SA 1175.5l.
Adams. Letter. 18h3


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C O L L E G E
L I B R A R Y





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RVARD
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY
… ." .
24.24 ºzº
& Cº.23, tº 22.
(... 23, Z/ ºy
L ETTE R - -
- FROM
HON. JOHN QUINCY ADAMS,
READ AT THE RECENT CELEBRATION OF
W E S T IN D F A E M A N C I P A TI O N
IN
BANGOR, (Me.)
(9 Asa WALKER, C. A. STAckpole, and F. M. SABINE, Esqrs.—
Committee of Correspondence of a meeting of the citizens of
Bangor and its vicinity, holden on the 27th of May, 1843.
- Quincy, 4th July, 1843.
FELLow CITIZENs :
I have received your letter of the 9th ult, and perhaps, in
answering it, my safest and most prudent course would be to
express my regret, that the precarious state of my health, and
particularly of my voice, would not warrant me in undertaking
an engagement to deliver a public address upon any subject
whatever, on the first day of next August. This answer I
have been most reluctantly constrained to give to several other
kind invitations to address the people on various subjects, in
the course of the ensuing summer and autumn. But the oc-
casion of which you propose to celebrate the anniversary, is
viewed in lights so entirely different and opposite to each other
that it cannot be denied to have assumed both a religious and
a political aspect, and this must be my apology, while return-
ing my thanks for your friendly invitation, for frankly unfold-
ing to you other reasons which would have dictated to me the
same conclusion, even if the state of my health admitted of my
compliance with it.
The extinction of SLAVERY from the face of the earth, is a
problem, moral, political, religious, which at this moment rocks.
the foundations of human society throughout the regions of
civilized man. It is, indeed, nothing more nor less than the
consummation of the Christian religion. It is only as immor-


* > 2. / -
e—
SA || 1 S, sº
2
(tal beings that all mankind can in any sense be said to be born
‘equal—and when the Declaration of Independence affirms as
a self-evident truth, that all men are born equal, it is precisely
the same as if the affirmation had been that all men are born
with immortal souls. For take away from man his soul, the
immortal spirit that is within him, and he would be a mere
tameable beast of the field, and like others of his kind, would
become the property of his tamer. Hence it is, too, that by
the law of nature and of God, man can never be made the
property of man. And herein consists the ſallacy with which
the holders of slaves often delude themselves, by assuming
that the test of property is human law. The soul of one man
cannot by human law be made the property of another. The
owner of a slave is the owner of a living corpse; but he is not
the owner of a man.
The natural equality of mankind, affirmed by the signers of
the Declaration of Independence to be held by them as self-ev-
ident truth, was not so held by their enemies. It was not so
held by the King and Parliament of Great Britain. They held
the reverse. They held that sovereign power was unlimitable.
That the tie of allegiance bound the subject to implicit obedi-
•ence, and, therefore, that the natural equality of mankind was
a fable. This was THE question of the American Revolution-
ary War. In the progress of that war, France, Spain, the
United Netherlands became involved in it. The Governments
of France and Spain, absolute monarchies, had no sympathies
with the American cause—the rights of human nature. Wer-
gennes had plotted with Gustavus of Sweden, the revolution
in Sweden, from liberty to despotism. Turgot, very shortly
before the surrender of Burgoyne, but after our Declaration of
Independence, had formally advised Louis the Sixteenth, that
it was for the interest of France and Spain that the insurrec-
tion in the Anglo-American colonies should be suppressed.
France and Spain had been warned of the remote consequen-
ces to them as owners of colonies, of the success of the Anglo-
Americans. But neither Turgot nor Wergennes, nor any one
European or American statesman of that age, foresaw or im-
agined what would be the consequence, by no means remote,
upon their own Governments at home, of the dismemberment
of the British Empire, and the triumphant establishment, by a
seven years' war on the continent of North America, of an
Anglo-Saxon confederate nation, on the foundation of the nat-
ural equality of mankind, and the inalienable rights of man.
Aſter Louis the Sixteenth lost his crown, he remembered,
and bitterly repented the part he had taken on the side of the
natural equality of mankind, and the rights of human nature
in the American revolutionary war. For the revolution in
France, by which he lost his throne and his life, was another
fruit of the same self-evident truth, that all men are born
equal, and have a RIGHT to life, liberty, and the pursuit of hap-


3
piness, without infringing upon the same right of all other
men.
Until the day of the Declaration of Independence, the con-
dition of slavery was recognized as lawful in all the English
colonies. The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massa-
chusetts, established three years after the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, adopted its self-evident truths, and the Judges of the
Supreme Court of the Commonwealth, under that Constitu-
tion, judicially decided that slavery within the Commonwealth
was thereby ipso facto abolished. Since that day, there has
not been a slave within the State.
The author of the Declaration of Independence was a slave-
holder. His self-evident truths taught him that slave-holding
was an outrage upon the natural rights of mankind, at least as:
great as Parliamentary taxation without representation. He
held that opinion to his dying day. He introduced it into his
draught of the Declaration of Independence itself, imputing the
existence of slavery in Virginia, to George the Third, as one
of the crimes which proved him to be a tyrant unfit to rule
over a free people.
Among the signers of the Declaration of Independence, there
were at least twenty slave-holders—or probably, thirty. They
could not stomach the application of the self-evident truths to
themselves, and they lopped it off as an unsightly excrescence
upon the tree of Liberty. But his grandson and executor has
carefully preserved it in the double form of print and ſac sim-
ile, in the edition which he has published of his writings, and
there it stands, an unanswerable testimonial to posterity. that
in the roll of American Abolitionists, first and foremost after
the name of George Washington, is that of Thomas Jefferson.
The result of the North American Revolutionary War had
prepared the minds of the people of the British Islands, to con-
template with calm composure the new principle engrafted
upon the association of the civilized race of man, the self-evi-
dent truth, the natural equality of mankind, and the rights of
man. They had waged against it a cruel and disastrous war
of seven years. Hundreds of thousands of valiant Britons
had fallen victims, hundreds of millions of British treasure had
been squandered to sustain the principle of illimitable sover-
eignty against the principle of illimitable human rights. The
prize of the conflict was the liberty and the immortal soul of
man. The contest was over between Britain and her chil-
dren. The Lord of Hosts had decided the wager of battle.
Human liberty was triumphant, and a new confederation en-
tered upon the field of human affairs, with the Urim and
Thummim of the Law from Sinai, “Light and Right,” in-
scribed upon her bosom, and upon the diadem around her
brow, “Holiness to the Lord.”
But while this contest had been in progress, both of intel-
lectual conflict and of mortal combat, the same question of hu-


4
man right against lawless power had been started in the land
of both the combatants parties to this controversy. The ques-
tion of the American Revolution had been of political govern-
ment in the relations of sovereign and subject. Anthony Ben-
ezet, a native of France, settled in Pennsylvania, a member of
the Society of Friends, and Granville Sharp, an English phi-
lanthropist, at London, were at the same time blowing the bu-
gle horn of human liberty and the natural equality of man-
kind, against the institution of slavery practiced from time im-
memorial by all nations, ancient and modern. There were
two modes of slavery which had crept in upon the relations of
mankind to one another, first as the results of war, by the
right of conquest, and secondly, by the voluntary servitude of
the feudal system. They had both become odious by the
silent progress of Christianity. The practice of enslaving ene-
mies taken in war had already ceased between Christian na-
tions. The traffic in slaves had been denounced by the popu-
lar writers both of France and England—by Locke, Addison,
and Sterne, as well as by Raynal, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and
Voltaire. It was every where odious, but every where prac-
ticed, till just after the close of the American Revolutionary
War arose the cry for the abolition of the African slave trade.
The first assault of the Reformers was upon the trade which
was prosecuted with such atrocious cruelty that the mere nar-
rative of its ordinary details excited disgust and horror.
“Sweet are the uses of adversity” saith Shakspeare, and
“in the day of adversity consider,” saith yet higher authority.
In the summer of 1783, when the results of the Revolutionary
War presented themselves to the people of the British Islands,
in the darkest form of adversity, they had, and they improved
the opportunity, of considering the principle for which, and the
principle against which they had so obstimately and fiercely
contended. Their warfare had been against the self-
evident truth of human rights. Thomas Clarkson, with
two or three other Englishmen, associated themselves
together with the purpose of arraying the power of
the British Empire, for the total abolition of slavery
throughout the earth ; and the commission with which they
went forth to regenerate the race of man, by leading captivity
captive, was the same identical, self-evident truth against
which Britain had just closed her relentless war, in humilia-
tion and defeat. She was now to make the identical principle
the inscription upon her banners—to war against slavery for
the natural rights of mankind, and to proclaim the jubilee
shout of liberty throughout the land—throughout the globe.
Of that undertaking, Clarkson himself has written the his-
tory. He has shown in what small beginnings it commenced,
by what slow and almost imperceptible progress it advanced—
by what interests, prejudices and passions, it was perpetually
obstructed. How many years it was before it could obtain ad-


5
mission to the hall of legislation in the British House of Com-
mons. How, in the meantime, it had been silently making
its way to the hearts of the British people. How many strug-
gles of argument and of eloquence it had to encounter, before
it could lay prostrate all opposition at its feet—and how this
emanation of the Christian faith, after waiting eighteen hun-
dred years for its development, came down at last like a
mighty flood, and is even now under the red cross of St.
George, overflowing from the white cliffs of Albion, and sweep-
ing the slave trade and slavery from the face of the terraque-
ous globe.
People of that renowned Island children of the land of our
forefathers, proceed, proceed in this glorious career, till the
whole earth shall be redeemed from the greatest curse that
ever has afflicted the human race—proceed, until millions upon
millions of your brethren of the human race restored to the
rights with which they were endowed by your and their Cre-
ator, but of which they have been robbed by ruffians of their
own race, shall send their choral shouts of redemption to the
skies in blessings upon your names, Oh! with what pungent
mortification and shame must I confess, that in the transcen-
dant glories of that day, our names will not be associated with
yours 1 May Heaven, in mercy grant that we may be spared
the deeper damnation of seeing our names recorded, not
among the liberators, but with the oppressors of mankind.
Fellow citizens ! the first impulse of the regeneration of
human liberty came from us—the Fourth of July is our anni-
versary day. Then was the principle proclaimed to the world
as that which was to be the vital spark of our existence as a
community among the nations of the earth. This is the bright-
ness of our glory, and of this we cannot be bereaved. But
how can we presume to share in the festivities and unite in
songs of triumph of the first of August 2 Have we emancipa-
ted our slaves 7 Have we mulcted ourselves in a hundred
millions of dollars, to persuade and prevail upon the man-
stealer to relinquish his grasp upon his prey ! Have we en-
compassed sea and land, and sounded the clarion of freedom to
the four ends of Heaven, to break the chain of slavery in the
four quarters of the earth 2 Has the unction of our eloquence
moved the bowels of compassion of the holy pontiff of the Ro-
man Catholic Church, to give his commands to his Christian
flock against slavery and the slave trade 2 Have we softened
the heart of the fiery Mussulman of Tunis, the follower of the
war-denouncing prophet of Mecca, to proclaim liberty through-
out his land 2 Are we carrying into Hindostan the inexpres-
sible blessings of emancipation ? Are we bursting open the
everlasting gates, and overleaping the walls of China, to intro-
duce into that benighted empire in one concentrated sunbeam,
the light of civil and of Christian liberty 2 Oh no, my coun-
trymen l No! nothing of all this Instead of all this, are we


_^
*H || 75, 54
††
H A R V A R D
C O L L E G E
L I B R A R Y








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RVARD
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY
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L ETTE IR - -
FROM
HON. J O HN QUINCY A DAMS,
READ AT THE RECENT CELEBRATION OF
W E S T IN D F A E M A N C I P A TI O N
IN
BANGOR, (Me.)
9 Asa Walken, C. A. Stackrole, and F. M. SABINE, Esqrs—
Committee of Correspondence of a meeting of the citizens of
Bangor and its vicinity, holden on the 27th of May, 1843.
- Quincy, 4th July, 1843.
FELLow CITIZENs :
I have received your letter of the 9th ult, and perhaps, in
answering it, my safest and most prudent course would be to
express my regret, that the precarious state of my health, and
particularly of my voice, would not warrant me in undertaking
an engagement to deliver a public address upon any subject
whatever, on the first day of next August. This answer I
have been most reluctantly constrained to give to several other
kind invitations to address the people on various subjects, in
the course of the ensuing summer and autumn. But the oc-
casion of which you propose to celebrate the anniversary, is
viewed in lights so entirely different and opposite to each other
that it cannot be denied to have assumed both a religious and
a political aspect, and this must be my apology, while return-
ing my thanks for your friendly invitation, for frankly unfold-
ing to you other reasons which would have dictated to me the
same conclusion, even if the state of my health admitted of my
compliance with it.
The extinction of SLAVERY from the face of the earth, is a
problem, moral, political, religious, which at this moment rocks.
the foundations of human society throughout the regions of
civilized man. It is, indeed, nothing more nor less than the
consummation of the Christian religion. It is only as immor-


