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They were the first to put us out of the pale of social relations: we, in return, could expel them without difficulty and with justice. The situation in which they are placed is precisely that to which they would reduce us. If they had been victorious, we should have been dead or enslaved; in possession of nothing, and asking nothing. But they were vanquished; they have therefore nothing; ask for nothing. We had a right to put them to death or enslave them, on the ground that they wished to put us to death or enslave us; and vice versa. We have acted with more justice and generosity than they; and have been content merely to drive them from our territories. They have no claim to our possessions, no pretence to revisit them. Let them not imagine they will be suffered to enter them again, under what pretence soever they come.

The ancient Romans, Germans, and Gauls, were accustomed to convert the property and persons of the vanquished to their own use after victory. It was then by right of conquest: the strongest won the prize. The law of nations, in modern times, alike equitable and humane, respects the person and property of the vanquished. Conquest confers no privilege. Claims of sovereignty and war are made with as little mutual evil as possible. We undoubtedly assent to the laws adopted by all civilised nations: but in regard to the ex-colonists the question is widely different. We are an exception to the rule. There is not a similar example to be found in the annals of nations. We submit our reflections to the political writers of all countries, and entreat them to condescend to favor us with their attention, on a subject of general law, so interesting and so worthy of engaging a more learned pen than our own.

The jus gentium of the moderns does not change the immutable laws of God; of justice and equity. On the contrary, they are its first and most solid foundation.

How can the ex-colonists presume to interpret in their favor the principles of morals, justice and public law, when they have violated all law, divine as well as human; when they have trampled on all principles of morality, of distributive or natural justice?

Plunderers of the property of wretched Indians, and profligate assassins, after having stripped us of our natural rights, and by perfidy and violence torn us from the bosom of our country, they have brought us upon this spot. We have found them to be torturers, who had no pity or remorse; who inflicted on us unexampled torments, pain and misery, without necessity or provocation, under the colonial system.

At the call of Liberty, we proved to our tyrants, that the Leeward Islands could be cultivated by free men; and that slavery was not essential either to the master or the slave. Order and discipline

reigned everywhere. The ex-colonists were in the full possession and enjoyment of what they term their estates. That condition of things lasted ten years: but the ex-colonists were not satisfied. They retained no longer the power of life and death. They could no longer load us with chains at pleasure. They viewed with regret the ancient state of things, and importunately demanded it. Every effort within power was made in the colony and metropolis, to compel us to resume the detested yoke of slavery, the sole and constant object of their anxious solicitations, to the transitory government of France.

The ex-colonists were the promoters of the naval expedition sent against us in 1802. They deceived Bonaparte, and betrayed him into error, by perfidious counsels; and assisting him with all their power, furnished him even with pecuniary means to accomplish that barbarous and unjust measure. They followed the expedition in crowds; they were the authors and abetters of all the crimes and cruelties that were exercised.

They procured, at their own expense, and conducted the bloodhounds against us; they spread our unfortunate country with scaffolds, gibbets, and instruments of torture; lighted up the burningpile; and introduced death by drowning, Carrier-boats, and every kind of torture and of crime. They destroyed by case-shot, and the bayonet, thousands of victims, without regard to age or sex. European Frenchmen never could have invented or committed such horrors, had they not been led and excited by the ex-colonists, long grown familiar with crime, and hackneyed in the art of torture.

They were the constant promoters of our wars and civil dissensions: on both sides equally ready to kindle the torch of discord; inflame the passions; provoke resentment; excite to mutual slaughter; and were never so rejoiced, as when they saw the blood of Hayti shed by its own hands.

Twenty-five years of misfortune and experience could not soften the vindictive temper of the ex-colonists. Since the restoration of the Bourbons, they have not changed an iota of their unjust and savage policy. They importuned, incessantly, the cabinet of Louis XVIII., to send an expedition against us, in imitation of Bonaparte; who complied with their intreaty. They not only recommended him to do it, but offered again, as they had done before, pecuniary means to undertake it. At first they sent spies, and then commissaries, all of them ex-colonists, to insult us by offering the alternative of slavery or death. They formed plans of attack, projects of extermination; and displayed them in publications and pamphlets, of which the tendency is to violate all laws of religion, justice, morals and humanity. In fine, they proposed to exterminate our whole race, to the very infant at the breast of its mother.

It follows then, that the ex-colonists are our natural enemies. Implacable in hatred and resentment, they were at all times our torturers and savage persecutors.

For what design, however, has man been created? For the purpose, surely, of knowing and seeking the Supreme Good, his happiness and felicity, and of protecting himself from any thing that might tend to endanger his safety. Self-defence is the first law of nature. It is the primary law, applicable to man either relatively, or as an individual. For these reasons we cannot, ought not, to restore to the ex-colonists what they term their estates; introduce them to our families; nor yet pay to them any sums of money, under any title or pretence whatever. Safety and selfpreservation imperiously demand it; and the very presence of one of these men would be sufficient to excite alarm and distress; or even lose us for ever.

