Chapter VII). He had no intention, however, of living in Pennsylvania,

for he immediately leased this estate to its former owner and hurried away.

July 14, 1789, found the elder Audubon enlisted as a soldier in the National Guards at Les Cayes. These colonial troops, which were originally militia organizations modeled after similar bodies in France, were reorganized at this time to meet any possible emergencies. Affairs in the southern provinces of Santo Domingo had followed, up to this moment, their normal course, and Jean Audubon, who could have learned nothing of what had transpired at home, decided to entrust his various interests to the hands of agents and return to France. This was probably in late August or early September, 1789, as we know that he first returned to the United States and visited Richmond, Virginia, at the close of that year.[26] Strangely enough, on the twentieth day of the former month the National Assembly at Paris had voted the celebrated Declaration of Rights, which was destined to upturn the whole social system of Santo Domingo and to convert that island into a purgatory of the direst anarchy, strife, and bloodshed which the world had ever known, or at least remembered; but fully six weeks must have elapsed before news of this grave decision could have reached the colony.

At this time Jean Audubon was no doubt regarded as a very rich man, and though he happened to leave Les Cayes at a critical moment, little could he have dreamed of the disaster that awaited him there as well as in his beloved France. His personal affairs during this eventful period, involving as they necessarily do the early life of his distinguished son, have hitherto been shrouded in the dark and sinister history of that ever smiling but ever turbulent island. Now, however, the veil of mist that has settled over the page can be penetrated at the most important points. In this and subsequent chapters we shall follow the life of father and son through the course of events which has been thus briefly summarized.

To return to the earlier threads of our narrative, at about the close of 1783, Captain Audubon was engaged by the Coirond brothers, colonial merchants at Nantes, to take charge of their foreign trade, which centered chiefly at Les Cayes,[27] Santo Domingo, then a most thriving and populous town, as it is today the largest seaport on the southern coast of the Republic of Haiti. Their ships brought sugar, coffee, cotton and other West Indian products to France, and laden with fabrics, wines and every luxury known to the colonists of that day, returned to Les Cayes, as well as to Saint Louis, an important port a little farther to the east, where these merchants also possessed warehouses and stores.

In a short time Jean Audubon had acquired an independent business of his own, both as a planter and merchant. He made his home at Les Cayes, but extended his enterprises to Saint Louis and possibly to other points. From this time onward he commonly described himself as _négotiant_,[28] or merchant, and his son, when writing to his father from America, addressed him in this way. His business letters and other documents of the period refer to his house at Les Cayes, his plantations of cane and his sugar refinery, his exportation of colonial wares, his purchases of French goods, particularly at Nantes, and to his trade in black slaves which eventually assumed large proportions. How important his sugar plantations may have been is not known, but a tax-receipt shows that at one time he possessed forty-two slaves.[29] The naturalist said that his father acquired a plantation on the Ile à Vaches, an island of considerable importance at the southern bound of the roadstead of Les Cayes and nine miles from the town, but we have found no other reference to it.