** * * 2 / . *
// tº e-
SA || 1 S, sº
2
(tal beings that all mankind can in any sense be said to be born
‘equal—and when the Declaration of Independence affirms as
a self-evident truth, that all men are born equal, it is precisely
the same as if the affirmation had been that all men are born
with immortal souls. For take away from man his soul, the
immortal spirit that is within him, and he would be a mere
tameable beast of the field, and like others of his kind, would
become the property of his tamer. Hence it is, too, that by
the law of nature and of God, man can never be made the
property of man. And herein consists the fallacy with which
the holders of slaves often delude themselves, by assuming
that the test of property is human law. The soul of one man
cannot by human law be made the property of another. The
owner of a slave is the owner of a living corpse; but he is not
the owner of a man.
The natural equality of mankind, affirmed by the signers of
the Declaration of Independence to be held by them as self-ev-
ident truth, was not so held by their enemies. It was not so
held by the King and Parliament of Great Britain. They held
the reverse. They held that sovereign power was unlimitable.
That the tie of allegiance bound the subject to implicit obedi-
•ence, and, therefore, that the natural equality of mankind was
a fable. This was THE question of the American Revolution-
ary War. In the progress of that war, France, Spain, the
United Netherlands became involved in it. The Governments
of France and Spain, absolute monarchies, had no sympathies
with the American cause—the rights of human nature. Wer-
gennes had plotted with Gustavus of Sweden, the revolution
in Sweden, from liberty to despotism. Turgot, very shortly
before the surrender of Burgoyne, but after our Declaration of
Independence, had formally advised Louis the Sixteenth, that
it was for the interest of France and Spain that the insurrec-
tion in the Anglo-American colonies should be suppressed.
France and Spain had been warned of the remote consequen-
ices to them as owners of colonies, of the success of the Anglo-
Americans. But neither Turgot nor Wergennes, nor any one
European or American statesman of that age, foresaw or im-
agined what would be the consequence, by no means remote,
upon their own Governments at home, of the dismemberment
of the British Empire, and the triumphant establishment, by a
seven years' war on the continent of North America, of an
Anglo-Saxon confederate nation, on the foundation of the nat-
ural equality of mankind, and the inalienable rights of man.
Aſter Louis the Sixteenth lost his crown, he remembered,
and bitterly repented the part he had taken on the side of the
natural equality of mankind, and the rights of human nature
in the American revolutionary war. For the revolution in
France, by which he lost his throne and his life, was another
fruit of the same self-evident truth, that all men are born
equal, and have a RIGHT to life, liberty, and the pursuit of hap-


3
piness, without infringing upon the same right of all other
men.
Until the day of the Declaration of Independence, the con-
dition of slavery was recognized as lawſul in all the English
colonies. The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massa-
chusetts, established three years after the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, adopted its self-evident truths, and the Judges of the
Supreme Court of the Commonwealth, under that Constitu-
tion, judicially decided that slavery within the Commonwealth
was thereby ipso facto abolished. Since that day, there has
not been a slave within the State.
The author of the Declaration of Independence was a slave-
holder. His self-evident truths taught him that slave-holding
was an outrage upon the natural rights of mankind, at least as:
great as Parliamentary taxation without representation. He
held that opinion to his dying day. He introduced it into his
draught of the Declaration of Independence itself, imputing the
existence of slavery in Virginia, to George the Third, as one
of the crimes which proved him to be a tyrant unfit to rule
over a free people.
Among the signers of the Declaration of Independence, there
were at least twenty slave-holders—or probably, thirty. They
could not stomach the application of the self-evident truths to
themselves, and they lopped it off as an unsightly excrescence
upon the tree of Liberty. But his grandson and executor has
carefully preserved it in the double form of print and ſac sim-
ile, in the edition which he has published of his writings, and
there it stands, an unanswerable testimonial to posterity. that
in the roll of American Abolitionists, first and foremost aſter
the name of George Washington, is that of Thomas Jefferson.
The result of the North American Revolutionary War had
prepared the minds of the people of the British Islands, to con-
template with calm composure the new principle engrafted
upon the association of the civilized race of man, the self-evi-
dent truth, the natural equality of mankind, and the rights of
man. They had waged against it a cruel and disastrous war
of seven years. Hundreds of thousands of valiant Britons
had fallen victims, hundreds of millions of British treasure had
been squandered to sustain the principle of illimitable sover-
eignty against the principle of illimitable human rights. The
prize of the conflict was the liberty and the immortal soul of
man. The contest was over between Britain and her chil-
dren. The Lord of Hosts had decided the wager of battle.
Human liberty was triumphant, and a new confederation en-
tered upon the field of human affairs, with the Urim and
Thummim of the Law from Sinai, “Light and Right,” in-
scribed upon her bosom, and upon the diadem around her
brow, “Holiness to the Lord.”
But while this contest had been in progress, both of intel-
lectual conflict and of mortal combat, the same question of hu-


4
man right against lawless power had been started in the land
of both the combatants parties to this controversy. The ques-
tion of the American Revolution had been of political govern-
ment in the relations of sovereign and subject. Anthony Ben-
ezet, a native of France, settled in Pennsylvania, a member of
the Society of Friends, and Granville Sharp, an English phi-
lanthropist, at London, were at the same time blowing the bu-
gle horn of human liberty and the natural equality of man-
kind, against the institution of slavery practiced from time im-
memorial by all nations, ancient and modern. There were
two modes of slavery which had crept in upon the relations of
mankind to one another, first as the results of war, by the
right of conquest, and secondly, by the voluntary servitude of
the feudal system. They had both become odious by the
silent progress of Christianity. The practice of enslaving ene-
mies taken in war had already ceased between Christian na-
tions. The traffic in slaves had been denounced by the popu-
lar writers both of France and England—by Locke, Addison,
and Sterne, as well as by Raynal, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and
Voltaire. It was every where odious, but every where prac-
ticed, till just after the close of the American Revolutionary
War arose the cry for the abolition of the African slave trade.
The first assault of the Reformers was upon the trade which
was prosecuted with such atrocious cruelty that the mere nar-
rative of its ordinary details excited disgust and horror.
“Sweet are the uses of adversity” saith Shakspeare, and
“in the day of adversity consider,” saith yet higher authority.
In the summer of 1783, when the results of the Revolutionary
War presented themselves to the people of the British Islands,
in the darkest form of adversity, they had, and they improved
the opportunity, of considering the principle for which, and the
principle against which they had so obstinately and fiercely
contended. Their warfare had been against the self-
evident truth of human rights. Thomas Clarkson, with
two or three other Englishmen, associated themselves
together with the purpose of arraying the power of
the British Empire, for the total abolition of slavery
throughout the earth ; and the commission with which they
went forth to regenerate the race of man, by leading captivity
captive, was the same identical, self-evident truth against
which Britain had just closed her relentless war, in humilia-
tion and defeat. She was now to make the identical principle
the inscription upon her banners—to war against slavery for
the natural rights of mankind, and to proclaim the jubilee
shout of liberty throughout the land—throughout the globe.
Of that undertaking, Clarkson himself has written the his-
tory. He has shown in what small beginnings it commenced,
by what slow and almost imperceptible progress it advanced—
by what interests, prejudices and passions, it was perpetually
obstructed. How many years it was before it could obtain ad-


5
mission to the hall of legislation in the British House of Com-
mons. How, in the meantime, it had been silently making
its way to the hearts of the British people. How many strug-
gles of argument and of eloquence it had to encounter, before
it could lay prostrate all opposition at its feet—and how this
emanation of the Christian faith, after waiting eighteen hun-
dred years for its development, came down at last like a
mighty flood, and is even now under the red cross of St.
George, overflowing from the white cliffs of Albion, and sweep-
ing the slave trade and slavery from the face of the terraque-
ous globe.
People of that renowned Island children of the land of our
forefathers, proceed, proceed in this glorious career, till the
whole earth shall be redeemed from the greatest curse that
ever has afflicted the human race—proceed, until millions upon
millions of your brethren of the human race restored to the
rights with which they were endowed by your and their Cre-
ator, but of which they have been robbed by ruffians of their
own race, shall send their choral shouts of redemption to the
skies in blessings upon your names. Oh! with what pungent
mortification and shame must I confess, that in the transcen-
dant glories of that day, our names will not be associated with
yours 1 May Heaven, in mercy grant that we may be spared
the deeper damnation of seeing our names recorded, not
among the liberators, but with the oppressors of mankind.
Fellow citizens ! the first impulse of the regeneration of
human liberty came from us—the Fourth of July is our anni-
versary day. Then was the principle proclaimed to the world
as that which was to be the vital spark of our existence as a
community among the nations of the earth. This is the bright-
ness of our glory, and of this we cannot be bereaved. But
how can we presume to share in the festivities and unite in
songs of triumph of the first of August 2 Have we emancipa-
ted our slaves 7 Have we mulcted ourselves in a hundred
millions of dollars, to persuade and prevail upon the man-
stealer to relinquish his grasp upon his prey ! Have we en-
compassed sea and land, and sounded the clarion of freedom to
the four ends of Heaven, to break the chain of slavery in the
four quarters of the earth 2 Has the unction of our eloquence
moved the bowels of compassion of the holy pontiff of the Ro-
man Catholic Church, to give his commands to his Christian
flock against slavery and the slave trade 2 Have we softened
the heart of the fiery Mussulman of Tunis, the follower of the
war-denouncing prophet of Mecca, to proclaim liberty through-
out his land 2 Are we carrying into Hindostan the inexpres-
sible blessings of emancipation ? Are we bursting open the
everlasting gates, and overleaping the walls of China, to intro-
duce into that benighted empire in one concentrated sunbeam,
the light of civil and of Christian liberty 2 Oh no, my coun-
trymen l No nothing of all this Instead of all this, are we


6.
not suffering our own hands to be manacled, and our own feet
to be ſettered with the chains of slavery : Is it not enough to:
be told that by a fraudulent perversion of language in the Con-
stitution of the United States, we have falsified the Constitu-
tion itself, by admitting into both the Legislative and Execu-
tive departments of the Government, an overwhelming repre-
sentation of one species of property to the exclusion of all
others, and that the odious property in slaves 2
Is it not enough, that by this exclusive privilege of property
representation confined to one section of the country, an irre-
sistible ascendancy in the action of the General Government
has been secured, not indeed to that section, but to an oligar-
chy of slave-holders in that section—to the cruel oppression of
the poor in that same section itself? Is it not enough that by
the operation of this radical iniquity in the organization of the
Government, an immense disproportion of all offices, from the
highest to the lowest, civil, military, naval, Executive and ju-
dicial, are held by slave-holders ? Have we not seen the
sacred right of petition totally suppressed for the people of the
free States during a succession of years, and is it not yet in-
exorably suppressed ? Have we not seen for the last twenty
years, the Constitution and solemn treaties with foreign na-
tions, trampled on by cruel oppression and lawless imprison-
ment of colored mariners in the Southern States ? In cold-
blooded defiance of a solemn adjudication by a Southern judge
in the Circuit Court of the Union ? And is this not enough *
Have not the people of the free States been required to re-
nounce for their citizens the right of habeas corpus and trial
by jury, and to coerce that base surrender of the only practical
security to all personal rights, have not the slave-breeders,
by State legislation, subjected to fine and imprisonment, the
colored citizens of the free States, for merely coming within
their jurisdiction ? Have we not tamely submitted, for years,
to the daily violation of the freedom of the post office and of
the press, by a committee of seal-breakers : and have we not
seen a sworn Post-Master General, formally avow, that though
he could not license this cut-purse protection of the peculiar
institutions, the perpetrators of this highway robbery must jus-
tify themselves by the plea of necessity ? And has the pillory
or the penitentiary been the reward of that Post-Master Gen-
eral Have we not seen printing presses destroyed—halls.
erected for the promotion of human freedom levelled with the
dust, and consumed by fire, and wanton, unprovoked murder
perpetrated with impunity, by slave-mongers ? Have we not
seen human beings, made in the likeness of God, and endowed
with immortal souls, burnt at the stake, not for their offences
but for their color 2 Are not the journals of our Senate dis-
graced by resolutions calling for war, to indemnify the slave
pirates of the Enterprise and the Creole, for the self-emancipa-
tion of their slaves, and to inflict vengeance, by a death of tor-


7
ture, upon the heroic self-deliverance of Madison Washing-
ton Have we not been fifteen years plotting rebellion against
our neighbor Republic of Mexico, for abolishing slavery
throughout all her provinces ! Have we not aided and abet-
ted one of her provinces in insurrection against her for that
cause ? And have we not invaded openly, and sword in hand,
another of her provinces, and all to effect her dismemberment
and to add ten more slave States to our confederacy 2 Has
the cry of war for the conquest of Mexico, for the expansion
of re-instituted slavery, for the robbery of priests, and the plun-
der of religious establishments, yet subsided ? Have the pet-
tifogging, hair-splitting, nonsensical, and yet in flammatory
bickerings about the right of search, pandering to the thirst for
revenge in France, panting for war, to prostrate the disputed
title of her king, has the sound of this war-trumpet yet faded
away upon our ears ? Has the supreme and unparalleled ab-
-surdity of stipulating by treaty to keep a squadron of eighty
guns for five years, without intermission, upon the coast of
Africa, to suppress the African slave trade, and at the same
time denying at the point of the bayonet, the right of that
squadron to board or examine any slaver all but sinking under
a cargo of victims, if she but hoist a foreign flag—has this di-
plomatic bone been yet picked clean Or is our indirect par-
ticipation in the African slave trade to be protected at what-
ever expense of blood and treasure ? Is the Supreme Execu-
tive Chief of this Commonwealth yet to speak not for himself,
but for her whole people, and pledge them to shoulder their
muskets, and to endorse their knapsacks against the fanatical,
non-resistant abolitionists, whenever the overseers may please
to raise the bloody flag, with the swindling watch word of the
UNION ? Oh! my friends ! I have not the heart to join in
the festivity on the first of August, the British anniversary of
disenthralled humanity, while all this, and infinitely more than
I could tell—but that I would spare the blushes of my coun-
try—weigh down my spirits, with the uncertainty, sinking into
my grave as l am, whether she is doomed to be numbered
among the first liberators or the last oppressors of the race of
immortal man.
Let th rodden-down African, restored by the cheering
voice an ristian hand of Britain, to his primitive right and
condition of manhood, clap his hands and shout for joy on the
anniversary of the first of August. Let the lordly Briton strip
off much of his pride on other days of the year, and reserve it
all for the pride of conscious beneficence on that day. What
lover of classical learning can read the account in Livy or in
Plutarch, of the restoration to freedom of the Grecian cities by
the Roman Consul Flaminius, without feeling his bosom heave
and his blood flow cheerily in his veins 2 The heart leaps
with sympathy when we read, that on the first proclamation
by the herald, the immense assembled multitude in the tumult


