AS COMMISSIONER TO SANTO DOMINGO -1871 501 



monkeyish passion for destruction by wantonly firing 

 upon this beautiful structure. It now lay in ruins. In its 

 main staircase an iron ring was pointed out to us, and we 

 were given the following chronicle. 



During the recent revolution the fugitive President 

 Salnave had been captured, a leathern thong had been 

 rudely drawn through a gash in his hand, and, attached 

 by this to a cavalryman, he had been dragged up the hill 

 to the palace, through the crowd which had but recently 

 hurrahed for him, but which now jeered and pelted him. 

 Arriving upon the scene of his former glory, he was at- 

 tached by the thong to this iron ring and shot. 



Opposite the palace was the ruin of a mausoleum, and 

 in the street were scattered fragments of marble sar- 

 cophagi beautifully sculptured: these had contained the 

 bodies of former rulers, but the revolutionists of Haiti, 

 imitating those of 1793 in France, as apes imitate men, 

 had torn the corpses out of them and had then scattered 

 these, with the fragments of their monuments, through the 

 streets. 



In the markets of the city we had ample experience 

 of the advantage arising from unlimited paper money. 

 Successive governments had kept themselves afloat by new 

 issues of currency, until its purchasing power was reduced 

 almost to nothing. Preposterous sums were demanded for 

 the simplest articles : hundreds of dollars for a basket of 

 fruit, and thousands of dollars for a straw hat. 



With us as one of our secretaries was Frederick Doug- 

 lass, the gifted son of an eminent Virginian and a slave wo- 

 man, one of the two or three most talented men of color I 

 have ever known. Up to this time he had cherished many 

 hopes that his race, if set free, would improve ; but it was 

 evident that this experience in Santo Domingo discour- 

 aged and depressed him. He said to one of us, "If this is 

 the outcome of self-government by my race, Heaven help 

 us!" 



Another curious example bearing on the same subject 

 was furnished us in Jamaica, whither we went after leav- 