Our political and moral existence, our interests are incompatible with those of the ex-colonists. After they have introduced pillage, devastation and death; after we have made exertions that have exhausted us, to repair the mischief occasioned at different periods, by several wars; at the moment when we begin to enjoy the fruits of our exertions, fatigue, and blood, we are expected to surrender all to the French! Where is the unjust law, by which we are condemned to divest ourselves of our privileges and estates, in order to enrich an odious race of despots, and afford them an opportunity of menacing again our lives and liberties, natural, political and civil? Have they a right to dispossess us of every thing, and overthrow the order of things established by the will of God, the laws of justice and morality? and have we no right to dispose of landed property, of a spot we have bedewed for three centuries, with our tears, sweat and blood? . They were justly ac quired, and the ex-colonists have been dispossessed of them for ever, by a long series of crimes and iniquities, which rise up in judgment against them!

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"The estates of the emigrants," says M. de Boigne, "were legally and politically sold: but the Haytian ex-colonists are in a peculiar and favorable situation." For the proof of which, he asserts, that those estates are still in our hands as a trust; and were never sold, by any legal or illegal act of the government of Hayti.

In that, as in many other instances, M. de Boigne is under a great mistake. The estates which the ex-colonists term theirs, were in general sold by an authorised act of the government of his majesty the king of Hayti. There will not, in a short space of time, remain a single insignificant house, formerly inhabited by an ex-colonist, that will not become the legitimate property of a native of Hayti.

We would not, at first, attempt to undeceive M. de Boigue and his panegyrists, M. M. Fiévée, Hoffmann, and Felletz, by showing them their egregious error, in bringing forward the sale of estates. With such political writers we chose rather to discuss at once the question in regard to public right; for, the deed is not the right. We now assure them, as well as the ex-colonists and their supporters, that their estates, as they are pleased to call them, have been sold and disposed of, in a strictly legal, just, and prudent manner, by a solemn act presented to the king in the great council of state; and that in fact, as well as in sound principle, the estates are theirs no more. If they are sorry for it, so much the worse. They have drawn upon themselves their own misfortunes. They have to accuse themselves alone. They imagined that there was no respect paid to distributive justice on earth; but erroneously. Must they not be possessed with a spirit of infatuation and blindness, to suppose that we should keep as a trust, our own property, and surreilder it to them afterwards?

If they had not considered the same ignorant and barbarous people without any knowledge of political, of civil law, or European notions, they would not have dared, in our presence, to appeal, so inconsiderately as they have done, to the principles of morality, justice and jus gentium of Europe, in favor of the ex-colonists.

They would not have talked to us of the eternal obligation of debt and the fixed rights of property, when they stand upon a false and criminal basis. They would not have presumed to tell us that the ex-colonists were placed in a particular category, and more favorably circumstanced than the emigrants whose estates had been legally and politically sold, because it is incumbent on wise and prudent governments, before all things, to prevent the recurrence of disorder, and of reaction, still more dangerous.

Though M. de Boigne is guilty towards the emigrants of cruel injustice, by putting them on a level with the ex-colonists, he admits notwithstanding, that their estates were legally and politically sold. Might we not ask, why the estates, which the ex-colonists term theirs, could not be legally and politically sold? We should be particularly desirous of being informed why such a sale would be illegal and impolitic on our part? of being informed why our government is necessarily less wise and prudent than their own? and why we should not, above all things, prevent the recurrence of d der, a d of reaction, still more dangerous?

If, at the period when we proclaimed our independence, we did not sell or dispose of such estates, it must be attributed to the head of the government then existing, who did not consider himself in a fit situation to do it. In that instance, he committed a capital fault, unprecedented in the annals of history, and indefensible. An act

so great, salutary, and judicious, would in itself have preserved the country from the horrors of civil war. The nation would have been happier; the country richer and more powerful, and government more firm. All would have stood on a more substantial basis. The frivolous questions on property, always dangerous, because they attack man in his most vital interests, and have been a principal cause of civil war, would have been avoided. The government of that time would have found in the owners of newly acquired estates, a number of persons deeply interested in its maintenance and stability. Forty or fifty thousand of the new proprietors would have supported it with all the influence of their wealth, character, and credit, over the great body of the people.

That government fell, because it stood independent of the people, and was grounded on no solid and permanent basis. M. le Borgne de Boigne attributes the death of the emperor Dessalines to the slaughter of Frenchmen in his reign. "At last," says he, "the conspiracy succeeds, the implacable enemy of the human race is assassinated by his suite, with part of his guard, and the accomplices of his cruelty."

The emperor, though an enemy to the French, was not so to the human race. Though he made reprisals upon men who would have exterminated us, he was not cruel. He owes, on the contrary, his death to his having relied with too much confidence on the French faction; and a white Frenchman, named Verret, whom the emperor had promoted to the rank of adjutant-general, was base enough to give him the first stab !

An ardent patriot, a lover of his countrymen, and his country's liberty the emperor Dessalines, with the inclination and power to do good, had not the knowledge, sagacity and prudence indispensably necessary to sovereigns, in the management of public affairs. Unfortunately he was surrounded by factious men, who to debauchery and corruption superadded the love of intrigue. Their depravity and loose conduct lost him the favorable opinion of the people: for they were suffered to acquire an ascendency in his councils, though incapable of understanding or promoting the welfare of the country. The very small number of honest men who could be prevailed upon to enter the cabinet, were not listened to. The unhappy prince, with the very best intentions, was misled. At a period when the greatest hardships were felt, the most idle extravagances were persisted in. No useful establishments were created; no measure of common advantage introduced. Disorders crept into the administration; a spirit of insubordination and licentiousness spread itself among the troops. The French faction, which had been itself the original cause of the mischief, seized the opportunity afforded by the situation in which the empire was placed, to conspire against the emperor. He was basely and treacherously

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