8
of astonishment and joy, could scarcely believe their own ears
—that they called back the herald and made him repeat the
proclamation, and then—“ Tum ab certo jam gaudio tantus
cum clamore plausus est ortus, totiesque repetitus, ut facile ap-
pareret, nihil omnium bonorum multitudini gratius quam lib-
ertatem esse. Then rang the welkin with long and redoubled
shouts of exultation, clearly proving that of all the enjoyments
accessible to the hearts of men, nothing is so delightful to them
as Liberty.” Upwards of two thousand years have revolved
since that day, and the first of August is to the Briton of this
age, what the day of the proclamation of Flaminius was to the
ancient Roman. Yes—let them celebrate the first of August
as the day to them of deliverance and of glory—and leave to
us the pleasant employment of commenting upon their mo-
tives, of devising means to shelter the African slaver from their
search, and of squandering millions to support on a pestilential
coast a squadron of the stripes and stars, with instructions
sooner to scuttle their ships than to molest the pirate slaver
who shall make his flag-staff the herald of a lie.
Apologising to you, gentlemen, for the length of this letter,
I will close it with an ejaculation to Heaven, that you may
live to substitute for the first of August, the day when slavery
shall be proclaimed a word without a meaning in all the lan-
guages of the earth, and when the power of emancipation shall
be extinguished in Universal Freedom. To share in the jubi-
lant chorus of that day, if my voice could burst from the cere-
ments of the tomb, it should be to shout Hallelujah! for the
Lord God Omnipotent reigneth let the earth rejoice and be
glad!
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS.


AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE
IN JAMAIC A.
- N -
COMPARATIVE TREATMENT OF SLAVES.
R. E. A. D. E. E. E. O. R. E. T. H. E.
|
MARYLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY,
OC TO BER, 1854.
º - - | -
-
.
| º
º /
-
-
º





AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE
I N J A M A IC A,
COMPARATIVE TREATMENT OF SLAVES.
R E A D B E Fo RE THE
MARYLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY,
O C T O B E R , 1854.
PRINTED FOR THE MARYLAND HISTORICAT, SOCIETY,
B Y J O H. N. D. T. O Y .


/343, c/?: 3%
º
v/4. º … 2. º ^^,
% ºr.


AFRIC A.N SL AW E TRAI) E
I N J A M A I CA,
A N D
COMPARATIVE TREATMENT OF SLAWES.
THE cruelty of the Spaniards towards the Abori-
gines of the Island of Jamaica, has ever been the
theme of just and strong indignation by Histo-
rians:–but the cruelties inflicted by British subjects
upon the Africans in the same Island, as will be
evidenced by the statistics hereafter shown, have
never met with the reprehension they deserve.
It is true, Parliament has abolished Slavery, but
how much of this measure was due to humanity, and
how much to policy, is uncertain. The fact, that
England for one hundred and seventy-nine years,
tolerated the Slave trade, a system so cruel, and so
destructive to the lives of its unfortunate victims,
should forever silence all reproach on the part of
British subjects against the United States, so far as
Slavery in connection with the treatment of those
held in bondage is concerned.


4
In the march of humanity, different motives may
combine to impel the mass forward:—sympathy and
policy may unite to effect a common object; policy
in the government, philanthropy in the people.
Formerly, English manufactures, to an immense
amount, were introduced into the Spanish posses-
sions in America, through Jamaica. The dismem-
berment of these possessions from Spain, opened the
ports of Spanish America to the direct trade of
England; and Jamaica ceased to be profitable to her;
hence the reduction in the differential duties; and
what were those duties but a premium on slave
labor —
Before the emancipation of the slaves in Jamaica,
many of the owners of the Estates were deeply
involved in debt, notwithstanding the premium in
the form of protection; and emancipation only has-
tened their ruin.
England, therefore did not abolish Slavery in the
West Indies, until it had become unprofitable.
The Slavery in disguise now being introduced
into the Island of Jamaica, called Apprenticeship,
will be more profitable:–nearly the whole amount
of capital heretofore employed in the purchase of
slaves, will be saved. It is obviously more econom-
ical than the former system, and may enable the
planters to retrieve their circumstances.


5
English writers tell us with exultation, that the
British drum and fife may be heard successively,
until the music goes round the world;—but they
omit to tell us, that the groans of oppressed human-
ity, the cries of infant innocence, and the shrieks of
virgin purity, mingle with the sounds that herald the
dominion of the British Isles.
There is another aspect of the subject, which it
would be well for the Parliament of “Exeter Hall”
to consider, whenever American Slavery becomes a
matter for anathema. Slavery in this country had its
origin in the commercial policy of England. Under
the fostering protection of the British Government,
the trade in African slaves which supplied all her
Colonies, America included, was begun and contin-
ued; —and continued too, in many instances, against
the earnest and repeated remonstances of the Col-
onists.
Here is the origin of American Slavery ; —and it
exhibits an effrontery unparalleled, for England, with
all her severities in the East Indies; with the toler-
ation of Slavery in Jamaica, for one hundred and
seventy-nine years; and the enormous sacrifice of
life it entailed upon its miserable victims, and with
the continuance of the Slave Trade, with all its


6
horrors, for so many years, forcing its evils upon
unwilling Colonies, to be uttering reproaches against
the citizens of the United States, for the existence of
a system fastened upon them, by her own arbitrary
actS.
That Slavery here, is not what English Aboli-
tionists profess to believe, nor what in reality it has
been in their own Colonies, is clearly proved by the
following statistics, collected from their own writers.
The number of slaves in the United States,
In 1850, was . . . . 3,204,089
In 1790, - - • - e 697,897
Increase in sixty years, . e e 2,506,192
(Two millions five hundred six thousand one hun-
dred and ninety-two; —)
The number of free colored people
In 1850, was -> e - - 428,661
In 1790, . . . . . 59,466
Increase in sixty years, . e e 369,195
(Three hundred and sixty-nine thousand one
hundred and ninety-five.)


7
It is estimated that one-half of this increase of the
free colored population was from emancipation of
slaves:—and of course so far, it lessened the increase
of the latter, and added to the increase of the former.
The number of slaves brought into Jamaica by the
Spaniards during their possession of the Island,
from 1509 to 1655, say in one hundred and forty-
six years, was 40,000, (forty thousand.)
Of these, there were found by Penn and Wena-
bles, at the time of their conquest of the Island in
1655, only 1,500, (fifteen hundred.)
Now if 697,897 persons in sixty years amount to
3,204,089,-1,500 persons, in one hundred and
seventy-nine years, by the same ratio, would
amount to, e - - e e 20,544
Add the number imported into Jamaica in
one hundred and seventy-nine years,
say from 1655 to 1834, (eight hundred
and fifty thousand,) . e e . 850,000
And the amount will be, - - . 870,544
The number of slaves found on the Island,
at the time of the Emancipation in


8
Amount brought over, . 870,544
1834, was (three hundred twenty-two
thousand four hundred and twenty-one,) 322,421
Showing a waste of human life under
British rule, as contrasted with the ratio
of increase in the United States, of . 548,123
(Five hundred forty-eight thousand one hundred
and twenty-three,) exclusive of any estimated
increase upon the eight hundred and fifty thou-
sand (850,000) who were imported, that would
have accrued under a humane system of treat-
ment. -
In submitting these comparative results of British
Colonial slavery, with slavery in the United States,
it must not be supposed that the compiler of this
Exhibit is an advocate or friend of slavery. He is
not. The question we are considering, is not slavery,
but the comparative treatment of slaves.
His object is to show, that the odium of its intro-
duction here, and the evils that it has inflicted or
may inflict upon the United States, are chargeable to
England:—and that the iniquity of the institution
may be aggravated or lessened, according to the
manner in which the slaves are treated.


9
Under their treatment in the United States, upon
an original stock of 697,897, (six hundred ninety-
seven thousand eight hundred and ninety-seven,)
they have increased to 3,204,089, (three millions two
hundred and four thousand and eighty-nine,) while
by their treatment in Jamaica, they were reduced in
one hundred and seventy-nine years, upon a stock
of 851,500, (eight hundred fifty-one thousand five
hundred) to 322,421, (three hundred twenty-two
thousand four hundred and twenty-one.)
This statement needs no comment. It exhibits
Slavery in the British Colony of Jamaica, tolerated
by the Parliament of Great Britain for one hundred
and seventy-nine years sufficiently revolting, without
dramatic skill to render the picture still more re-
pulsive.
Again ; we may assume, that allowing the 850,000
(eight hundred and fifty thousand) imported, and
the 1,500 (fifteen hundred) Spanish slaves, making
851,500; forty-five years of the one hundred and
seventy-nine, of equal productiveness with the Ame-
rican slaves, would give an increase of 2,931,450,
(two millions nine hundred thirty-one thousand four
hundred and fifty.)


10
Here we have a loss of 2,931,450 lives destroyed
in embryo, infancy, and maturity, in the time inter-
vening between the capture of the Island by Admiral
Penn and General Wenables, in 1655, and the period
of Emancipation in 1834;-a number nearly equal-
ing the population of the United States, at the
period of its dismemberment from the British Em-
pire.
Further;-in the capture of the slaves, the march
of the Koffle to the coast, and on the middle passage,
the smallest estimate is ten per cent. loss, until the
slaves are landed in the West Indies. We must
therefore add 85,000 (eighty-five thousand) to the
850,000, (eight hundred and fifty thousand,) making
935,000, (nine hundred and thirty-five thousand,)
requisite, during the whole period of slave importa-
tions, to land 850,000 in Jamaica.
This gives a grand total of 3,016,450 (three mil-
lions and sixteen thousand four hundred and fifty)
that perished in one hundred and seventy-nine
years; or in round numbers, 17,000 (seventeen
thousand) annually.
It results from these facts and deductions, that the
evils and fatal effects of Slavery, consist as much in


11
the manner in which the slaves are treated, as in the
Jact of their being held in servitude.
The importation of slaves into the United States
was not prohibited until the year 1808:-but very
few were introduced; there were no sugar lands in
the country; cotton was unknown as an article of
commerce, and slaves were not wanted. The low
estimate of ten per cent. loss on the importation of
them into Jamaica, and the assumption that they
were productive but forty-five years of the one
hundred and seventy-nine, will more than balance
the small number that were brought into the country.
A very important question presents itself here :-
what is to be the future situation of the black
man?—
The colored race have possessed a luxuriant soil,
and balmy climate for unknown ages:—to these are
added, now, the offer of civilization and its attain-
ments, which they have never acquired. The capa-
city of the race for progress, will now be deter-
mined. The African family will decide for itself its
position in the great family of mankind:—I say,
decide for itself:-for it is not the acknowledgment


12
of the independence of Liberia, by one nation, or
another nation, or by all nations, that will elevate the
people of that Republic to the desired point;-that
must be achieved by intellect and labor.
The division of the human race, called Caucasian,
or Anglo-Saxon, and its numerous subdivisions, will
not dispense with the luxury of Tropical produc-
tions;–they cannot produce them—therefore, if the
black man will not furnish them voluntarily, it is to
be feared, compulsory means will be adopted to com-
pel him.
It is then apparent, that the black can render the
white race tributary to them—this is now to be de-
cided, and forever, in Liberia. Colonization in Afri-
ca, therefore, is an experiment far more important
than the mere question of manumission.
It is an auxiliary in the elevation of the colored
race, by transferring to them the knowledge pos-
sessed by a race that has preceded them in the march
of civilization and its concomitant arts and sciences.
If the colored race adopt them, and join in their .
onward progress, they will then be placed on an
equality. Emancipation alone will not effect it; it is
but a minor object, the gift of others; and can only
have conferred upon its beneficiaries, the opportunity


13
of their ascending to equality. The colored man in
his own domicil, and by his own energies must
ascend to it. The facility is presented him, of emer-
ging from the long and dark night of time in which
he has been enveloped.
I have said, the crime of slavery consists as much
in the manner, as the fact:—it is equally true of
manumission. The merit of conferring it, and its
value, depend upon the previous preparation for it.
This is abundantly proved in the Island of Jamaica.
It would be absurd, to suppose a person capable of
understanding Algebra, who was ignorant of Arith-
metic.
The Colonization Society, is in fact, an auxiliary
to the elevation of the colored man. If it succeeds,
it will guarantee the freedom of the colored race in
North and South America, by deciding the long
mooted question of the cheapness of free compared
with slave labor; and thus rendering slaves valueless.
The psychological question that presents itself
here, belongs to another department:—I will there-
fore, only add a sentence.
The native Africans have a plurality of local
Gods; powerful, and as malignant as they are pow-


14
erful. What then must be their sensations, when a
knowledge of the true God is unfolded to their
minds?—when they are made acquainted with a
Deity, not confined to lakes or chained to rocks; and
are taught that he is the friend of all?
The doctrine of equal civil and religious liberty
after its rise, spread rapidly through wider regions
than the “Roman Eagle overshadowed.” It could
not be arrested by fleets or armies, for it pervaded
them; it was not stopped by seas or mountains, it
passed over them. Like the magnetic influence, it
spread from meridian to meridian; and like that
subtle fluid, it promises to wrap the globe from pole
to pole. But the zones of the earth give character
to their inhabitants; and in the highest point of
attainment to which the human family may progress,
there will doubtless be a difference in the destiny of
nations.








