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the red hand of murder, he was thrust from the full tide of
this world's interest, from its hopes, its aspirations, its vic-
tories, into the visible presence of death- and he did not
quail. Not alone for the one short moment in which, stunned
and dazed, he could give up life, hardly aware of its relin-
quishment, but through days of deadly languor, through
weeks of agony, that was not less agony because silently
borne, with clear sight and calm courage, he looked into his
open grave. What blight and ruin met his anguished eyes,
10 whose lips may tell what brilliant, broken plans, what
baffled, high ambitions, what sundering of strong, warm,
manhood's friendships, what bitter rending of sweet house-
hold ties! Behind him a proud, expectant nation, a great
host of sustaining friends, a cherished and happy mother,
wearing the full, rich honors of her early toil and tears; the
wife of his youth, whose whole life lay in his; the little boys
not yet emerged from childhood's day of frolic; the fair
young daughter; the sturdy sons just springing into closest
companionship, claiming every day and every day rewarding
20 a father's love and care; and in his heart the eager, rejoic-
ing power to meet all demand. Before him, desolation and
great darkness! And his soul was not shaken. His coun-
trymen were thrilled with instant, profound and universal
sympathy. Masterful in his mortal weakness, he became
25 the centre of a nation's love, enshrined in the prayers of
a world. But all the love and all the sympathy could not
share with him his suffering. He trod the wine press alone.
With unfaltering front he faced death. With unfailing ten-
derness he took leave of life. Above the demoniac hiss of
30 the assassin's bullet he heard the voice of God.
simple resignation he bowed to the Divine decree.

With

As the end drew near, his early craving for the sea returned. The stately mansion of power had been to him the wearisome hospital of pain, and he begged to be taken from 35 its prison walls, from its oppressive, stifling air, from its homelessness and its hopelessness. Gently, silently, the

love of a great people bore the pale sufferer to the longed-for healing of the sea, to live or die, as God should will, within sight of its heaving billows, within sound of its manifold voices. With wan, fevered face tenderly lifted to the cooling breeze, he looked out wistfully upon the ocean's changing 5 wonders; on its far sails, whitening in the morning light; on its restless waves, rolling shoreward to break and die beneath the noonday sun; on the red clouds of evening, arching low to the horizon; on the serene and shining pathway of the stars. Let us think that his dying eyes read a mystic 10 meaning which only the rapt and parting soul may know. Let us believe that in the silence of the receding world he heard the great waves breaking on a further shore, and felt already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morning.

III.

WENDELL PHILLIPS.

Toussaint l'Ouverture.1

A lecture delivered in New York and Boston in December, 1861. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: I have been requested to offer 15 you a sketch made some years since, of one of the most remarkable men of the last generation, — the great St. Domingo chief, Toussaint l'Ouverture, an unmixed negro, with no drop of white blood in his veins. My sketch is at once a biography and an argument, a biography, of course very 20 brief, of a negro soldier and statesman, which I offer you as an argument in behalf of the race from which he sprung. I am about to compare and weigh races; indeed I am engaged to-night in what you will think the absurd effort to convince you that the negro race, instead of being that object of pity 25

-

1 Reprinted by permission of Lee & Shepard from Speeches, Lectures and Letters, Wendell Phillips, First Series.

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or contempt which we usually consider it, is entitled, judged by the facts of history, to a place close by the side of the Saxon. Now races love to be judged in two ways—by the great men they produce and by the average merit of the mass of the race. We Saxons are proud of Bacon, Shakespeare, Hampden, Washington, Franklin, the stars we have lent to the galaxy of history; and then we turn with equal. pride to the average merit of Saxon blood, since it streamed from its German home. So, again, there are three tests by 10 which races love to be tried. The first, the basis of all, is courage, the element which says, here and to-day, "This continent is mine, from the Lakes to the Gulf: let him beware who seeks to divide it!" [Cheers.] And the second is the recognition that force is doubled by purpose; liberty 15 regulated by law is the secret of Saxon progress. And the third element is persistency, endurance; first a purpose, then death or success. Of these three elements is made that Saxon pluck which has placed our race in the van of modern civilization.

