Biographical Memoir of Bar&n de Beauvois. 15 



true that the Negroes belonged to a different species from ours, 

 would it not be enough to be rational and sensible to have a right 

 to be treated as men ? Enlightened nations have made laws to 

 prevent cruelty to animals, and when we have to do with beings 

 who speak, who love, and who weep like ourselves, to what 

 purpose is it to dispute respecting their origin or their spedes ? 

 Besides, it is especially for the interest of the whites, their mo- 

 ral interest, that it is necessary to set free the blacks, for the 

 greatest evil of slavery is perhaps the corruption which it pro- 

 duces in the masters. 



Be this as it may, it will easily be comprehended into what 

 party, a man arrived at St Domingo with such ideas, would ne- 

 cessarily throw himself. It was that which called itself the pa- 

 triot party, and which is commonly called the party of St Marc, 

 from the place in which the first general assembly in which it 

 predominated was held. 



M . de Beauvois was not of this first assembly ; but he had 

 been elected to the provincial assembly of the north, which sat at 

 French Cape, and he supported there all the measures of the 

 Assembly of St Marc. In the month of January 1790, this 

 assembly of the north having re-established, by its private au- 

 thority, the superior council of the Cape, which the king had 

 suppressed some years before, it called to it M. de Beauvois, on 

 whom his office of advocate conferred a title to that honour. 

 This honour, however, was a cruel one, for he found himself 

 constrained by it, in March 1791, to be oneof the judges of the 

 unfortunate Vincent Oge, a mulatto, who, with several of his 

 partisans, was condemned to a punishment, the very name of 

 which makes one shudder, for the crime of having attempted to 

 put in execution, by force of arms, the laws which the consd^ 

 tuent assembly had passed in favour of his caste. 



The party of the assembly of St Marc continuing to predo- 

 minate among the white colonists, M. de Beauvois was named to 

 the second colonial assembly, which met in August 1791, a dis- 

 astrous epoch for St Domingo, when the free men of colour be. 

 ||4ti to assemble in the western provinces, for the purpose of ac- 

 quiring, by force, the civil rights which the whites persisted in 

 refusing them ; and when, almost at the same time, the black 

 slaves rose in the northern province, and ravaged the plain of 



