The gens de couleur were happy but wary radical whites were outraged. The National Assembly sent more troops to the colony, then passed a law granting citizenship to people of color whose parents had both been free and who owned a sufficient amount of property. Radical and often poor, whites accused planters and people of color of acting against the Revolution. In addition to the violence stirred up by Ogé's revolt, Saint-Domingue's whites became fragmented. Such dangerous apathy! Evil's frightening silence is usually broken only by a tumultuous dash for liberty. The oppressed can be forced into inactivity now only because they are temporarily weak. There can be no doubt that sooner or later the repressed energy of the mulattos will rise up with an unstoppable violence. That same month the Abbé Gregoire, a white Parisian supporter of Ogé, had written a prescient pamphlet, "Letter to Those Who Love Mankind," which concluded: When it failed, he and twenty-three others were hanged. Ogé led an abortive revolt of gens de couleur. The colonial governor of Saint-Domingue, not surprisingly, refused to let people of color have a vote in the matter. The document's language was vague and neither confirmed nor denied the rights of people of color. The committee called upon to settle the matter, therefore, passed it off each colony should write its own constitution and decide such matters for itself. To deny their request would have been to implicitly deny the principles of the revolution to accede to it would have enraged white planters. Several prominent people of color, including Julien Raimond and Vincent Ogé, pressed the French government to recognize the rights of all free men regardless of race. They wanted to be treated as the equals of whites, especially in the early, heady days of the French Revolution. Although clearly not opposed to slavery, as they were more than willing to benefit from it, many free people of color were indeed opposed to racism. Hundreds of them were part of an elite class, owning plantations and slaves themselves. Some of those people of color inherited not only freedom but also money and sometimes property. ![]() By 1789 there were 30,000 white citizens in the colony and 25,000 free gens de couleur ("people of color"). Over time, enough white planters had fathered-and subsequently freed-children with black mistresses that the free, biracial community had expanded significantly. A third group gradually arose in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, however. Slaves and masters were the norm in the Caribbean after European arrival.
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