Great numbers of negroes must have passed through Jean Audubon's hands, as shown by his bills of sale, which strangely reflect the customs of a much later and sadder day on the North American continent (see Appendix I, Documents Nos. 4-6). In one of these bills, dated at Les Cayes, September 16, 1785, Jean is credited with one-half the net proceeds of the sale of forty negroes, bought originally of M. Th. Johnston for the sum of 60,000 francs, and sold by Jean Audubon and Messrs. La Croix, Formon & Jacques for 71,552 francs; after deducting 183 francs for food and treatment, the net returns became 71,369 francs, and Jean's profits, on a half-interest basis, 5,684 francs, or about 142 francs per head. The prices of these slaves, which were sold to planters on the island when not retained for their own use, ranged from 1,500 to 2,100 francs, or from $300 to $420, at the present rate of exchange. It is interesting to notice that while these negroes were held for sale, the exact period of which is not stated, they received as food eighty bunches of bananas and three beef heads; though under the care of a physician, it is not surprising to find that one of them died. Another bill, bearing date of August 7, 1785, records the sale to Jean Audubon of ten negroes and three negresses for a total sum of 26,000 francs; 16,000 francs of this amount was paid in sugar, but what is particularly interesting now is the fact that a balance of 2,000 francs was finally cancelled on June 9, 1788, a year or more after Jean Audubon, according to the accepted accounts, is supposed to have lost his wife and his property and to have fled from the island. Mme. Anne Moynet Audubon never visited America, and her husband, as we have seen, left Santo Domingo in 1789, before the outbreak of the revolution. His property remained substantially intact until after 1792, and in some years, it is believed, yielded him in rents 90,000 francs, which at present rates in American money would be equivalent to $18,000. In giving his certificate of residence at Nantes in that eventful year, Captain Audubon publicly declared that he possessed a dwelling, a sugar refinery, and warehouses or stores at both Les Cayes and Saint Louis. Moreover, his West Indian estate was not completely settled until 1820, two years after his death.

Slaves were regarded in Santo Domingo as an indispensable commodity, as they had been in Virginia and the Carolinas for a century past, and were still to be for three-quarters of a century to come; the "friends of the blacks" as the abolitionists were called, were considered by most planters as the enemies of the whites. Degradation and cruelty, ever attendant upon a system that drew its chief support from the self-interest of a class, were all too common in the island, yet there were many who earnestly strove to soften the lot of their slaves. Though a born fighter, Jean Audubon was humane, and the evidence, so far as it goes, shows that his own slaves were treated with kindness and consideration.

This period in Santo Domingo, particularly from the year 1785 to 1789, not only is important for our story, but happened to mark a crisis in French sovereignty in America. It will be necessary, therefore, to follow certain events in a history which can serve only as a warning to mankind, for it contains little to satisfy the understanding and nothing to excite the fancy or gladden the heart. It is to be noticed first, however, that according to the accepted accounts, John James Audubon was born of a Spanish creole mother, in Louisiana, in 1780. Shortly after his birth, his mother is said to have gone to Santo Domingo, where she perished in a local uprising of the blacks, when Jean Audubon's plantations and property were totally destroyed; Jean managed to escape with only his two children, a few faithful slaves, and a part of his money and valuables, to New Orleans, whence he subsequently went to France. Investigation of existing records has proved that these statements are not in accord with the facts, but before entering into further personal details it will be well to examine those conditions on the island of Santo Domingo which led many into easy fortune only to involve them later in a ruin as complete and irretrievable as it was unforeseen and unnecessary.

For nearly a hundred years the western half of Santo Domingo had been held by France, and to every outward appearance it had enjoyed such unbounded and steadily increasing prosperity that it was regarded with envy on every side; in fine, it seemed to be one of the richest and most desirable colonies in the whole world. Historians, said an observer of a later day,[30] were "never weary of enumerating the amount of its products, the great trade, the warehouses full of sugar, cotton, coffee, indigo and cocoa; its plains covered with splendid estates, its hillsides dotted with noble houses; a white population, rich, refined, enjoying life as only a luxurious colonial society can enjoy it." Few could then see the foul blot beneath so fair a surface, or realize that what had been bought by the misery and blood of a prostrate race would demand an equivalent, and that a settlement might be forced.

Negroes had been imported into Santo Domingo from the African coasts in incredible numbers, first by Spain after she had succeeded in exterminating the inoffensive native Caribs, and later by France. One hundred thousand blacks of all ages were entering the colonies each year, and to secure this number of _bossals_, as the native Africans were called, involved the death of nearly as many more, either through the fighting that preceded their capture on land, or from the terrors of pestilence or shipwreck that awaited them at sea. By 1790 the blacks of Santo Domingo outnumbered the whites sixteen to one, and the number of blacks then in the island was estimated at 480,000, in contrast to 30,800 whites, and about 24,000 free mulattoes or "people of color."

