body. Of him history bears witness, "He never broke his word." Maitland was travelling in the depths of the woods to meet Toussaint, when he was met by a messenger, and told that he was betrayed. He went on, and met Toussaint, 5 who showed him two letters, one from the French general, offering him any rank if he would put Maitland in his power, and the other his reply. It was, "Sir, I have promised the Englishman that he shall go back." [Cheers.] [Cheers.] Let it stand, therefore, that the negro, truthful as a knight of old, Io was cheated by his lying foe. Which race has reason to be proud of such a record?

But he was not cheated.

He was under espionage. Sup

As

pose he had refused: the government would have doubted him, would have found some cause to arrest him. He 15 probably reasoned thus: "If I go willingly I shall be treated accordingly;" and he went. The moment he entered the room, the officers drew their swords and told him he was prisoner; and one young lieutenant who was present says, “He was not at all surprised, but seemed very sad." They 20 put him on shipboard, and weighed anchor for France. the island faded from his sight, he turned to the captain, and said, "You think you have rooted up the tree of liberty, but I am only a branch; I have planted the tree so deep that all France can never root it up." [Cheers.] Arrived in Paris, 25 he was flung into jail, and Napoleon sent his secretary, Caffarelli, to him, supposing he had buried large treasures. He listened awhile, then replied, "Young man, it is true I have lost treasures, but they are not such as you come to seek." He was then sent to the Castle of St. Joux, to a dungeon 30 twelve feet by twenty, built wholly of stone, with a narrow window, high up on the side, looking out on the snows of Switzerland. In winter, ice covers the floor; in summer, it is damp and wet. In this living tomb the child of the sunny tropics was left to die. From this dungeon he wrote two 35 letters to Napoleon. One of them ran thus : "Sire, I am a French citizen. I never broke a law. By the grace of God,

I have saved for you the best island of your realm. Sire, of your mercy grant me justice."

Napoleon never answered the letters. The commandant allowed him five francs a day for food and fuel. Napoleon heard of it, and reduced the sum to three. The luxurious 5 usurper who complained that the English government was stingy because it allowed him only six thousand dollars a month, stooped from his throne to cut down a dollar to a half, and still Toussaint did not die quick enough.

This dungeon was a tomb. The story is told that, in Jo- 10 sephine's time, a young French Marquis was placed there, and the girl to whom he was betrothed went to the Empress and prayed for his release. Said Josephine to her, "Have a model of it made, and bring it to me." Josephine placed it near Napoleon. He said, "Take it away it is horrible!" 15 She put it on his footstool, and he kicked it from him. She held it to him for the third time, and said, "Sire in this horrible dungeon you have put a man to die." "Take him out," said Napoleon, and the girl saved her lover. In this tomb Toussaint was buried, but he did not die fast enough. Fi- 20 nally, the commandant was told to go into Switzerland, to carry the keys of the dungeon with him, and to stay four days; when he returned, Toussaint was found starved to death. That imperial assassin was taken twelve years after to his prison at St. Helena, planned for a tomb, as he had 25 planned that of Toussaint, and there he whined away his dying hours in pitiful complaints of curtains and titles, of dishes and rides. God grant that when some future Plutarch shall weigh the great men of our epoch, the whites against the blacks, he do not put that whining child at St. Helena 30 into one scale and into the other the negro meeting death like a Roman, without a murmur, in the solitude of his icy dungeon!

From the moment he was betrayed, the negroes began to doubt the French, and rushed to arms. but Maurepas deserted the French.

Soon every negro 35 Leclerc summoned

Maurepas to his side. He came, loyally bringing with him five hundred soldiers. Leclerc spiked his epaulettes to his shoulders, shot him, and flung him into the sea. He took his five hundred soldiers on shore, shot them on the edge of 5 a pit and tumbled them in. Dessalines from the mountain saw it, and, selecting five hundred French officers from his prisons, hung them on separate trees in sight of Leclerc's camp; and born, as I was, not far from Bunker Hill, I have yet found no reason to think he did wrong. [Cheers.] They 10 murdered Pierre Toussaint's wife at his own door and after such treatment that it was mercy when they killed her. The maddened husband, who had but a year before saved the lives of twelve hundred white men, carried his next thousand prisoners and sacrificed them on her grave.

