When the French vessels, bringing news of the developing Revolution, touched the wharves of Cap Français, a spark seemed to leap forth into the colony, to run through all ranks and classes of men, setting the Creole hearts afire, till it fell dead against the _gros peau_ and the _peau fin_[27] of the black man. Three colonial parties vibrated with expectations that were radically discordant when the cannon of the people thundered against the Bastille. First in rank and assumption were the old planters and proprietors, two-thirds of whom were at the time absentees in France. They were, excepting a small minority, devoted royalists, but desired colonial independence in order to enjoy a perfect slaveholding authority. They were embittered by commercial restrictions, and longed to be set free from the mother-country, that San Domingo might be erected into a feudal kingdom with a court and gradation of nobility, whose parchments, indeed, would have been black and engrossed all over with despotism. They wanted the freedom of the seas and all the ports of the world, not from a generous motive, nor from a policy that looked beyond the single object of nourishing slavery at the cheapest rates, to carry its products to the best markets in exchange for flour, cloths, salted provisions, and all the necessaries of a plantation. The revolutionary spirit of Prance was hailed by them, because it seemed to give an opportunity to establish a government without a custom of Paris, to check enfranchisements and crush out the dangerous familiarity of the mulatto, to block with sugar-hogsheads the formidable movements in France and England against the slave-trade. These men sometimes spoke as republicans from their desire to act as despots; they succeeded in getting their delegates admitted to seats in the National Assembly to mix their intrigues with the current of events. Their "_Club Massiac_" in Paris, so named from the proprietor at whose residence its meetings were held, was composed of wealthy, adroit, and unscrupulous men, who often showed what a subtle style of diplomacy a single interest will create. It must be hard for bugs of a cosmopolitan mind to circumvent the _formica leo_, whose sole object in lying still at the bottom of its slippery tunnel is to catch its daily meal. If this great party of slave-owners had preserved unity upon all the questions which the Revolution excited, their descendants might to-day be the most troublesome enemies of our blockade. But history will not admit an If. The unity which is natural to the slaveholding American was impossible in San Domingo, owing to the existence of the mulattoes and the little whites.