Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [20]
Gentlemen,
Those who have the honor to present you with these Memoirs are a class of men whom up to the present you have failed to recognize as like unto you, and whom you have covered in opprobrium by heaping upon them the ignominy attached to their unfortunate lot. These are men who don't know how to choose big words, but who are going to show you and all the world the justice of their cause; finally, they are those whom you call your slaves and who claim the rights to which all men may aspire.
For too long, Gentlemen, byway of abuses which one can never too strongly accuse to have taken place because our lack of understanding and our ignorance—for a very long time, I say, we have been victims of your greed and your avarice. Under the blows of your barbarous whip we have accumulated for you the treasures you enjoy in this colony; the human race has suffered to see with what barbarity you have treated men like yourself—yes, men—over whom you have no other right except that you are stronger and more barbaric than we; you've engaged in [slave] traffic, you have sold men for horses, and even that is the least of your shortcomings in the eyes of humanity; our lives depend on your caprice, and when it's a question of amusing yourselves it falls on a man like us [sic] who most often is guilty of no other crime than to be under your orders.
We are black, it is true, but tell us, Gentlemen, you who are so judicious, what is the law that says that the black man must belong to and be the property of the white man? Certainly you will not be able to make us see where that exists, if it is not in your imagination—always ready to form new [phantasms] so long as they are to your advantage. Yes, Gentlemen, we are free like you, and it is only by your avarice and our ignorance that anyone is still held in slavery up to this day, and we can neither see nor find the right which you pretend to have over us, nor anything that could prove it to us, set down on the earth like you, all being children of the same father created in the same image. We are your equals then, by natural right, and if nature pleases itself to diversify colors within the human race, it is not a crime to be born black nor an advantage to be white. If the abuses in the Colony have gone on for several years, that was before the fortunate revolution which has taken place in the Motherland, which has opened for us the road which our courage and labor will enable us to ascend, to arrive at the temple of Liberty, like those brave Frenchmen who are our models and whom all the universe is contemplating.
For too long we have borne your chains without thinking of shaking them off, but any authority which is not founded on virtue and humanity and which only tends to subject one's fellowman to slavery, must come to an end, and that end is yours. You Gentlemen who pretend to subject us to slavery— have you not sworn to uphold the French Constitution of which you are members? What does it say, this respectable Constitution?—what is the fundamental law?; have you forgotten that you have formally vowed the declaration of the rights of man which says that men are born free, equal in their rights; that the natural rights include liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression? So then, as you cannot deny what you have sworn, we are within our rights, and you ought to recognize yourselves as perjurers; by your decrees you recognize that all men are free, but you want to maintain servitude for four hundred and eighty thousand individuals who allow you to enjoy all that you possess; by your creatures you offer us only to give liberty to our chiefs; but it is still one of your maxims of politics that is to say that those who have been the half of our work would be delivered by us to be your victims. No, we prefer a thousand deaths to acting that way toward our own kind. And you want to accord us the benefits which are due to us, they must also shower onto all of our brothers …
Gentlemen, in very few