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The French exhausted every form of torture. The negroes were bound and thrown into the sea; anyone who floated was shot, others sunk with cannon-balls tied to their feet; some smothered with sulphur fumes, others strangled, scourged to death, gibbeted; sixteen of Toussaint's officers 20 were chained to rocks in desert islands, - others in marshes,

and left to be devoured by poisonous reptiles and insects. Rochambeau sent to Cuba for bloodhounds. When they arrived the young girls went down to the wharf, decked the hounds with ribbons and flowers, kissed their necks, and, 25 seated in the amphitheatre, the women clapped their hands to see a negro thrown to these dogs, previously starved to rage. But the negroes besieged this very city so closely that these same girls, in their misery, ate the very hounds they had welcomed.

30 Then flashed forth that defying courage and sublime endurance which show how alike all races are when tried in the

same furnace. The Roman wife, whose husband faltered when Nero ordered him to kill himself, seized the dagger, and, mortally wounding her own body, cried, "Poetus, it is 35 not hard to die." The world records it with proud tears. Just in the same spirit, when a negro colonel was ordered to

execution, and trembled, his wife seized his sword, and, giving herself a death-wound, said, "Husband, death is sweet when liberty is gone."

The war went on. Napoleon sent over thirty thousand more soldiers. But disaster still followed his efforts. What the sword did not devour, the fever ate up. Leclerc died. Pauline carried his body back to France.

5

Napoleon met her at Bordeau, saying, “Sister, I gave you an army,—you bring me back ashes." Rochambeau - the Rochambeau of our history — left in command of eight thousand troops, sent 10 word to Dessalines: "When I take you, I will not shoot you like a soldier, or hang you like a white man, I will whip you to death like a slave." Dessalines chased him from battlefield to battle-field, from fort to fort, and finally shut him up in Samana. Heating cannon balls to destroy his fleet, Des- 15 salines learned that Rochambeau had begged of the British Admiral to cover his troops with the English flag, and the generous negro suffered the boaster to embark undisturbed.

Some doubt the courage of the negro. Go to Hayti, and stand on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers 20 France ever had, and ask them what they think of the negro's sword. And if that does not satisfy you, go to France, to the splendid mausoleum of the Counts of Rochambeau, and to the eight thousand graves of Frenchmen who skulked home under the English flag, and ask them. And if that does not 25 satisfy you, come home, and if it had been October, 1859, you might have come by way of quaking Virginia, and asked her what she thought of negro courage.

You may also remember this, - that we Saxons were slaves about four hundred years, sold with the land, and our 30 fathers never raised a finger to end that slavery. They waited till Christianity and civilization, till commerce and the discovery of America, melted away their chains. Spartacus in Italy led the slaves of Rome against the Empress of the world. She murdered him and crucified them. There 35 never was a slave rebellion successful but once, and that was

5

in St. Domingo. Every race has been, some time or other, in chains. But there never was a race that, weakened and degraded by such chattel slavery, unaided, tore off its own fetters, forged them into swords, and won its liberty on the battle-field, but one, and that was the black race of St. Domingo. God grant that the wise vigor of our government may avert that necessity from our land,

may raise into peaceful liberty the four million committed to our care, and show under democratic institutions a statesmanship as far10 sighted as that of England, as brave as the negro of Hayti! So much for the courage of the negro. Now look at his endurance. In 1805 he said to the white men, "This island is ours; not a white foot shall touch it." Side by side with him stood the South American republics, planted by the best 15 blood of the countrymen of Lope de Vega and Cervantes. They topple over so often that you could no more daguerrotype their crumbling fragments than you could the waves of the ocean. And yet, at their side, the negro has kept his island sacredly to himself. It is said that at first, with rare 20 patriotism, the Haytien government ordered the destruction of all the sugar plantations remaining, and discouraged its culture, deeming that the temptation which lured the French back again to attempt their enslavement. Burn over New York to-night, fill up her canals, sink every ship, destroy her 25 railroads, blot out every remnant of education from her sons, let her be ignorant and penniless, with nothing but her hands to begin the world again,- how much could she do in sixty years? And Europe, too, would lend you money, but she will not lend Hayti a dollar. Hayti, from the ruins of her colo30 nial dependence, is become a civilized state, the seventh nation in the catalogue of commerce with this country, inferior in morals and education to none of the West Indian isles. Foreign merchants trust her courts as willingly as they do Thus far, she has foiled the ambition of Spain, 35 the greed of England, and the malicious statesmanship of Calhoun, Toussaint made her what she is. In this work

our own.