The whites set up the tree of liberty, and shouted over the rights of man, as they did in Paris. The poor whites (the petits blancs) were bitter, the mulattoes discontent, and the slaves reckless, or sullen, or indifferent. The planters did not believe themselves fools or mad! When the mulatto Lacomb presented his petition to the authorities, asking the rights and privileges of a man, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, he was only hanged for doing it. When a respectable planter, Beaudiere, at Petite Goave, presented a petition, asking for rights for the mulattoes, he was simply derided, and then torn in pieces.[8] The temper of the times was hot. Many of the mulattoes were rich, many educated, with the tastes and manners of well-bred men. The whites hated them from the moment that it appeared that the “rights of man” included _them_, and that they knew it. The self-constituted General Assembly of the whites declared “that they would rather die than participate their political rights with a bastard and degenerate race.” Both parties knew who had made them bastards; and the injurers always hate the injured. The mulattoes were by thousands the slaves of their own fathers—often freed, and favored, but all despised. The murder-spots would never out; no time, no talent, no wealth, no virtue, no genius, could wash away the stain. African blood, even if of princes, “tainted the character for ever!”[9] Their condition was worse, “in truth, much worse,” than the same class in the British Islands.[10] They could hold no public office—no mulatto could be a priest, or a physician, or lawyer, or schoolmaster. He could not even take the surname of his father. They were as the Tiers Etat of ancient France, which at last drowned the noblesse in their own blood. By a law (not often enforced) a mulatto who struck a white man, upon any pretext, was to have that hand struck off; a white man who struck a free mulatto was dismissed with a small fine.[11] By law, the free mulattoes were at the mercy of the King’s army officers—they could be compelled to serve indefinitely in the army, as horse or foot, without pay, to provide themselves with arms and to defray their expenses. They were free mulattoes, truly, but the slaves of the State. They could acquire property—the pursuit of wealth alone was free. Many were, therefore, immensely rich. The presence of cultivated and manly fellows, such as some of these mulattoes were, in Paris, increased the zeal of the extreme Republicans in their favor, and the society of “Amis des Noirs”[12] (formed in 1787) comprised some of the best and most brilliant men of France. These asserted, with power and eloquence, that the civil rights of this class of “_free men_” in the French Colonies were guaranteed by the Declaration of Rights.