第175章

At the Haitian capital our commission had interviews with the president, his cabinet, and others, and afterward we had time to look about us. Few things could be more dispiriting. The city had been burned again and again, and there had arisen a tangle of streets displaying every sort of cheap absurdity in architecture. The effects of the recent revolution--the latest in a long series of civic convulsions, cruel and sterile--were evident on all sides. On the slope above the city had stood the former residence of the French governor: it had been a beautiful palace, and, being so far from the sea, had, until the recent revolution, escaped unharmed; but during that last effort a squad of miscreants, howling the praises of liberty, having got possession of a small armed vessel in the harbor and found upon it a rifled cannon of long range, had exercised their monkeyish passion for destruction by wantonly firing upon this beautiful structure. It now lay in ruins. In its main staircase an iron ring was pointed out to us, and we were given the following chronicle.

During the recent revolution the fugitive President Salnave had been captured, a leathern thong had been rudely drawn through a gash in his hand, and, attached by this to a cavalryman, he had been dragged up the hill to the palace, through the crowd which had but recently hurrahed for him, but which now jeered and pelted him.

Arriving upon the scene of his former glory, he was attached by the thong to this iron ring and shot.

Opposite the palace was the ruin of a mausoleum, and in the street were scattered fragments of marble sarcophagi beautifully sculptured: these had contained the bodies of former rulers, but the revolutionists of Haiti, imitating those of 1793 in France, as apes imitate men, had torn the corpses out of them and had then scattered these, with the fragments of their monuments, through the streets.

In the markets of the city we had ample experience of the advantage arising from unlimited paper money.

Successive governments had kept themselves afloat by new issues of currency, until its purchasing power was reduced almost to nothing. Preposterous sums were demanded for the simplest articles: hundreds of dollars for a basket of fruit, and thousands of dollars for a straw hat.

With us as one of our secretaries was Frederick Douglass, the gifted son of an eminent Virginian and a slave woman,--one of the two or three most talented men of color Ihave ever known. Up to this time he had cherished many hopes that his race, if set free, would improve; but it was evident that this experience in Santo Domingo discouraged and depressed him. He said to one of us, ``If this is the outcome of self-government by my race, Heaven help us!''

Another curious example bearing on the same subject was furnished us in Jamaica, whither we went after leav-ing Haiti. Our wish was to consult, on our way home, the former president of the Haitian republic, Geffrard,--who was then living in exile near Kingston. We found him in a beautiful apartment, elegantly furnished; and in every way he seemed superior to the officials whom we had met at Port-au-Prince. He was a light mulatto, intelligent, quiet, dignified, and able to state his views without undue emphasis. His wife was very agreeable, and his daughter, though clearly of a melancholic temperament, one of the most beautiful young women I have ever seen. The reason for her melancholy was evident to any one who knew her father's history. He had gone through many political storms before he had fled from Haiti, and in one of these his enemies had fired through the windows of his house and killed his other daughter.

He calmly discussed with us the condition of the island, and evidently believed that the only way to save it from utter barbarism was to put it under the control of some civilized power.

Interesting as were his opinions, he and his family, as we saw them in their daily life, were still more so. It was a revelation to us all of what the colored race might become in a land where it is under no social ban. For generations he and his had been the equals of the best people they had met in France and in Haiti; they had been guests at the dinners of ministers and at the soires of savants in the French capital; there was nothing about them of that deprecatory sort which one sees so constantly in men and women with African blood in their veins in lands where their race has recently been held in servitude.

And here I may again cite the case of President Baez--a man to whom it probably never occurred that he was not the equal socially of the best men he met, and who in any European country would be at once regarded as a man of mark, and welcomed at any gathering of notables.

Among our excursions, while in Jamaica, was one to Spanish Town, the residence of the British governor.

In the drawing-room of His Excellency's wife there was shown us one rather curious detail. Not long before our visit, the legislature had been abolished and the island had been made a crown colony ruled by a royal governor and council; therefore it was that, there being no further use for it, the gorgeous chair of ``Mr. Speaker,'' a huge construction apparently of carved oak, had been transferred to her ladyship's drawing-room, and we were informed that in this she received her guests.

From Kingston we came to Key West, and from that point to Charleston, where, as our frigate was too large to cross the bar, we were taken off, and thence reached Washington by rail.

One detail regarding those latter days of our commission is perhaps worthy of record as throwing light on a seamy side of American life. From first to last we had shown every possible civility to the representatives of the press who had accompanied us on the frigate, constantly taking them with us in Santo Domingo and elsewhere, and giving them every facility for collecting information.