12 Biographical Memoir of Baron de Beauvois. 



among the men who sought to establish civil equality and poli- 

 tical liberty in France ; and, in the eyes of the colonists, the 

 abolition of the trade could not fail speedily to introduce the 

 abolition of slavery, or, at least, the equality of rights between 

 the free men of colour and the whites. Now, the very idea of 

 equality with a man of colour was more revolting to the pride of 

 the whites than the abolition of slavery seemed to compromise 

 their interests. Thus there was formed in the minds of the 

 colonists that strange mixture of opposite ideas, by which alone 

 the revolution of St Domingo can be accounted for : on the one 

 hand, opposition to France, and to the agents of the King, which 

 assumed the appearance of democracy ; on the other, the con- 

 temptuous and aristocratic repulsion of the more natural de- 

 mands of all those who retained any trace of mixed blood. The 

 result is but too well known. The predominant party, among 

 the whites, expelled or reduced to impotence the agents of the 

 royal authority, at the same time that it made the men of colour 

 undergo numberless humiliations. The latter, in their turn, 

 avenged themselves with the fury which is characteristic of their 

 blood and climate ; and at length, the slaves of both, excited 

 by the example of their masters, and aware of their strength, 

 destroyed all who possessed any degree of pre-eminence from 

 colour, fortune, or personal liberty. 



It would seem that M. de Beauvois, who had only gone to 

 Africa as a naturalist and philosopher, who had been witness 

 of the horrible sufferings which the slave-trade inflicted upon 

 the Negroes, who was not a colonist, and possessed no slaves, 

 would naturally be more inclined towards the ideas of the friends 

 of the blacks, or, at least, that he would not have declared against 

 the humble pretensions of the free men of colour. 



The case was quite otherwise ; and this singularity is to be 

 explained by the history of this voyage. 



He had seen in Africa two-thirds of each tribe reduced to the 

 most absolute slavery. He had been witness to the atrocious 

 conduct of the chiefs towards these unfortunate beings, who 

 were buried alive with their masters, whom superstition every 

 where immolated in great numbers, and whose flesh is still sold 

 in many countries. He himself had seen three of them butcher- 

 ed at a feast, which one of the Ministers of the King of Benin 



