The very tropical anarchy which has turned Central America into a perpetual theatre of civil wars has also continually divided the two zones of the ancient Hispaniola: San Domingo and Hayti. In the one the Spaniards ruled, in the other the French, and the antagonism of these two Powers was of long duration. Hayti is a negro State, and San Domingo refused to submit to the tyranny of ex-slaves. Conflicts of a political origin were supplemented by the warfare of castes. Caudillos and tyrants have succeeded one another in the government; revolutions and domestic wars have continually troubled these two small States, over which the United States have gradually extended their tutelage.
As early as the seventeenth century the French were established in Hispaniola, on the northern coast; bold Normans, herdsmen and shepherds, the celebrated buccaneers, had founded a kind of forest republic ruled by special laws. In 1691 this territory was a French colony, and in 1726 it contained 30,000 free inhabitants and 100,000 slaves, black or mulatto. The Creoles, according to the chroniclers of the time, were proud and inconstant, idle and { 227} sceptical as to religion. The negroes, chiefly occupied in servile labour, superstitious and imprudent, formed the bulk of the slaves. A Jesuit, Father Charlevoix, who had observed them, wrote in 1725: "Properly speaking we may say that the negroes between Cap Blanc and Cap Noir have been born only for slavery."[1] It was said that the negroes were wont to celebrate the rites of a secret worship in the forest, and were preparing to fight for their liberty. They hated the other castes, the whites, the free negroes, and the mulattos; and the Hayti of the future was born of this racial hatred. Ex-slaves governed the isle, and found in bloody hecatombs revenge for their long servitude. These formed the oligarchy, an intolerable and intolerant aristocracy, inimical to whites and mulattos. Like the revolts of slaves in the ancient world, these rebellions of American serfs were the occasion of wars of extermination. The French Revolution provoked them by its Utopian liberalism: Mirabeau and Lafayette were friends of the negro, and the Convention decreed the abolition of slavery in the colonies in 1794. The slaves had risen already, in 1791, at the first rumours of the risings in France, burning property and killing their rulers.