Brown's history of the Haitian revolution, St. Domingo: Its Revolution
and its Patriots, was delivered as a lecture in London and Philadelphia
in 1854 and published in Boston in December of the same year (though the
publisher's imprint is 1855). Of St. Domingo, one scholar
has written: "in this work Brown intended to make the history of the Haitian
revolution serve the United States as a warning and a reminder--a warning
that Negroes, like other human beings, not only desired freedom but would
fight unto death to win and maintain it, and a reminder that a slave revolt
had actually succeeded" (William Edward Farrison, William Wells Brown:
Author and Reformer [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969], 256).
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Toussaint's career as a Christian, a statesman, and a general, will lose nothing by a comparison with that of Washington. Each was the leader of an oppressed and outraged people, each had a powerful enemy to contend with, and each succeeded in founding a government in the New World. Toussaint's government made liberty its watchword, incorporated it in its constitution, abolished the slave-trade, and made freedom universal amongst the people. Washington's government incorporated slavery and the slave-trade, and enacted laws by which chains were fastened upon the limbs of millions of people. Toussaint liberated his countrymen; Washington enslaved a portion of his, and aided in giving strength and vitality to an institution that will one day rend asunder the UNION that he helped to form. Already the slave in his chains, in the rice swamps of Carolina and the cotton fields of Mississippi, burns for, revenge. In contemplating the fact that the slave would rise and vindicate his right to freedom by physical force, Jefferson said:– "Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever; that, considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest. 'What an incomprehensible machine is man! who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself, in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him through his trial, and inflict on his follow-men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose." And, should such a contest take place, the God
of Justice will be on the side of the oppressed blacks. The exasperated
genius of Africa would rise from the depths of the ocean, and show its
threatening form; and war against the tyrants would be the rallying cry.
The indignation of the slaves of the south would kindle a fire so hot that
it would melt their chains, drop by drop, until not a single link would
remain; and the revolution that was commenced in 1776 would then be finished,
and the glorious sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, "That all
men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," would
be realized, and our government would no longer be the scorn and contempt
of the friends of freedom in other lands, but would really be the LAND
OF THE FREE AND HOME OF THE BRAVE.
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