In the United States of America, slaveholders made a law that "the child shall follow the condition of the _mother_"; consequently, every child of a slave-woman was born a slave, however light its complexion might be. This was a very convenient arrangement for white fathers, who wanted to sell their own children. In the French colonies, the law was, "the child shall follow the condition of its _father_." The consequence was, that all the children the planters of St. Domingo had by their slaves were born free. This was, of course, a numerous class. In fact, their numbers were two thirds as great as those of the whites. There were at that time 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 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.