Under French rule the blacks had been subjected, as many believed, to a system of slavery unsurpassed for cruelty and barbarity. No doubt there were Frenchmen who, in their fierce struggle to become rich, worked their slaves beyond human endurance and did not hesitate to terrorize them with the severest punishment upon the first symptoms of revolt; but, on the whole, such sweeping denunciations were probably unjust. An impartial observer and historian of that day, himself an Englishman,[31] declared that the French treated their slaves quite as well as the English did theirs, and clothed them better. He believed that the lot of the Santo Domingo blacks at the period of which we speak would compare favorably with that of the peasantry of Europe, a comment made familiar to American ears when applied to the slave population of the South. The real trouble came from the more enlightened disaffection of the mulattoes and free negroes, fanned by the fanatic zeal of abolitionists abroad, particularly of those who formed the society of _Les Amis des Noirs_ in France, who were determined to carry out their policies by any means and at whatever cost.

The mulattoes were really in worse plight than the actual slaves, for they were virtually slaves of the State and had no master to whom they could appeal, being subject to military service without pay, to the _corvée_ or labor upon the highways, the hardships of which were insupportable, as well as to a constant and galling tyranny. The law was invariably framed in favor of the white man, who, if he struck a mulatto, was subject to a trivial fine, while retaliation by the man of color might cost him his right hand. It should be added, however, that custom was usually more lenient than the law, and that such atrocious enactments were generally a dead letter.

As might have been expected in the circumstances, the mulattoes took their revenge on the despised blacks, whom they were permitted to hold as slaves. They were notoriously the hardest taskmasters in the island, and in return they were naturally envied and hated by the ignorant mass of black humanity. The whites, to complete the discord, were divided among themselves, the Frenchmen from Europe affecting a superiority over the white Creoles, the seasoned natives of the island, a condition that never made for good feeling. Moreover, the white planter, who endeavored to gain a foothold by producing sugar, cotton or coffee, seems to have had a just grievance against the merchants whom the law favored and who set the price for negroes and all other commodities that had to be bought in exchange for produce. Such at least was the conviction and experience of a keen observer, Francis Alexander Stanislaus, Baron de Wimpffen,[32] who went to Santo Domingo in 1788, tried to establish himself as a coffee planter at Jaquemel, on the southern coast not far from Les Cayes, and after three years of fruitless effort, gave up the attempt in disgust, glad to escape, as from the flames of purgatory, to the United States, where he settled in Pennsylvania. Baron de Wimpffen's lack of success no doubt colored his impressions of the country to some extent, but after making due allowance on this score, we find in his letters, beyond a doubt, an essentially true picture of Santo Domingan society and plantation life at the very time and place with which our story is most intimately concerned. A sketch of the picture which the Baron has drawn, though in brief outline, will enable us better to understand the real condition of affairs.

The prevailing taste in Santo Domingo, according to this observer, was creolian tinctured with _boucan_, or with the characteristics of the buccaneers. White society on the island was divided into governmental or town officials, merchants, and planters, the several classes having their own interests, which were often conflicting. The planters were concerned only with negroes, their sugar, their cotton or their coffee, and could talk of nothing else; values were reckoned in negroes, or in sugar, for which slaves were commonly exchanged. The laxity of morals, the absence of schools, and the total lack of books were patent on every hand. After sunset dancing was the chief form of amusement in the towns, and handsome mulattoes were the acknowledged Bacchantes of the island. It was from this class that housekeepers were usually chosen by the greater part of the unmarried whites. They had "some skill," said Baron de Wimpffen, "in the management of a family, sufficient honesty to attach themselves invariably to one man, and great goodness of heart. More than one European, abandoned by his selfish brethren, has found in them all the solicitude of the most tender, the most constant, the most generous humanity, without being indebted for it to any other sentiment than benevolence."