20

In the hour you lend me to-night, I attempt the Quixotic effort to convince you that the negro blood, instead of standing at the bottom of the list, is entitled, if judged either by its great men or its masses, either by its courage, its purpose, or its endurance, to a place as near ours as any other blood 25 known in history. And, for the purpose of my argument, I take an island, St. Domingo, about the size of South Carolina, the third spot in America upon which Columbus placed his foot. Charmed by the magnificence of its scenery and fertility of its soil, he gave it the fondest of all names, His30 paniola, Little Spain. His successor, more pious, rebaptized it from St. Dominic, St. Domingo; and when the blacks, in 1803, drove our white blood from its surface, they drove our names with us, and began the year 1804 under the old name, Hayti, the land of mountains. It was originally tenanted by 35 filibusters, French and Spanish, of the early commercial epochs, the pirates of that day as of ours. The Spanish took

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the eastern two-thirds, the French the western third of the island, and they gradually settled into colonies. The French, to whom my story belongs, became the pet colony of the mother land. Guarded by peculiar privileges, enriched by the scions of wealthy houses, aided by the unmatched fertility of the soil, it soon was the richest gem in the Bourbon crown; and at the period to which I call your attention, about the era of our Constitution, 1789, its wealth was almost incredible. The effeminacy of the white race rivalled that of the Sybarite of antiquity, while the splendour of their pri- 10 vate life outshone Versailles, and their luxury found no mate but in the mad prodigality of the Cæsars. At this time the island held about thirty thousand whites, twenty or thirty thousand mulattoes, and five hundred thousand slaves. The slave trade was active. About twenty-five thousand slaves 15 were imported annually; and this only sufficed to fill the gap which the murderous culture of sugar annually produced. The mulattoes, as with us, were children of the slaveholders, but, unlike us, the French slaveholder never forgot his child by a bondswoman. He gave him everything but his name, wealth, rich plantations, gangs of slaves; sent him to Paris for his education, summoned the best culture of France for the instruction of his daughters, so that in 1790 the mulatto race held one-third of the real estate and one-quarter of the personal estate of the island. But though educated and rich, 25 he bowed under the same yoke as with us. Subjected to special taxes, he could hold no public office, and, if convicted of any crime, was punished with double severity. His son might not sit on the same seat at school with a white boy; he might not enter a church where a white man was worship- 30 ping; if he reached a town on horseback, he must dismount and lead his horse by the bridle; and when he died, even his dust could not rest in the same soil with a white body. Such was the white race and the mulatto, the thin film of a civilization beneath which surged the dark mass of five 35 hundred thousand slaves.

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It was over such a population, the white man melted in sensuality; the mulatto feeling all the more keenly his degradation from the very wealth and culture he enjoyed; the slave, sullen and indifferent, heeding not the quarrels or the changes 5 of the upper air,—it was over this population that there burst, in 1789, the thunder-storm of the French Revolution. The first words which reached the island were the motto of the Jacobin Club, "Liberty, Equality." The white man. heard them aghast. He had read of the streets of Paris run10 ning blood. The slave heard them with indifference; it was a quarrel in the upper air, between other races, which did not concern him. The mulatto heard them with a welcome which no dread of other classes could quell. Hastily gathered into conventions, they sent to Paris a committee of the whole 15 body, laid at the feet of the National Convention the free gift of six millions of francs, pledged one-fifth of their annual rental toward the payment of the national debt, and only asked in return that this yoke of civil and social contempt should be lifted from their shoulders.

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You may easily imagine the temper in which Mirabeau and Lafayette welcomed this munificent gift of the free mulattoes of the West Indies, and in which the petition for equal civil rights was received by a body which had just resolved that all men were equal. The Convention hastened to ex25 press its gratitude, and issued a decree which commences thus: "All freeborn French citizens are equal before the law." Ogé was selected the friend of Lafayette, a lieutenant-colonel in the Dutch service, the son of a wealthy mulatto woman, educated in Paris, the comrade of all the leading 30 French Republicans the decree and the message

to

carry

He landed. The decree

of French Democracy to the island. of the National Convention was laid on the table of the General Assembly of the island. One old planter seized it, tore it in fragments, and trampled it under his feet, swearing by all 35 the saints in the calendar that the island might sink before they would share their rights with bastards. They took an