Le Cap. Petition of eight hundred signatures for general liberty laid on the altar of the fatherland.

At almost the same time a petition bearing eight hundred signatures, by which general liberty was demanded, had been drawn up at the municipal office of Le Cap. The men of color and the white republicans who surrounded Sonthonax, headed by Vergniaud, seneschal of the town, lieutenant of the admiralty and a relative of the illustrious member of the Convention, followed by the municipal officers and by a crowd of women, children and old men singing patriotic hymns and waving caps of liberty in the air, came and laid the petition on the altar of the fatherland in the name of the cultivators of Saint-Domingue. It was 24 August. Among its other provisions the petition contained the following passage: “We claim rights that no powers, human or divine, can refuse us, rights that nature herself has granted us: the rights of man, liberty, security, property, resistance to oppression. France has guaranteed them to all men. Are we not men? What barbarous law gave Europeans the right to carry us to a foreign soil and there devote us to eternal tortures? You have exiled us from our country: very well! let your country become ours. But we wish to be recognized as free men and as Frenchmen.”