The National Assembly passed the decree giving rights only to freedmen born of free parents.

The assembly remembered the harm that the ambiguity of the instructions of the month of March had done to Saint-Domingue; it was to this ambiguity that this country had owed the butchery of the Cap. It rejected the proposal of the congress of Saint-Martin. The club Massiac, the {{*Léopardins*|the Leopards, the reactionary colonial faction}}, the deputies of the colonies who sat in the assembly, were displeased that the fate of the freedmen was no longer to depend upon their iniquities; they announced the baleful effects of this decision with such certainty that the assembly, in the decree which it passed on 15 May, divided the freedmen into categories; it gave the rights of active citizen only to those who were born of free fathers and mothers, leaving the fate of the others to the free and spontaneous wish of the colonies. It showed so much gentleness toward colonial prejudices that it confirmed the existence of the colonial assemblies, in which, however, no man of color had taken part, and reserved for the future the exercise of the rights that it had just granted to a portion of this class.