º


- (3/
ANTI-SILA VERY TRAOTS. No. 6.
...T.ZT-7
zº ºf 2 ºzoº /**
23.22 cº- Avºvº, CA, (z. /*26)
THE “RUIN’’ () F JAMAIC A.
*/~~
By R. HILDRETH.
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2
CHAPTER I. — Historical Introduction.
PERHAPs there is not a single delusion more systematically and more
perseveringly practised upon the good people of the United States, and of
Great Britain too, than the comparison so perpetually brought to their
notice of the alleged present economical ruin of the Island of Jamaica, as
contrasted with its alleged former prosperity, and with the present prosperi-
ty of the neighboring Island of Cuba. And what gives the greater effect
to this delusion is, that the instruments for spreading it are frequently men
of honest intentions, and, on the generality of subjects, very well informed,
but whose total ignorance of the history of Jamaica makes them easy
dupes, and who, indeed, are very often blindly led into the ditch by guides
in the form of respectable residents of the island, hardly less ignorant than
themselves; for it is not among the residents of Jamaica that any thing be-
yond very superficial ideas of the history of the island is generally to be.
found. • -
As the bearing of this matter on grave domestic questions gives to it a
high degree of interest, we propose to explain the true state of facts with
respect to Jamaica, past as well as present, in order to put our readers in
the position to draw legitimate conclusions, and to avoid being deluded by
falsehoods, which, though reported by almost every mail from the West
Indies, whatever currency and general acceptation they may gain by that:
repetition, are not rendered thereby any the less groundless and delusive.
The Island of Jamaica has an extent of a little less than six thousand.
square miles. It is thus about the size of the States of Connecticut and
Rhode Island together. Like all the West India Islands, it consists of a
central group of mountains, with fertile plains, of no great width, extend-
ing from their foot to the coast. Being placed directly south of the east:
end of Cuba, and thus cut off from the northern breezes, which reach it:
much in the state of a sponge already once squeezed, it suffers much more.
from drought than either Cuba, Hayti, or Porto Rico; many of its fertile.
plains, too distant from the mountains, and unfreshed by summer showers,
are, from that cause, rendered worthless; while the rugged character of
much of the interior, with the climate and difficulties of transportation,
1 - -
. . . . . . . . .
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vº
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ANTESLA VERY TRACTS. No. 6.
/360, º 7. Tº -
ºv. 5; 2 º º, 22.2.
24.22 ºv Awarºvºzzº - Cº. /**)
THE “RUIN’’ () F JAMAIC A.
*A*.
w
By R. HILDRETH.
CHAPTER I. — Historical Introduction.
PERHAPs there is not a single delusion more systematically and more
perseveringly practised upon the good people of the United States, and of
Great Britain too, than the comparison so perpetually brought to their
notice of the alleged present economical ruin of the Island of Jamaica, as
contrasted with its alleged former prosperity, and with the present prosperi-
ty of the neighboring Island of Cuba. And what gives the greater effect
to this delusion is, that the instruments for spreading it are frequently men
of honest intentions, and, on the generality of subjects, very well informed,
but whose total ignorance of the history of Jamaica makes them easy
dupes, and who, indeed, are very often blindly led into the ditch by guides
in the form of respectable residents of the island, hardly less ignorant than
themselves; for it is not among the residents of Jamaica that anything be-
yond very superficial ideas of the history of the island is generally to be:
found. - - - -
As the bearing of this matter on grave domestic questions gives to it a
high degree of interest, we propose to explain the true state of facts with
respect to Jamaica, past as well as present, in order to put our readers in
the position to draw legitimate conclusions, and to avoid being deluded by
falsehoods, which, though reported by almost every mail from the West
Indies, whatever currency and general acceptation they may gain by that:
repetition, are not rendered thereby any the less groundless and delusive.
The Island of Jamaica has an extent of a little less than six thousand-
square miles. It is thus about the size of the States of Connecticut and,
Rhode Island together. Like all the West India Islands, it consists of a
central group of mountains, with fertile plains, of no great width, extend-
ing from their foot to the coast. Being placed directly south of the east:
end of Cuba, and thus cut off from the northern breezes, which reach it:
much in the state of a sponge already once squeezed, it suffers much more.
from drought than either Cuba, Hayti, or Porto Rico; many of its fertile-
plains, too distant from the mountains, and unfreshed by summer showers,
are, from that cause, rendered worthless; while the rugged character of
much of the interior, with the climate and difficulties of transportation,
-
*/ Zºº.
1


2 ANTI-SLAVERY TRACTs. --
wholly unfits it for the production of sugar and coffee. In natural fertility
of soil, it is, or rather was, – for of virgin soil fit for cultivation none is
left, — decidedly inferior to the other three islands, and more exposed, also,
to storms and hurricanes, by which, occasionally, it suffers very severely
Columbus discovered Jamaica on his second voyage, in May, 1494. In
his fourth voyage, in 1503, he ran his leaky vessel on shore on the coast of
the island, and remained there for fifteen months. In 1507, Don Diego,
Columbus's viceroy, sent a colony to occupy it. The natives, as in the case
of all the West India Islands settled by the Spaniards, were speedily worn
out by unaccustomed labor. Negroes were introduced to supply their
places; but the demand for colonial produce was then very slight; and
when Jamaica surrendered to Admiral Penn (the father of our William
Penn) in 1655, with whom was our Winslow, one of the founders of Plym-
outh colony, and who, being then in England as agent for Massachusetts,
was sent out in the fleet by Cromwell, as one of the commissioners for
superintending such conquests as might be made, it contained only a thou-
sand or two of Spanish creoles, and a less number of negroes. The Span-
iards submitted to the invaders; most of the negroes fled to the interior
mountains, where they became the progenitors of the maroons, recruited
from time to time by additional runaways, from whose depredations Jam tica
afterwards suffered so much, and of whom she finally got rid, so late as 1796,
only by the disgraceful breach of a capitulation into which they had been
induced to enter. These maroons, transported by that breach of faith to
Nova Scotia, became, along with some of the refugee slaves from Virginia
and Maryland, whom the British at the close of the revolutionary war had
refused to give up, the first settlers of the colony of Sierra Leone, and some
of their descendants are at this day thriving merchants, and among the
leading inhabitants of that Anglo-African settlement.
Cromwell, who had expected to get St. Domingo, from which his fleet
was repulsed, was anxious to make all he could out of Jamaica. He tried
to persuade the settlers at New Haven, who had not prospered altogether
according to their expectations, to remove thither in a body, and in a sermon-
izing letter endeavored to convince them that they had a call from God to
that work. They declined this pressing invitation; but among the adven-
turers who did go to Jamaica was Samuel Vassall, who had been one of
the first settlers of Massachusetts, but whom the intolerant spirit prevailing
there had induced to leave, and whose large landed estates acquired in
Jamaica passed finally, together with his name, into the family of the
Foxes, the head of which now bears the aristocratic title of Lord Holland.
Winslow, who died shortly after landing, was succeeded by Sedgwick, an-
other New England man, who had served in the parliamentary army, and
whose posterity are very honorably distinguished among us. But this new


The “RUIN" of JAMAICA. 8
et, amissioner, on arriving in Jamaica, did not find things in a very promis-
ing condition. The soldiers left there had been principally drawn from the
Island of Barbadoes, which had then a much larger white population than
at present—being, in fact, at that time (just two hundred years ago) the
most populous and wealthy of the English colonies in America. But these
troops by no means came up to the standard of our good Puritan, parlia-
mentary soldier, who was afterwards major general of Massachusetts; and
in his official letters he described them very much as our letter writers of
to-day describe the Jamaica negroes, “so lazy and idle as it cannot enter
into the heart of any Englishman that such blood should run in the veins
of any born in England.” To recruit this rather unpromising population,
Cromwell ordered a thousand girls and young men to be enlisted in Ireland,
and he directed the administrators of the Scottish government to appre-
hend all “known idle, masterless robbers and vagabonds” for transporta-
tion thither. A certain number of prisoners of war were also disposed of
in the same manner.
The best thing that offered to these first English settlers in Jamaica was
privateering against the Spaniards; and even after the establishment of
amicable relations between Spain and England, they still kept it up. So
far did Sir Thomas Modyford, who was governor in 1668, carry his notions
of colonial rights, – a man after the heart of our nullifiers, whom he an-
ticipated by almost two centuries, – that he declared war on behalf of the
island against Spain, merely for the sake of being able to give commissions
to the cruisers; for it is to be observed that the buccaneers of those times,
like the kidnappers of ours, always preferred, when it was possible, to act
under a commission. The prosperity of Jamaica, like that of the neighbor-
ing colony of French St. Domingo, (the present empire of Hayti,) thus
took its start from buccaneering. Such was the source of the wealth, lux-
ury, and profligacy, no doubt exaggerated by tradition, of Port Royal, now
become an English town. But Sir Thomas Modyford was not, by any
means, a man of one idea. Besides granting commissions to the bucca-
neers, it was he too who introduced the cultivation of sugar; and when
buccaneering began to grow less profitable, and more dangerous, – though
till the last moment Port Royal afforded them a market for their prizes and
entertainment for their money, - the richer and more stable-minded of the
old buccaneers began to import and buy negroes, and to turn their attention
to sugar planting — the introduction into Europe of the use of tea and
coffee having opened an enlarged market, and created a new demand for
that article. From buccaneering to sugar planting — such was the second
step in the career of population tha prosperity alike in Jamaica and in
French St. Domingo.
Jamaica, however, still retained its interest in navigation; and from
*** ----- - - ºs------ * * * * * *


- - - -
-
4 ANTI-SLAVERY TRACTS.
fighting and plundering the Spaniards began now to trade with them. This
trade, in fact, had in it something of the excitement, the risks, and the
profits, too, of buccaneering; for the Spanish colonial system allowed no
commerce with strangers, and the traffic actually carried on had either to
be forced, in spite of the Spanish guarda costas, or insinuated by vessels
that anchored off the coast under pretence of leaks, injury by storms, or
lack of supplies, the eyes of the Spanish officers being closed with gold; or
else worked through under cover of the assiento treaty, by which Spain had
ceded first to France, and afterwards to England, the privilege of introdu-
cing, annually, a certain number of negro slaves into her colonies, with
whom the vessels admitted for that purpose contrived also to smuggle in a
great many other kinds of goods.
Port Royal was ruined by an earthquake in 1722, but Kingston succeeded
it, and grew to be the largest town in the West Indies—not at all as a
mere port for shipping sugar and landing plantation supplies, but as the
entrepot of the entire British trade with Spanish America. And this en-
trepot it remained till the revolt of the Spanish colonies, first against the
Bonaparte family and afterwards against the restored Bourbons, by open-
ing the Spanish American ports to legitimate commerce, made any such
smuggling entrepot unnecessary. Kingston, also, while the slave trade
lasted, was the grand British entrepot for that traffic; and Bryan Edwards
calculates that, besides the import for domestic supply, Kingston had, dur-
ing the eighteenth century, the profits on half a million of negroes furnished
to other colonies, foreign and British.
The city of Kingston was thus built up by smuggling and slave trading.
Both these occupations are now gone, and no other has yet been created to
supply their places. This simple statement of historical facts will serve to
explain the decay, dilapidation, and houses to let, observed by correspond-
ents at Kingston, the general stopping-place of travellers, and the source
whence come so many Jeremiads about ruin, decay, and insolent free nig-
gers that won't work. The very same result from similar causes might have
been seen, twenty years ago in many dilapidated New England seaport
towns, such as Newport, Salem, and Newburyport, into which manufactur-
ing industry has again introduced bustle and prosperity. Jamaica, how-
ever, so far from having any protective policy to aid her in contending
against the revolutions of commerce, after having been for years the spoilt
child of Protection, having been as a slave colony always sustained by the
close monopoly (in common with the other British sugar islands) of the
British sugar market, and by occasional large parliamentary grants of
money direct, has been exposed as a free colony, with its lands exhausted,
its credit greatly diminished, and its supply of labor curtailed, to a thorough-
going free-trade competition, not only with the virgin soil, resident proprie.
|


