CHAPTER III

JEAN AUDUBON AS SANTO DOMINGO PLANTER AND MERCHANT

Captain Audubon at Les Cayes—As planter, sugar refiner, general merchant and slave dealer, amasses a fortune—His return to France with his children—History of the Santo Domingo revolt—Baron de Wimpffen's experience—Revolution of the whites—Opposition of the abolitionists—Effect of the Declaration of Rights on the mulattoes—The General Assembly drafts a new constitution—First blood drawn between revolutionists and loyalists at Port-au-Prince—Ogé's futile attempt to liberate the mulattoes—Les Cayes first touched by revolution in 1790, four years after the death of Audubon's mother—Emancipation of the mulattoes—Resistance of the whites—General revolt of blacks against whites and the ruin of the colony.

After the American struggle for liberty had been finally won, Captain Audubon resigned his commission held in the United States and returned to his home at Nantes, but town or country could not hold him long. Lured by the prospects of great wealth which Santo Domingo offered to the merchant of those days, and having learned by long experience in her ports the devious methods by which fortunes were attained, he decided to give up the sea and embark in colonial trade. For six years, from 1783 to 1789, he lived almost continuously in the West Indies, and as merchant, planter, and dealer in slaves amassed a large fortune. Meanwhile his wife, who had seen little of him since their marriage in 1772, remained at Nantes.

Captain Audubon traveled through the United States early in 1789, and again late in that year when on his way to France, probably in the first instance returning to Santo Domingo by way of the Ohio and the Mississippi. Symptoms of unrest were already prevalent in the northern provinces of the island but had caused no serious alarm in the south. Jean Audubon's aim seems to have been to collect debts due him in the United States and to leave the capital invested there. At all events it was on this occasion that he purchased the farm of "Mill Grove," near Philadelphia, the history of which will be given a little later (see