Expense of cultivation at this time is said to have risen out of all proportion to the value of the product. While negro service was a prime necessity to the planter, the African mine was becoming exhausted; even then slave dealers were penetrating a thousand leagues or more from the Guinea coast. Added to the cost of slaves, which was yearly increasing and had already reached to 2,000 or even 3,000 francs per head, the Government exacted a ruinous capitation tax, which bore with special weight on the planter.[33] Physicians and lawyers, however ignorant, exacted exorbitant fees; masons and carpenters, however inefficient, demanded an unreasonable wage; they, we are told, with the merchant and official governmental class, were the only money makers on the island. The merchant whom we have seen taking the planter's produce at his own price, in exchange for slaves again at his own price, had the advantage in every business transaction; the planter, as a result, was his chronic debtor, and at usurious rates.

Subject to an enervating climate, which Europeans with their intemperate habits could seldom endure for long, the planter, though weak and sick himself, was often obliged to be overseer, driver, apothecary, and nurse to his negroes, the slave of his slaves. In spite of every care, out of one hundred imported negroes the mortality was nearly twenty per cent in the first year. Where less oversight was given to their food, the slightest scratch was likely to degenerate into a dangerous wound, while the most dreaded disease, then known in English as the "yaws" and in French as _la grosse vérole_ (to distinguish it from the smallpox, _la petite vérole_), was a scourge for which no remedy had then been found. Every slave was branded with a hot iron on the breast, with both the name of his master and that of the parish to which he belonged, but notwithstanding such precautions desertions were far from uncommon.

The Santo Domingan blacks were put to work in the morning with a crack of the _arceau_, a short-handled whip, delivered on their backs or shoulders, and so accustomed had they become to the regularity of this stimulus that they could hardly be set in motion without it. How to manage the true _bossal_, as distinguished from the African creole, with humanity and success was a problem to which many considerate planters must have addressed themselves in vain, if, as this one declared, the black's ruling passion was to do nothing, and he was by nature a thief, to whom indulgence was weakness and injustice a defect of judgment that excited both his hatred and his contempt.

Stanilaus further observed that the soil of Santo Domingo was then already becoming exhausted, and he believed that the day of rapid fortunes for the planter had passed. "Calculate now," said he, "the privations of every kind, the commercial vicissitudes, the perpetual apprehensions, the disgusting details, inseparable from the nature of slavery; the state of languor or anxiety in which he vegetates between a burning sky, and a soil always ready to swallow him up, and you will allow with me that there is no peasant, no day-labourer in Europe, whose condition is not preferable to that of a planter of San Domingo." "I never met," he adds, "a West Indian in France who did not enumerate to me with more emphasis than accuracy, the charms of a residence at Saint Domingo; since I have been here, I have not found a single one who has not cursed both Saint Domingo, and the obstacles, eternally reviving, which, from one year to another, prolong his stay in this abode of the damned."

Having followed De Wimpffen to this point, the reader is entitled to hear his parting epigrams. "The more I know," he said, of the inhabitants of Saint Domingo, "the more I felicitate myself on quitting it. I came hither with the _noble_ ambition of occupying myself solely in acquiring a fortune; but destined to become a master, and consequently to possess slaves, I saw, in the necessity of living with them, that of studying them with attention to know them, and I depart with much less esteem for the one, and pity for the other. When a person is what the greater part of the planters are, he is made to have slaves; when he is what the greater part of the slaves are, he is made to have a master."