THE “RUIN" of JAMAICA, 7
undue advantages, but solely on the fair and honorable ground of reciprocal
benefit, have been compelled, much against their inclination, to become plant-
ers themselves—being obliged to receive unprofitable West India estates in
yment, or lose their money altogether. I have known plantations transferred
in this manner which are a burden instead of a benefit, and which are kept up
solely in the hope that favorable crops and an advance in prices may, some
time or other, invite purchasers.
“Thus oppression in one class of creditors, and gross injustice towards an-
other, contribute equally to keep up cultivation in a country where, if the risks
and losses are great, the gains are sometimes commensurate; for sugar estates
there are, undoubtedly, from which, instead of the returns that I have esti-
mated, double that profit has been obtained. It is indeed true that such in-
stances are extremely rare; but, º: to that very circumstance—which
to a philosopher, speculating in his closet, would seem sufficient to deter a
wise man from adventuring in this line of cultivation — it is chiefly owing that
so much money has been expended in it. I mean the fluctuating nature of its
returns. The quality of sugar varies occasionally so much as to create a dif-
ference in its value of ten shillings the hundred, which, for the superior quali-
A ty, is pure gain. Much, undoubtedly, depends on skill in the manufacture;
and, the process being apparently simple, the beholder feels almost an irresisti-
ble propensity to engage in it. Though, perhaps, not more than one man in
fifty comes away fortunate, every sanguine adventurer takes it for granted that
he shall be that one. Thus his system of life becomes a course % experiments,
and if ruin should be the consequence of his rashness, he imputes his misfortunes
to any cause rather than to his own want, and capacity, and foresight.”
These extracts from Edwards afford an insight into the rationale of slave
cultivation according to the system which ultimately prevailed throughout
the British West Indies, and to a very considerable extent also in the
French and Dutch colonies. The motive power of the system, the real
owners not only of the plantations and of the slaves, but of the nominal
proprietors also, were a few great mercantile houses in Europe, with whom
it was a leading object to secure the transportation of the sugars and of the
plantation supplies in their vessels, with the commissions on their sale and
purchase. It was these profits, and these alone, that sufficed to cover the
numerous risks of sugar planting, and to justify the large advances which
the business required. -
Though often compelled to carry on the estates in their own names and
at their own sole risk, these European merchants greatly preferred to standin
the relation of mortgagees—thus leaving all the risks to be borne, so long
as they could stand under them, by nomihal proprietors. These nominal
proprietors were chiefly drawn from the mercantile class, or from the class
of overseers, doctors, lawyers, master mechanics, and others, who, going
out to the colonies to seek their fortunes, had gradually, as attachés to the
plantations, accumulated a few thousand pounds—often, it was said, in the
case of the overseers, by cheating their absent employers. Whatever resi-
dent in the colonies, by whatever means, succeeded in getting together a
considerable sum of money, was drawn on, by a fascination like that of the
gaming table, to invest it in a sugar plantation, which remained mortgaged
for the balance to the European consignees of the produce. The certain


8 ANTI-SILAVERY TRACTs.
ruin that in nineteen cases out of twenty attended this procedure was pro-
verbial in the West Indies; yet few indeed who had the means, had the
strength of mind to resist the temptation to become (nominal) proprietors
—that being the height of West Indian glory and dignity; while a few for-
tunes acquired here and there by extraordinary crops or series of crops, or
by a sudden rise in the sugar market, occasioned by war or other accident,
served still to bait the trap. -
It was thus that the European sugar houses absorbed every thing—not
only the labor of the black slaves, but all the earnings and savings of their
white employés also – drawn at last into a plantation investment—the
nominal proprietors being scarcely less bond slaves than the very negroes
themselves. To these few houses, and to these alone, was sugar planting,
under the slave system, a profitable venture. To every body else employed
in it, black or white, it was incessant, exhausting, and unrequited toil,
except that the black people had a very scanty and insufficient supply of
food and clothing, — the latter generally a rag about their loins, – and the
white people a pretty good supply of these, with plenty of wine, brandy,
ale, rum, and black mistresses, horses to ride, and negroes to domineer
over. And this, under the most prosperous times of the slave system, con-
stituted the entire sum and substance of Jamaica prosperity 1 But even
this kind of prosperity, such as it was, carried with it the seeds of its own
decay. Two things were absolutely essential to its continuance—an un-
limited supply of new land, and an unlimited supply of new slaves to take
the places of those annually used up on the plantations.
The era of the highest planter prosperity of Jamaica corresponds exactly
with the era of the highest planter prosperity of Virginia—that is to say,
the twenty years preceding the breaking out of our revolutionary war.
During this period the market for colonial produce enlarged steadily.
Jamaica and Virginia, from the establishments already made in them, had
the decided advantage over newer and yet infant settlements. There was
still a sufficiency of virgin land; slaves were imported in greater numbers
than ever before, and the establishment of new plantations went on in an
accelerated ratio. But soon the same inevitable drawback laid its claw upon
both Jamaica and Virginia. The lands in both, suitable for plantations, be-
gan to be exhausted, and settlers and speculators began to seek out fresh
lands elsewhere. The first great rival of Jamaica in this respect (what
Cuba is to her now) was French St. Domingo. The cultivation of that
colony in the latter half of the last century advanced with very rapid strides,
and her exports from the period of the American war—from which Jamai
ca suffered greatly, in the starvation of her slaves and the loss of her ac-
customed supplies of lumber—began to rival and presently to exceed those
of the English colony. The French revolution and its result, the self.


THE “RUIN" OF JAMAICA. 9
ſ:
:
º:
º:
**
i:
º:
*
º:
º
º
º
:
emancipation of the slaves of St. Domingo, delivered Jamaica from that
powerful and hated rival. But about the same time with this deliverance,
a change was made in the policy of Spain respecting Porto Rico and Cuba,
and these islands, hitherto without trade, and with a very limited popula-
tion, presented themselves as new competitors in the business of sugar
growing. Presently, too, by the abolition of the slave trade, Jamaica lost
her annual supply of laborers, who thenceforward, down even to the present
moment, have annually diminished. For though the total population of
Jamaica has increased since emancipation, that increase consists of children
not yet of an age for labor; while not only has the adult able-bodied popu-
lation gone on still diminishing year by year, but the women, formerly
employed equally with the men in the field and the sugar mill, from the
necessity of taking care of their infant children and overseeing, not slave
huts, but free households, have necessarily been withdrawn from plantation
labor. -
With her lands year after year more and more exhausted, her supply of
labor diminishing, the protective sugar duties repealed, old and worn-out
Jamaica is exposed to competition with new and fertile Cuba. Compare
Virginia and Missouri, and their present rate of growth, and understand, O
ye travellers and letter writers! why it is that the sugar growing interest de-
clines in Jamaica and flourishes in Cuba; why it is that, in this particular
line of sugar growing, the old emancipated colonies cannot compete with
the new slave ones.
Charter III. — The “Ruin” of Jamaica an old Story.
IN reference to the alleged former prosperity and pretended present
“ruin” of Jamaica, we have seen in what that prosperity consisted; and
that, by the operation of causes entirely independent of the nature of the
labor employed, that prosperity, such as it was, had already reached its
period, and had commenced a gradual decline years before the abolition of
slavery, or even of the slave trade.
That prosperity, to restate the matter in a few words, consisted in the dil-
igent and laborious cultivation of a certain number of sugar and coffee plan-
tations, by upward of three hundred thousand negroes, in the lowest state
of degradation, misery, ignorance, and barbarism, uninstructed, religiously
or otherwise, naked, or nearly so, supported on a scanty allowance of the
coarsest food, (and a large part of that imported,) forced to labor some six-
teen hours a day, and annually diminishing at the rate of nearly three per
cent. — the number being kept good only by fresh importations from Africa,
—while all the profits of this forced and cruel toil went into the coffers of a
few great British commercial houses, except what stuck by the way, and
----------------" "


THE “RUIN" of JAMAICA. 11
women; and such wives as were occasionally brought out from Great Brit-
ain pretty generally soon wished themselves at home again. The white
men supplied themselves with mistresses and housekeepers, either from
among the slaves or the free people of color, who formed, during the so-
much-regretted era of Jamaica prosperity, a third and equally distinct class
of the population. These free people of color, with whom were reckoned
also a few manumitted negroes, amounted to about ten thousand in number,
being the offspring of the connections above mentioned. In a few rare
cases these colored children were educated and provided for in a fatherly
manner. If the mother were a slave, it was considered in Jamaica — our dem-
ocratic slaveholders think differently — only an act of common decency to
secure the freedom of the child; but here, in general, the care of the father
stopped. With few exceptions, the males, unprovided with any means of
gaining for themselves a creditable livelihood, keenly sensitive to the honor
on the one side of their white parentage, and to the disgrace of their Afri-
can blood on the other, were left speedily to terminate, or miserably to pro-
tract, a wretched existence as they might. They were subjected to much the
same legal disabilities and indignities as are the colored people of our South-
ern States, not being allowed to testify against a white man, to vote, or to
hold any office; and the legislature of Jamaica had also provided — a thing
not yet found necessary in any of our Southern States—that no testamentary
devise from a white person to a negro or mulatto should be valid if it ex-
-ceeded the amount of seven thousand dollars. The females had, as their
only resource, the concubinage above described – a degraded position, in
which, however, they often fulfilled, with the utmost scrupulousness and self.
devotion, all the duties, without enjoying one of the rights, of a wife, and
which, as it secured to them and their colored relations a white champion
and protector, was regarded as the greatest piece of good fortune, and the
most respectable position to which they could possibly attain.
Such was the prosperity over the decay of which so many regrets are ut-
tered—the enjoyments, if they are to be called such, secured by it to the lim-
ited white population, and to them only, being of the grossest character.
From living constantly among negroes, mostly imported from Africa, over
whom they exercised despotic authority, the white immigrants, the greater
part of them not over refined to begin with, degenerated into gross barbari-
ans. Their only relaxations were drunken frolics, naked negro girls be-
ing employed to wait at table; while it was an ordinary piece of Jamaica
hospitality to furnish, not only a bed to the guest, but a woman to share it.
Such were the pleasures of the whites of Jamaica. Their business consisted
in watching and driving up the negroes, and in gradually accumulating the
means to flit for a moment as nominal proprietor of a plantation, which
proprietorship, in nineteen cases out of twenty, speedily transferred these
hard-earned gains into the coffers of some London sugar house.


12 ANTI-SILAVERY TRACTS.
Nor was even this wretched system sustained, except by a strict monopoly
of the British sugar market, secured to the British West India planters—
a monopoly which, in the latter quarter of the last century, was so severely
felt by the British consumers, considering the prices at which they might
have purchased the rival sugars of French St. Domingo, as to raise a great
clamor in. England against the whole system of West India cultivation as
a ruinous and losing concern, accompanied by a scheme for drawing the
supply of sugar from the East Indies — a scheme which only received its
quietus when the revolt of the slaves in French St. Domingo had freed the
British colonies from that invidious contrast. On the other hand, the legis-
lature of Jamaica complained with no less emphasis of the wretched condi-
tion to which the island was reduced. They stated, in a formal report, that,
in consequence of the interruption of their usual supplies, resulting from
the quarrel between Great Britain and her northern continental colonies,
(now the United States,) fifteen thousand negroes had perished, between
the end of 1780 and the beginning of 1787, “ of famine, or of diseases con-
tracted by scanty and unwholesome diet.” Another report, dated November
22, 1792, represents that, in the course of twenty years preceding, one hundred
and seventy-seven estates were sold for the payment of debts, fifty-five were
thrown up, —so long ago had that abandonment of estates commenced, of which
we nowadays hear so much, as though it were a new thing growing out of
amancipation, — and ninety-two were then in the hands of creditors, while,
during the same period, eighty thousand and twenty-one executions,
amounting to above twenty-two million five hundred thousand pounds ster-
ling, had been lodged in the provost marshal's office. -
Such was the prosperity of Jamaica in 1792; and accounts still more
lamentable are given in a another report of November 23, 1804, and in re-
ports of the British House of Commons, of July 24, 1807, of April 13, 1808
—report No. 279, 1812, and No. 381, 1832; from all which it appears that
Jamaica ruin is an ancient and chromic complaint — as painful, no doubt,
but apparently not much more dangerous than the gout, which, as the pa.
tient has survived it for seventy years or more, is not likely, perhaps, to re-
sult in immediate dissolution; especially as the inhabitants of the island, in
spite of this protracted and reiterated ruin of the sugar planters, are vastly
better off in every respect — socially, politically, intellectually, religiously,
physically, and morally — than at any former period.
Published for gratuitous distribution, at the Office of the AMERICAN
ANTI-SLAv ERY Society, No. 138 Nassau Street, New Yörk. Also
to be had at the Anti-Slavery Offices, No. 21 Cornhill, Boston, and
No. 31 North Fifth Street, Philadelphia.
•





(2/
E M A N C I PAT I 0 N
• IN THE
WEST IND I E.S.
BY
F. B. SANBoRN.
CONCORD, MASS.
MARCH, 1862.


