in St. Domingo thirty thousand whites, twenty thousand free mulattoes, and five hundred thousand black slaves. Not unfrequently the white planters sent their mulatto children to France to be educated like gentlemen. Many of them acquired great wealth and held numerous slaves. But they were a class by themselves. However rich and educated they might be, they were kept trampled down[41] in a degraded and irritating position, merely on account of their color. They despised the negro slaves, from whom they had descended on the mother's side; and they in their turn were despised by the whites, whose children they were, because their color connected them with the enslaved race. They were not allowed to be doctors, lawyers, or priests; they could hold no public office; they could not inherit the name or the property of their fathers; they could not attend school with white boys, or sit at a white man's table, or occupy the same portion of a church with him, or be buried in the same graveyard. They were continually insulted by whites, but if they dared to give a blow in return, the penalty was to have the right hand cut off. This class of free mulattoes claimed that, being numerous and wealthy, and the payers of taxes, they had a right to send representatives to the Colonial Assembly to look after their interests. They had the more hopes of gaining this point, because a great Revolution was then going on in France, and the friends of liberty and equality were daily growing stronger there. When the white planters sent deputies to France, the mulattoes sent deputies also, with a present of more than a million of dollars, and an offer to mortgage a fifth part of all their property toward the payment of the French national debt. All they asked in return was that the law should put them on an equality with white men. Being slaveholders, they manifested the same selfishness that white slaveholders did. They declared that they asked redress of grievances only for oppressed freemen; that they had no wish to change the condition of the negroes, who were slaves.

[41]

This petition was drawn up in 1790, and sent to Paris by a wealthy colored man named Ogé. It excited lively[42] discussion in the National Assembly of France. One of the members, named Lamoth, who owned large estates in St. Domingo, said: "I am one of the largest proprietors in that island; but I would lose all that I possess there rather than disown principles which justice and humanity have consecrated. I am not only in favor of admitting men of color into the Colonial Assemblies, but I also go for the emancipation of the negro slaves." After animated discussion, the reply received by the mulatto deputies from the President of the 

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