Whether Jean Audubon's long experience would have confirmed all that has just been said is doubtful, for he was primarily a merchant or dealer and thus belonged to the favored class. But what especially interests us now is that both he and De Wimpffen were owners of plantations in the southern province of Santo Domingo at the same time. The one who wished to retain a valuable property followed the custom of the time by confiding the management of his affairs to an agent, either at a fixed salary or on a profit-sharing basis; while the other, who stayed long enough to discern the trend of events, was glad to sell his land and his slaves and shake the dust of the island from his feet forever.[34]

Before resuming the intimate details of our narrative, we must follow the whirlwind of political events already set in motion in the island colony. In the spring of 1789 the white colonists of Santo Domingo took administrative matters into their own hands, and without vestige of legal authority, elected and dispatched eighteen deputies to the States-General, then sitting in France. These men reached Versailles in June, a month after that body had declared itself the National Assembly, but only six were ever admitted to its counsels. For a long time opposition to the planters had been fomented in Paris by the "Friends of the Blacks," the abolition society to which we have referred; stories of cruelty to the slaves, colored and intensified in passing from mouth to mouth, as invariably happens when atrocity tales are used as partisan weapons, added to the arrogance and extravagant habits of many planters when resident in the mother country, did not tend to soften the prejudice of the public towards their class. The planters could get no consideration at home, and, as we have seen, the Declaration of Rights followed promptly in August, while a legislative Assembly was ordered in September. Meantime the mulattoes on the island were clamoring for the political rights which the decree had promised them, and, to make matters worse, some of the influential whites espoused their cause, even preaching the enfranchisement of the blacks, from whom up to this time little had been heard. In short, the whites were divided as effectually as were blacks and mulattoes.

The dominant party in Santo Domingo, led by the Governor-General, were determined to uphold the old despotic _régime_, while the General Assembly, which met at Saint Marc in obedience to orders from the mother country, on April 16, 1790, drafted a new constitution. The clash came in July of this year, and in the northern province, where the first blood of the revolution was drawn at Port-au-Prince. On October 12, 1790, James Ogé, a mulatto, inspired, financed and equipped by the "Friends of the Blacks" in Paris, landed secretly in Santo Domingo, established a military camp at Cap François and called all mulattoes to arms. His plan was to wage war on the whites as well as upon all mulattoes who refused to join his standard of revolt; but Ogé and his company were quickly suppressed, and this incompetent leader, who fled to Spanish territory, was later extradited and broken on the wheel. This episode naturally infuriated the whites against all mulattoes, who took up arms at Les Cayes and at other points. The whites also armed, and a skirmish occurred at Les Cayes, Jean Audubon's old home, where fifty persons on both sides lost their lives, but a temporary truce was immediately effected. This was the first serious incident in which the town of Les Cayes figured in the bloody revolution of Santo Domingo; it occurred, we believe, in the late autumn of 1790. Audubon's mother had then been dead four years, and her son, the future naturalist, had left the country in the fall of 1789; in order to bring out these facts clearly it has seemed necessary to enter into this detail.

Later events in Santo Domingo now moved in a direction and with a velocity which few then were able to comprehend. The danger and the potency of the volcano that had long been muttering beneath their feet needed but a few touches from without to reveal its full explosive power. These were furnished not only by the mulattoes, many of whom, after having fought under French officers in the American Revolution, had returned to the island and there spread wide the spirit of disaffection and revolt; but also by the National Assembly in France, which by its vacillating policies destroyed every hope of reconciliation. In March, 1790, this Assembly granted to the citizens of Santo Domingo the right of local self-government, but only a year later, on May 15, 1791, tore up this decree and emancipated the mulattoes. When the news reached the island six weeks later, the colony was thrown into the utmost consternation; the whites as a class refused point-blank to accept the decision and summoned an Assembly of their own, which met in August. The mulattoes again took up arms, and the blacks, who by this time had been won to their side, started a general revolt which had its origin on a plantation called "Noé," in the parish of Acul, nine miles from Cap François. They began by burning the cane fields and the sugar houses and murdering their white owners. Thenceforth Santo Domingan history becomes an intricate and disgusting detail of conspiracies, treacheries, murders, conflagrations, and atrocities of every description. The only ray of light comes from the first genuine leader of the blacks, the gallant but unfortunate Toussaint, in 1793.

As has already been intimated, Jean Audubon's Santo Domingo property suffered long after he left the island, and certainly after 1792 when, as we shall soon see, revolutions were demanding his attention and all his energies at home.