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France, Denmark, and Sweden, in 1848.
It is, then, 14 years since the last act of lib-
eration, 28 since the most important one,
and 69 since the first. There still remain in
Slavery, about 6750 000 Africans on the
continent and islands of America; that is to
say, nearly 4000 000 in the United States,
nearly 2000 000 in Brazil, 750 000 in Cuba,
and Porto Rico, and 50 000 in the Dutch
possessions.
The slaves of St. Domingo were set free
under martial law, amid the disorders of the
first French Revolution; those of Great
Britain were led into liberty in time of pro-
found peace, by carefully prepared statutes;
those of France and Denmark during the
Revolutionary year of 1848, but without the
interposition of martial law. We have here,
then, all the possible conditions of a commu.
nity, peace, war, and that intermediate
state which we call Revolution. If the ex-
periment had failed in any of these cases, we
might think it, owing to peculiar circum-
stances; if it had failed in all we might
think the policy a mistaken one, at least, so
far as these Islands are concerned ; if it has
succeeded in all, shall we not say it will also
succeed every where : Let it be noticed that
the number of slaves set free is about two-
fths of those in this country; or, to be more
exact, as many as are now in the States of
Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Virginia,
Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana,
Texas, and Florida. But while the 1600-
600 freedmen occupied an area of less than
300 000 square miles, these ten States have
an area of 600 000 square miles,—a circum-
stance very favorable to Emancipation; while
the climate of none of them is such as to ex-
clude the white man from active labors, as in
the West Indies.
At the period of emancipation, St. Domin-
go presented a condition of things somewhat
iike our own at this moment, but much more
like what ours may be a year hence if we do
not avail ourselves of the teachings of expe-
rence. For three years the colony had been
torn by civil wars between the whites and
mulattoes, in which the negroes had taken
little part. The Spaniards, in alliance with
the revolted slaves of 1791, and in the inter-
est of the exiled Bourbons, had invaded the
country, and occupied several important
places. The English, then as now eager to
destroy a commercial rival, were in treaty
with the planters to invade the island also.
The French Republic, represented in St. Do-
mingo by two commissioners, Sonthonax and
Polverel, was on the point of losing the rich
colony. The commissioners had but a thou-
sand French soldiers, a few hundred mulat-
toes, and the fragment of loyal slaveholders,
to oppose so many enemies. At this crisis,
by a bold act of justice, the very thought of
which they had repelled four months before,
they brought to the French cause the power-
ful aid of 500 000 megroes. On the 29th of
August, 1793, they declared all the slaves
free. Just three weeks after, the English
troops landed, but it was too late. On the
4th of February, 1794, the National Con-
vention confirmed the proclamation of the
Commissioners, and abolished slavery in the
other colonies. In June of the same year,
Toussaint L'Ouverture, with 5000 men,
who till them had fought under the Spanish
flag, forced himself into the chief city, re-
leased the French General, and put himself
and his negro soldiers at the orders of the
Republic. From that hour the fortune of
the war was changed. The English were
driven out, (1798) the Spanish retired, and
early in 1801, Toussaint proclaimed the
French Republic in the Spanish portion of
the Island, already ceded to France by the
treaty of 1795, thus confirming the liberation
of 100 000 more slaves who had been own-
ed by the Spaniards.
In the meantime, war alone had not occu-
pied the great genius of this negro warrior
and statesman. Having become virtually
Governor of the colony, in 1796 he had set
himself to the task of organizing free labor.
—a work begun by the French Commission-
ers in 1794. Sonthonax, returning from
an absence in France, in 1796, was astonished
at the prosperity which he saw. After the
expulsion of the English, in 1798, Toussaint
recalled the fugitive planters, gave them their
former slaves for hired laborers, and opened
the ports to free trade. To direct and enforce
his regulations, he put the whole Island under
military government, and supported his sys-
tem of labor, when resisted, by the bayonet.
The fruits of this sagacious policy were in-
stantly visible. Commerce returned to the
unfortunate Island; labor flourished; the
planters grew rich; the condition of the la-
borers was wonderfully improved; the Gov-
ernment was respected, and every thing
promised well for the future.
Suddenly, all this prosperity was again
destroyed—not by the negroes, who had cre-
ated it—but by the stupendous folly of Na-


poleon. Yielding to the urgency of the emi-
grant planters, and of Josephine, herself a
creole of Martinique, in 1802 Napoleon sent
an immense army to St. Domingo, treach-
erously seized Toussaint, and imprisoned him
in France, where he soon died of neglect.
At the same time, he reëstablished Slavery
and the Slave Trade in all the French colo-
nies except St. Domingo, proposing to do so
there when he should have conquered it. But
his vast armies were destroyed by war and
disease, and in 1804 the French were finally
driven from the Island.
Since then, the fortunes of Hayti have
been various, but, on the whole, ereditable
to her people; especially when we remember
that when she gained her independence, near-
ly half her people were slaves, who had been
imported from Africa, and that nine-tenths of
them had only the vicious training of slavery
to fit them to be citizens. They have in-
creased in population and in wealth, in spite
of the exactions of France and Spain, and
our own most illiberal treatment of them.
Their Government has been more stable than
that of Mexico, or the South American Re-
publics; their institutions show an honest
effort for liberty, under the restraints of law;
their literature, though scanty, will endure a
comparison with that of Cuba or of Canada.
But whatever have been the misfortunes of
Hayti, Emancipation was not their cause.
They began three years before the slaves
were freed; they ceased when the negro
Toussaint acquired power; they began again
when Napoleon, in 1802 reëstablished the
old curse of slavery.
“The evil that men do lives after them.”
It was Slavery. not Freedom, that ruined
the fair hopes of St. Domingo; it will be
Freedom. not Slavery, that will restore her
to her ancient and over-estimated splendor.
She may yet be our most faithful ally, our
best friend, and, to the delight of Milk street
and Wall street, our unlimited customer.”
Both justice and policy require us to recog-
nize her independence, and to offer her our
alliance and protection. It is now a ques-
tion whether she shall belong to us or to
Spain, from whose encroaching hand we
have more to fear, than even from the inso-
lence and avarice of England. Spain is no
longer a feeble State; with Mexico, Cuba,
and Hayti in her possession, she would be-
*The customer is the immediate jewel of our souls.”—
Emerson.
come a commercial power of the first rank;
shall we allow it?
Such was the first great experiment of ne-
gro Emancipation; now for the second.
In the very midst of the “Horrors of St.
Domingo” the English Abolitionists were
waging their war against the slave trade.
On the 5th of May, 1778, Mr. Pitt brought
forward in Parliament his motion against it;
a year later, Wilberforce made his first
speech against it, supported by Pitt, Fox,
and Burke. Clarkson and the Quakers had
moved still earlier; and Zachary Macaulay,
father of the brilliant historian, joined with
them. In 1807 their efforts abolished the
infamous traffic, a year before it was ended
here by act of Congress. Christian VII. of
Denmark had still earlier, in 1792, forbidden
his subjects to take part in it. In 1823 Mr.
Canning's resolutions, looking to the final
abolition of slavery itself, passed the House
of Commons, supported there, and in the na-
tion at large, by Wilberforce, Buxton, the
two Macaulays, Lord Broughan, and many
other illustrious men.
In 1833, by act of Parliament, after long
discussion, slavery was declared forever
abolished in all the British colonies. This
law went into effect, on the 1st pf August
1834, in all the colonies save "Mauritius,
where it took effect February 1st., 1835.
It provided, for an intermediate state between
slavery and entire freedom, a system of ap-
prenticeship, which was to continue for six
years. In effect it continued but four years,
being found to work badly, like all measures
of gradual Emancipation; and all the ne:
groes became unconditionally free on the 1st
of August, 1838, in the West Indies, and
on the first of March, 1839, in Mauritius.
The small island of Antigua, however, had at
first chosen immediate freedom, rejecting the
supposed advantages of apprenticeship, which
system, it should be said, the English Abo-
litionists had not favored. It was a conces-
sion to the slaveholders, and like all such
concessions had only bad results.
The number of slaves thus set free, was
77.0 390; they were scattered through nine-
teen colonies, controlled by a strong central
government; the measures for their liberation
had been preparing for ten years, and were
carried out by humane and resolute govern.
ors, in a time of universal peace. These
circumstances show the strongest contrast in
almost every particular, to the events of


1793, in St. Domingo; naturally, we should
expect a greater success than there; what
have the results been 2 Ask this question of
the first man you meet, and ten to one his
answer will be, “Emancipation in the British
Colonies is a failure.” Ask him how he
knows this, and he will tell you “he has
heard so, everybody say so.” Ask him to
give you figures and facts for it, and he is
silent. He has not, and the American peo-
ple generally, have not taken the trouble to
spend an hour in the examination of a mat-
ter far more important to us, than it has ever
been to England. But without authority,
without investigation, in the very face and
eyes of notorious facts, he continues to repeat
what is at once a mistake and a slander.
And why? Because in this, as in so many
other points, public opinion has been under
the control of those insolent planters and
their commercial allies at the North, from
whose tyranny we are now, thank God fast
freeing ourselves. “It is opinion, not truth,”
said Sir Walter Raleigh, “that travelleth the
world without passport.” Forgetting the
prejudices which we have learned from slav-
ery, let us take the testimony, not of plant-
ers and slave-drivers; not of vulgar politi-
cians, aiming at the White House, nor of
those profound sages, the traders in cotton
and sugar,<no, but of figures,-those im-
partial reporters, who can neither vote nor
hold office, nor buy and sell in any market,
but whose silent statement the slaveholder
dreads and hates more than all argu-
ments.
Let it be said, first, that emancipation was
feared and denounced by most of the white
colonists, whose fears were shared to some ex-
tent by the British government. No Ken.
tucky Congressman, or New York secessionist
can exceed in terrors or threats the “West India
Body of Merchants and Planters” resident
in England, during the year 1833. These
noblemen and gentlemen, interested in the
sugar trade, predicted as a consequence of
any measure of emancipation, “a commercial
crisis unparalleled in the history of the em-
pire;” “an extreme danger to the lives and
properties of the free persons resident in the
colonies;” “confusion and anarchy;” “whole
districts, indeed whole colonies,” they said,
“might be completely depopulated;” they
could see nothing in the law proposed “but
confiscation of property, and the prospect of
all those calamities which must result from a
dissolution of the ties which connect the col-
onies with the British Empire.”
They declared further, that it “is not even
calculated to advance the comforts and well-
being of the negro, that it endangers the con-
tinuance of the colonies as dependencies of
the British Crown, and utterly destroys the
possibility of their productive cultivation;”
that it would “throw the black population
back into a state of barbarism.”f
These gloomy forebodings have a too fa-
miliar sound. How did the event justify
them? The colonies are still loyal to the
British Crown, as we know to our cost; they
are more productive than before emancipa-
tion; no such commercial crisis took place;
the population instead of diminishing at the
rate of 5000 annually, as it had done from
1820 to 1834, is increasing; and the negroes.
have made extraordinary advances in wealth,
civilization, and morality. There has certain-
ly been a decrease in the sugar crop, and
there have been many other changes, but of
these emancipation has been but in part the
CauSe.
The British Government did not neglect
to guard against the imagined dangers.
They sent out additional troops, and created
a special police; they made careful provision,
as was thought, for the supply of labor; and
under the name of indemnity, they distrib-
uted nearly $100 000 000 among the plant-
ers, out of which the laborers' wages could
be paid, until the new system had been
fairly tested.
The first results of Emancipation aston-
ished every one. In Antigua, where the
slaves instantly became their own masters,
the public quiet was completely undisturbed.
The first of August happened to fall on Fri-
day, and it was wisely resolved by the mas-
ters, to give their 30 000 slaves a holiday
until Monday, the 4th. These three days
were spent by the negroes—first, in prayer
and thanksgiving to God for their great de-
liverance—then, in expressions of joy and
congratulation among themselves. On Mon-
day, with few exceptions, they returned to
their homes, took up the shovel and the hoe
again, and have ever since continued to be
peaceful citizens. In the other islands there
were similar events; scarcely a riot occurred,
and not a single white man lost his life. The
only sufferers were a few rash negroes, at
Trinidad and St. Christopher's,who attempted
*Proceedings of West India Body, pp. 9,43, 49,86. (Lon-
don, 1883.) tibid, pp. 96, 134.


a combination against the authorities. In
Trinidad, one negro was hanged, and a few
others sentenced to hard labor; in St. Chris-
topher's, four or five were transported for life.
In only one colony was martial law pro-
claimed; nor have there since been any seri-
ous outbreaks among the negroes, though this
is the twenty-eighth year of their freedom.
Yet, in Jamaica alone, from 1800–32, there
had been five insurrections, of which the last,
in the winter of 1831–32, cost the lives of
500 negroes, and involved a destruction of
property, amounting to six or seven millions
of dollars. Peace, therefore, was the first
effect of Freedom.
So much for the fears of murder and pil-
lage entertained by the colonists. The sec-
ond great evil which they feared, was a com-
plete cessation of labor, or such irregularity
as to derange all the operations of business.
In some colonies, and especially in Jamaica,
this fear has been partly realized; in others,
as in Antigua, Barbadoes, the Bahamas, noth-
ing of the kind has occurred. Now as the
same cause ought always to produce the same
effect, may we not suspect that the diminu-
tion of labor in Jamaica and elsewhere, is
due to other causes than the emancipation of
the laborer? At any rate, may we not find
some other reason for it, than the native idle-
ness of the negro, of which Mr. Carlyle and
a host of shallowers writes, say so much 3
May it not spring from a feeling which the
Anglo-Saxon of all men ought to respect,
since he has so much of it, Earth-hunger—
a desire to own land, and not to be the ser-
vant of another man? A committee of the
House of Commons in 1842, asserted that
this was the case. They said:
“Labor has diminished because the blacks
have devoted themselves to work more profit-
able for them than field work, and because
they have generally been able, especially in
the larger colonies, to purchase lands without
difficulty, to live comfortably, and enrich
themselves without being obliged to give
the planters more than three or four days of
seven hours in each week. The low price of
land, the ill-will of the planters, the harsh-
mess of the laws which establish the relation
between the laborer and his employer,
these have been the chief causes of the diffi-
culties experienced.”
To the same effect, Francis Hincks, Gov-
*See Cochin's Abolition de L'Esclovoge, Tome I. p. 404.
We have translated from the French, not having access to
the Blue Book in question.
7
ernor-in-Chief of the Windward Islands, said
in 1859;f “There has been a considerable
withdrawal of labor from sugar cultivation,
in Jamaica. Among the causes, next to the
tenure of land, the insolvency of the proprie-
tors has been the chief. The only wonder is,
that with such a land tenure as exists in the
West Indies, a single laborer remains on the
sugar estates.” Mr. Sewell, a Canadian by
birth, now an American citizen, who visited
Jamaica in 1860, and who has written a book
of high value, on the Labor Question in the
West Indies,f speaks in the same tone;
“All the impartial testimony that I could ob-
tain in Jamaica,” he says, “summed up a
crushing contradiction to the unqualified pre-
tension of the planter, that the negro would
not work. And when I asked the negro
himself, why he preferred the toil of the mine
(eight hours in the day and six days in the
week) to the comparatively easy labor of the
plantation, his explanation was very simple—
‘Buckra don't pay.’” Be it remembered
that Mr. Sewell is no abolitionist.
But let us see how great is the evil com-
plained of Certainly if idleness has in-
creased in the British colonies, it will show
itself by diminished imports and exports;
for the foreign and domestic trade of a coun-
try is the sure index of its industry. First
let us consider the sugar crop alone, in which
the alleged diminution has been greatest.
There is no doubt that the sugar crop of Ja-
maica, and of several of the other colonies,
has much decreased since emancipation.
But it must not be forgotten that this de-
crease began so long ago as 1807, and con-
tinued steadily until 1853, when it seemed to
be checked, and there is now, we are told, a
slight gain. We must bear in mind, too,
that the negroes in Jamaica have decreased,
since 1807, nearly twenty per cent., and that
the sugar monopoly, which the colonies en-
joyed has been entirely superseded by the
modern English theories of Free Trade,
while the planters have been all this time in
a state of chronic bankruptcy, far worse than
the financial condition of our Southern States.
Remembering all these things, we find by the
sure evidence of Arithmetic that all the
British sugar colonies produced, during the
four last years of slavery, a yearly average
of 4377971 cwt ; in the four years of ap-
t See Anti-Slavery Standard (N.Y.) Sept. 24, 1859, for a
report of this speech, made at London, Aug. 1st, 1859.
t The ordeal of Free Labor in the British West Indies.
By Wm. G. Sewell. N. Y., 1861, p.285.


