their wives and children in caves, were fed and attended to by
attached slaves, at the peril of their lives. The army of blacks
increased without the walls of the Cape Town, where they formed and
disciplined a fortified camp. Guns and cannons arrived by the aid of
invisible auxiliaries. Some accused the English, others the Spaniards;
others, the "friends of the blacks," with being accomplices of this
insurrection. The Spaniards, however, were at peace with France; the
revolt of the blacks menaced them equally with ourselves. The English
themselves possessed three times as many slaves as the French: the
principle of the insurrection, excited by success, and spreading with
them, would have ruined their establishments, and compromised the lives
of their colonists. These suspicions were absurd; there was no one
culpable but liberty itself, which is not to be repressed with impunity
in a portion of the human race. It had accomplices in the very heart of
the French themselves.

The weakness of the resolutions of the Assembly on the reception of this
news proved this. M. Bertrand de Molleville, minister of marine,
ordered the immediate departure of 6000 men as reinforcement for the
isle of San Domingo.

Brissot attacked these repressive measures in a discourse in which he
did not hesitate to cast the odium of the crime on the victims, and to
accuse the government of complicity with the aristocracy of the
colonists.

"By what fatality does this news coincide with a moment when emigrations
are redoubled? when the rebels assembled on our frontiers warn us of an
approaching outbreak? when, in fact, the colonies threaten us, through
an illegal deputation, with wit