prenticeship, 4038 321 cwt., a loss of 8 1-2
per cent. ; in the first six years of freedom
3 120765 cwt., a loss of 40 per cent. ;
but in 1847, 4 393 946 cwt., a slight gain
over the last years of slavery. In the two
last years of slavery they exported to Great
Britain 8471744 cwt; in 1856-7 they ex-
ported 8 736654 cwt; a gain of 3 per cent.
Leaving Jamaica out of view, and also
Mauritius, where the crop has immensely in-
creased, by reason of the immigration of
Coolies, we find that the remaining fifteen
sugar colonies produced in the three last
years of slavery 7405 849 cwt, ; in the
three years 1855–6–7, 7427 618 cwt., a
slight gain. From 1827 to 1855 the ton-
nage of vessels entering at eight of these
islands—the only ones reportedš—had in-
creased more than six per cent.
If the colonies which have been well man-
aged are considered, we shall find a still more
marked gain.
The four colonies of Antigua, Barbadoes,
Guiana, and Trinidad, exported, in the last
four years of slavery, an annual average of
187 000 000 pounds of sugar; from 1856
to 1860, they have annually exported 265-
000 000 pounds,-an increase of 41 per
cent. For fourteen years before emancipa-
tion, the same colºnies imported an average
of $8,840 000; in 1859, they imported
$14,600 000,—an increase of 65 per cent.
It is true that in Barbadoes and Trinidad,
the population has largely increased, but by
no means in this ratio; in Guiana and An-
tigua, there are fewer people than in 1822.
Some of the single colonies show results
still more astonishing.
Take Antigua, for example, the island
where the slaves were immediately emanci-
pated. For the fourteen years before Eman-
cipation, the annual imports averaged $600-
000; for 1859, the imports were $1280-
000, or more than double, while its exports
have increased more than 25 per cent. In
this instance, free labor has had a fair field
from the start, and all has gone well; in
Barbadoes, Grenada, Mauritius, and, indeed,
most of the colonies, the same is true, though
in a less degree. On the whole, we can say
that the evils resulting from the scarcity of
labor were never so great as had been feared,
and in many islands did not exist at all;
they were by no means owing wholly to
Emancipation, and they will soon be entirely
removed.
$Edinburgh Review, April, 1859.
But we may be told that the prosperity of
Cuba is a proof of the advantages of slavery.
Nobody denies that Cuba has made, and is
making, great advances in wealth. Her ex-
ports have risen from $12 000 000 in 1828,
to $34 000 000 in 1858;| her imports in
the same time, from $17 000 000 to $39-
000,000. Her population has increased
nearly as fast. In 1828, it was 704487;
in 1858, it was at least 1,400,000, of whom
half were probably slaves. There has been
a similar increase in Porto Rico, the other
colony of Spain; but there, the proportion
of slaves to the whole population, is only
about one-eighth. Both these islands, how-
ever, are comparatively thinly settled; espe-
cially Cuba, whose population is but 33 to
the square mile, or about the same as New
Hampshire. Jamaica, on the contrary, has
68, and Barbadoes 843, to the square mile.
The abundance of land, together with the
fertility of the soil, its favorable position for
commerce, and the greater liberality of Spain's
commercial policy in recent years, will ex-
plain the rapid growth of Cuba, which, after
all, is only a quarter part of the growth of
Iowa, within the last fifteen years. Let us
see if there is not some delusion about the
wealth of Cuba; let us apply a more certain
test. How much value per man, for her
whole population, will the trade of Cuba
show for 1858 2 We answer, $52. Now, the
trade of the French West Indies, which we
are told have been ruined by Emancipa-
tion, as well as the British colonies, gives
a yearly average of $68 per man, from
1852 to 1858. The imports of Cuba
for 1858, are $27.85 per head; those
of Antigua, for 1859, are $36.57 per
head. In 1857, the whole trade of Great
Britain with her West India colonies, was
over $52 000 000, giving a greater sum per
head than Cuba can show. Where, then,
are the boasted advantages of Slavery 2 Yet
in Cuba, Slavery is said to be mild, and the
proportion of whites to blacks is nearly four
times as great as in the British colonies.
We may add that in the fabulous prosperity
of St. Domingo, before the French Revolu-
tion, her exports and imports are set at about
$40 000 000, giving about the same average
per head as in Antigua in 1859. -
| Cochin–Tome II., p., 191.
To this careful French writer, we have been much in-
debted for statistics, concerning the results of Emancipa-
tion. Had he thrown these more into a tabular form, he
would have much increased the value of his book. Schoel-
cher's volumes are still of great authority, though pub-
lished fifteen or twehty years ago.


So much for the “ruin” of the British
colonies, and the prosperity of the Spanish.
Let us now turn to the last argument of the
British planters; that Emancipation would
barbarize the negro. Nor have we dwelt so
long on the pecuniary results of Emancipa-
tion because we regard those as the most im-
portant; but because they have been most
frequently called in question. We believe
most firmly in that good old maxim of the
Democratic party, “the greatest good of the
greatest number,”—interpreting it to mean
“the greatest good of all.” So even if the
100 000 whites in the British colonies had
been pecuniarily ruined by Emancipation,
and the prosperity of the colonies destroyed,
we think we could have endured it with forti-
tude, on the assurance that the 800 000
negroes and mulattoes were immeasurably
the gainers. Now the whites have not been
ruined as a whole, and their own folly is the
chief cause of what troubles have come upon
them since 1834. Leaying them for the
present out of the º let us consider
the moral and social condition of the negroes
since Emancipation. Here the testimony is
all one way, and of the strongest kind.
. True, Mr. Carlyle sneers at “Quashee” lying
in the sun, with his “pumpkin,” and “his
saccharine juices,”—but a sneer is not testi-
mony nor argument. Did not Mr. Carlyle
once make a rather plain statement about
“eighteen million of bores,” and did any
American believe him :
Because a crabbed Scotchman does not
fancy the color, or the features, or the dialect
of some of his fellow-men, are we to disbe-
lieve our own eyes and ears, and reject all
history till he has manipulated it?
In November 1838, Lord Glenelg, who had
been Colonial Secretary, wrote:* “Up to this
time the results of the great experiment of
abolition have justified the liveliest hopes of
its authors and advocates. After having ex-
amined carefully the evils that have attended
its execution, it seems to me that they must
be in great measure attributed to the old co-
lonial system. Whoever has reflected on hu-
man nature, and the history of slavery, must
have expected that such a reform could not
be brought about without embarassments. I
am happy, then, to be able to say that in a
short period of time there has been a progress
in the social condition which will increase the
happiness of mankind, and of which history
affords no greater example.”
In 1842 a committee of the House of Com-
mons, reported thus:
“The great act of Emancipation of slaves
in the West India colonies has produced the
most favorable effects, so far as concerns the
physical and social condition of the black
population. As to their moral condition,
their improvement is more than proved by
their constantly increasing eagerness for re-
ligious and secular instruction, by their de-
sire, more and more perceptible, to assume
the obligations of marriage, and fulfil the
duties of domestic life; by the reformation
of their morals and their rapid progress in civi-
lization; finally, by the value which they now
attach to the acquisition of property and a
position of independence.”f
In I840 a commission of French peers,
deputies, and official persons was appointed
to examine into the results of British Eman-
cipation, and report a project for the French
colonies. At the head of this commission
was the now venerable Duke de Broglie,
whose position among French philanthropists,
is like Lord Brougham's, in England; among
its members, were the great De Tocqueville,
who had already made a report in favor of
Emancipation; (1839) Admiral Mackau,
Hippolyte Passy, De Tracy, and other emi-
nent statesman. They continued their in-
quiries until March 1843, when their report
was presented, written by the Duke de
Broglie, After quoting largely from Eng-
lish documents, they say: -
“Nobody any longer pretends that the
blacks are a savage, unsocial race, ready to
lay waste the country the instant they are
unchained. The event has quieted these ap-
prehensions; the negroes, on the contrary,
are a very gentle, very obedient, and wonder-
fully easy to govern. All the documents
which we have examined, agree on this point.
We must cease, no less, to represent them as
an abject, idle, stupid race, insensible to the
pleasures which activity and industry pro-
cure, and incapable of the least effort to ac-
quire them. All the documents published
by the English Government, entirely confirm
this assertion. All the negroes have shown
the most lively sense of the blessings of civi-
lization; all have been prompt to do what is
necessary to obtain them, and most of them
have succeeded. We have shown what a
prodigious increase has taken place in the
importation of goods for their use. They
*Quoted by Cochin–Tome I. p., 379.
f Quoted in the Duc de Broglie's Report.
# This Report in two quarto volumes, is a marvel of faith-
ful and impartial labor.


I0
havo everywhere become artisans, farmers,
freeholders; they have built houses, cleared
lands, founded villages; and if any one will
take the trouble to examine the answers made
to the circular questions asked by the English
Government, in 1839 and 1840, he will see
that these answers are uniform, and that all
the colonial authorities agree that the condi-
tion of the black peasantry is equal or supe-
rior to that of the richest and happiest peas-
antry of Europe.”
M. Jules Lechevalier, a French writer of
some note who had visited all these islands,
and the Southern States of America, testified
before this commission. He said, * “Eman-
cipation has worked MARVELLOUs results for
the negro. I can find no other word to ex-
press what I think about this. • Education,
religion, and liberty make a man of the ne-
gro, such as nobody would recognize—an en-
tirely new being. For my part I answer,
Emancipation is very successful. The respect
and attachment of the negroes for the English
Government has become a sentiment of re-
ligion. Thus a black will not name the king
without taking off his hat. If you ask him
who is the author of the liberty which he has
gained, he will reply, “God and the king.”
It should be noticed that this witness was un-
friendly to the Abolitionists. Mr. Burnley,
for forty years a planter in Trinidad, was in-
troduced by his friend De Tocqueville.
Said he f
“I confess that the majority of the planters
expected disorders; but that was not the
opinion of reflecting people. For, setting
aside the natural mildness of the negroes,
what reasonable ground was there to expect
violence from men whose moral and social
osition was being changed for the better?
hat caused doubt and anxiety to the intel-
ligent colonists was how to keep up the sup-
ply of labor. On this point we confess today,
for the most part, that our fears were exag-
gerated, and we believe that the blacks will
work like the whites when they are subjected
to the same necessities.”
We should do the subject an injustice,
were we to omit here the testimony of Mr.
Emerson to the same point. We quote from
his address on the 1st of August 1843, an
admirable essay which, it is much to be re-
gretted is out of print.
-
“It was the sarcasm of Montesquieu, ; ‘It
would not do to suppose that negroes were
men, lest it should turn out that whites were
not;’ for the white has for ages done what
he could to keep the negro in that hoggish
state. It now appears that the negro race is,
more than any other, susceptible of rapid
civilization. The Emancipation is observed
in the island to have wrought for the negro a
benefit as sudden as when a thermometer
is brought out of the shade into the sun. It
has given him eyes and ears. He is now the
principal, if not the only, mechanic in the
West Indies, and is, besides, an architect, a
physician, a lawyer, a magistrate, an editor,
and a valued and increasing political power.”$
A more recent authority, Mr. Sewell,
brings the evidence down to 1860. “I
think,” says he, (p. 254,) “that the position
of the Jamaica peasant, in 1860, is a stand-
ing rebuke to those who, wittingly or unwit-
tingly, encourage the vulgar lie that the Af-
rican cannot possibly be elevated. Very
large numbers . as merchants, mechan-
ics, and tradesmen, and not a few of the ex-
slaves of Jamaica, or their children, are
members of the Legislature, and fill respon-
sible offices under Government. In the As-
sembly alone, there are seventeen black and
colored men, out of a total of forty-seven.
The whole people of Jamaica work;-I am
utterly amazed at the progress they have
made.”
Anthony Trollope confirms most of these
statements, in his flippant and shallow book,
“The West Indies, and the Spanish Main.”
But we will not leave the matter to rest
on authority, however illustrious or abundant;
we will bring forward the evidence that this
improvement has taken place. - -
There are three chief tests of civilization:
(1.) The security of life; (2.) The security
of property, and the value attached to it;
(3.) The sanctity of marriage and the posi-
tion of woman. Now, these three tests can
be applied rigorously by means of statistics,
and we find them all verified with increasing
force in the West Indies.
It is hardly needful to say that in slavery
the right of property is constantly violated
towards the slave, and often towards the
master; while marriage, properly speaking,
#See Cochin–Tome II. p. 433, who quotes thus: “Il est
impossible que nous supposions que ces gens-lâ soient des
hommes, parceque, sinous les supposions des hommes, on
*Report. 1st Part pp. 49–62.
f3d Part p. 38th, Tome I.
commencerait a croire que nous ne sommes pas nous-mêmes
chrétiens.” Esprit des Lois, Lib. XV.
§See Conway's “Dial,” Cincinati, 1861.


13
There was a derangement of commerce and
agriculture for a few years. The trade of
the colonies fell off 40 per cent. in 1848, as
compared with 1847, which was a very pros-
perous year. At the same time, the trade of
France fell off 25 per cent. From 1848–53
there is a falling off of 10 per cent., as com-
pared with the five years before Emancipa-
tion; but in the five subsequent years, from
1852–57, there is a gain of nearly 50 per
cent., and the four colonies are steadily gain-
ing in wealth and numbers. We have al-
ready spoken of the effect of slavery to di-
minish population in the West Indies. Since
emancipation, this tendency has been checked
in the French colonies, though it still con-
tinues in some of the English islands. The
population of the French possessions, in
1836, was 376 296; in 1846, it had fallen
to 374 548; in 1856, it had risen to 387-
821, exclusive of immigration.S
The Dutch colony of Guiana, where slaves
are still held, gives a most atrocious example
of this loss of population.| About 1800
there were 80 000 slaves there, producing an
annual value of $7 000000; in 1845 there
were but 43,285 slaves and 9712 free
blacks; a decrease of 46 per cent. in 45
years, or, if we include the free blacks, of 34
per cent. But these 43 000 slaves only pro-
duced in 1845 a value of $700 000. Of
917 plantations 636 have been abandoned."[
and the production has fallen away nine-tenths;
yet Emancipation has never troubled the
Dutch sugar growers.
From the Danish colonies since Emancipa-
tion we have few statistics, but those are all
favorable to freedom. We know that St.
Thomas is a rich emporium, and that Santa
Cruz flourishes. Some disorders, by which the
negroes were the greatest sufferers, attended
emancipation; but they were occasioned by
the ill temper of the planters, and were soon
quieted by the excellent government. For
the past ten years we hear no tidings of tu-
mult or distress from them.
In 1859 when Theodore Parker visited
Santa Cruz and St. Thomas, a member of
his family wrote thus of the freed slaves:
“I often think how delighted you would
be with the results of Emancipation, as we see
them all around us, and have abundant op-
portunity to examine them; twenty thousand
§ Cochin, Tome I., p. 276.
|See Cochin, II.. p 267.
TEdinburgh Review, April, 1859.
aft;" Report of the Am. A. S. Society, N.Y., 1861—p.
people raised at once from the condition of
cattle to that of responsible º:
tected and assisted, if need be, by the Gov-
ernment. The thrifty and industrious al-
ready succeed in laying up enough to put
them forward in the world, build a comforta-
ble little home in town, and bring their
children up to trades. They have great
pride in being independent. They
are gradually acquiring a pride of matrimony.
A noble young man here, an Episcopal .
minister, has established a day school for
the colored children of his parish, and I was
never so pleased with any school I have ever
visited. The progress has been surprising
indeed.”
“Here, as elsewhere,” says Cochin, “Slav-
ery did no good, and Emancipation no harm.
A hurricane, or the change of a single degree
in the thermometer, would have had an in-
fluence more hurtful and more lasting, than
the fortunate release of 25 000 or 30 000
men, unjustly enslaved.”
In the single Swedish island of St. Bar-
tholomew, there were in 1846, 531 slaves,
out of a population of 1700. These have all
since been freed by purchase gradually made
by King Oscar, $10,000 a year having been
voted for this purpose by the Swedish Par-
liament. We have no information about the
effects; if they had been bad, we should, no
doubt, have heard of it.
We have now spoken of the condition of
all the West India Islands where Emancipa-
tion has taken place. It has been shown
that all from which we have statistics, except
Jamaica and Hayti, are more wealthy than
during slavery, and that all, without excep-
tion, are increasing their trade and produc-
tion; that the ruin of Hayti and Jamaica, so
far as it exists, is owing to many other causes
than Emancipation,-chiefly in the one case,
to the cruel policy of Napoleon, and the un-
generous course of France, Spain, and the
United States, and in the other, to the folly
of the planters, and the evils begotten by
slavery. It has been shown, too, how delu-
sive is the assumed prosperity of Cuba and
Porto Rico—islands now passing through the
hot fit of the slaveholding fever, but which
must soon be let blood by Emancipation, as
in Hayti, or pass into the ague fit and mel-
ancholy decline of the Dutch colonies, which
slavery still curses. It has been shown that
the negro is not bloodthirsty, that he is not
idle, that he is capable of civilization. Let
us add that he is not a pauper, contrary to



14
the theories of many Americans, who fear to
do an act of justice, lest we of the North
shall be overrun by black paupers from the
South. No, the paupers of the South are
clothed in soft raiment, and live delicately,
and are, or would be, in Kings' houses. It
is a curious, but well attested fact, that
among the free colored people of the British
West Indies, in 1826, the proportion of
paupers was one in 370, while among the
whites it was one in 40.* In many places,
the proportion was still more surprising. In
Barbadoes, there were 14 500 whites, and
4500 free blacks; there were 996 white pau-
pers, and one black one ! In Berbice, there
were two colored paupers out of 900, and sev-
enteen white ones out of 600. In Jamaica, the
free colored were to the whites as two to one,
while the white paupers were to the colored,
as two to one. In Massachusetts, in 1855,
the number of paupers was one in 148. No
return was made of colored paupers, but we
are told that the returns of Philadelphia,
where there were in 1850, about 20 000 col-
ored persons, show a much greater proportion
of white, than of colored paupers. .
Many authorities have already been quoted
to show the happy results of Emancipation,
and we have been careful to take the testi-
mony of enemies as well as friends. Let us
add a few more to the list.
In 1839, De Tocqueville wrote thus;f
“Many persons, prečccupied by the recollec-
tions of St. Domingo, are led to believe that
the Emancipation of the slaves will occasion
bloody collisions between the two races,
whence the expulsion or the massacre of the
whites may soon follow. Everything leads
to the belief that these fears are imaginary,
or at least, much eacaggerated. Nothing
which has taken place in the English colonies
leaves room to suppose that Emancipation
would be accompanied with the disasters
which are dreaded.”
In the Encyclopedia Britannica, a work of
the highest authority, occurs this passage in
the article on Slavery, published in 1859:
“There can be but one opinion regarding
the results of Emancipation entertained by
any man who will dispassionately investi-
gate the condition of the colored populations
in the West Indies; and that opinion will
redound, in the highest degree, to the sa-
* Blue Book, May 9, 1826. Quoted in The Tourist 1832.
f Report on the Abolition of Slavery in the French Colo-
nies. By Alexis De Tocqueville. (Translation) Boston, 1840.
p.26. This is a pamphlet of 54 pages.
t
gacity of those who then advocated the de-
liverance of the slave. England, by freeing
her slaves, performed a politic, as well as a
very just act.”
Mr. Sewell, who has already been quoted,
says, at the close of his book, written in 1860:
“The act of British Emancipation has been
widely abused; but its detractors must live
among the people it disenthralled, if they
would learn the value at which it can be es-
timated. Time, which develops the freedom
that act created, adds continually to its lustre.
Freedom, when allowed fair play, injured
the prosperity of none of these West Indian
colonies. It saved them from a far deeper
and more lasting depression than any they
have yet known. It was a boon conferred
upon all classes of society; upon planter and
upon laborer; upon commerce and agricul-
ture; upon industry and education; upon
morality and religion. And if a perfect
measure of success remains to be achieved,
let not freedom be condemned ; for the ob-
stacles to be overcome were great, and the
workers few and unwilling.” -
The Hon. Charles Francis Adams, in a
letter written July 21st, 1860, says:
“West India Emancipation is gravely pro-
nounced a failure. I have heard it so de-
scribed on the floor of the House of Repre-
sentatives. The only reason given, is that
the British Islands do not produce so many
pounds of coffee and sugar as they did when
they could force them out of the bones and
muscles of slaves. Now mankind may, by
possibility, be tolerably well off, and yet do
entirely without coffee and sugar. But how
can they be happy without good security for
their right to seek happiness in their own
way? Yet they tell us, because
coffee and sugar fail there is no good in
Emancipation. If, by reason of this failure,
it could be shown that there was misery and
famine in the land, that starvation was in a
fair way to turn the garden into a wilder-
ness, I should be ready to concede something
to the argument. But I hear of no such
thing as that.”
The Hon. Charles Sumner, in a letter of
July 30th, 1860, says:
“Well-proved facts vindicate completely
the policy of Emancipation, even if it were
not commanded by the simplest rules of mor-
ality. . . . Two different Governors of this
island (Jamaica)f have assured me that, with
#See New York Independent of March 20, for an impor-
tant letter of Gov. Hinks on this point.


15
all their experience there, they looked upon
Emancipation as a blessing.”
Here ends our chapter on the West In-
dies. What inference can be drawn from all
this?
We answer—First: That Emancipation
in the United States is safe. If it was so in
Jamaica, where the whites were as one to fif-
teen, will it not be in Maryland, where they
are more than three to one, in Kentucky,
where they are nearly four to one, in Mis-
souri, where they are nearly ten to one 7
Second : It will be politic. If the free-
ing of half a million of slaves in 1793,
saved St. Domingo from falling into the
hands of England, the freeing of four mil-
lions, in 1862, may save the Cotton States
from a like fate, which even our recent and
brilliant victories perhaps may hasten.
Third: It must not be attended by forced
colonization. If the great want of the West
Indies is labor, with what expectation can we
ship out of our Southern States two-thirds of
the laboring population ? Immigration is
the demand in the West Indias, it would be
folly for us to try emigration.
Fourth. It must not be gradual, but im-
mediate and complete. If the experience of
Antigua and Jamaica teaches anything, it
teaches that simultaneous and entire emanci-
pation is the safest, the cheapest, and the
wisest course.
Fifth. It will attract more white men to
the South than it will send black men to the
North. This is the opinion of a sensible fu-
gitive, to whom we owe the statement; but
the history of immigration to the West In-
dies, and to Mauritius and Bourbon proves
it true. Why should the negroes come here
after emancipation? On the contrary, reasons
both of climate and of political economy will
carry them South in great numbers, not only
from the border States, but from the North
and from Canada.
Finally, these facts prove, what no man of
lofty virtue ever can doubt, That justice is
always earpedient.
The Greeks had a story which devout old
Herodotus has preserved, that Glaucus, the
Spartan, wishing to commit an injustice, and
to confirm it by an oath, asked of the oracle
if he might do so. “Glaucus, son of Epicy-
des!” answered the priestess, in her solemn
chant, “for the present perjury is profitable,
and theft; swear, then, for death lies in wait
for the just and the unjust. But there is a
nameless child of perjury, without hands,
without feet, yet swiftly she pursues till she
clutches and destroys thy race, and all thy
house. But the race of the just man flour-
ishes forever.”
Thus the oracle. “And now,” adds the
narrator, “there is no descendant of Glaucus
at all, not any branch of the stock of Glaucus;
but he has been cast forth from Sparta, root
and branch.”
Centuries earlier, the wise Athenian law.
giver, in grave verse, which Demosthenes
loved to quote, had warned his countrymen
of the same truth.*
My soul, Athenians, prompts me to relate
What miseries upon injustice wait.
Riches by theft, and cozenage to possess,
The sacred bounds of Justice ye transgress;
Who silent sees the present, knows the past,
And will revenge these injuries at last.
But Justice all things orderly designs,
And in strict fetters the unjust confines.
What's sour she sweetens, and allays what cloys.
Wrong she repels, ill in the growth destroys,
Softens the stubborn, the unjust reforms,
And in the State calms all seditious storms.
Bitter dissensions by her rule supprest,
Who wisely governs all things for the best.
And earlier yet, the stern warnings of the
Hebrew sage, who led forth his despised peo-
ple from the oppression of Egypt, had an-
nounced the eternal law with no doubtful
WO1Ce:
“Beware that thou forget not the Lord thy God, in not
keeping his commandments and his judgments, and his sta-
tutes which I command this day; lest when thou hast eaten
and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt there-
in ;
And when thy flocks and thy herds multiply, and thy
silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is
multiplied;
Then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the Lord
thy God. . . . And thou say in thine heart, my power and
the might of my hand hath gotten me this wealth.
And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the Lord thy God,
I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish.
As the nations which the Lord destroyeth before your
face, so shall ye perish ; because ye would not be obedient
łº,the voice of the Lord your God.”—[Deuteronomy viii.
*Demosthenes. False Legation, 255. Stanley's Trans-
lation in the History of Philosophy.