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Mr. Wilberforce,

ON

The Abolition of the Slave Trade.

A LETTER
ON
THE ABOLITION
OF THE
SLAVE TRADE;
ADDRESSED TO THE
FREEHOLDERS AND OTHER INHABITANTS
OF
YORKSHIRE.

By W. WILBERFORCE, Esq.

“There is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all. Put on therefore bowels of mercies, kindness,” &c.—Col. iii. 11. 12.

“God hath made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth.”—Acts xvii. 26.

LONDON:

Printed by Luke Hansard & Sons,

FOR T. CADELL AND W. DAVIES, STRAND; And,

J. HATCHARD, PICCADILLY.

1807.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION.

For many years I have ardently wished that it had been possible for me to plead, in your presence, the great cause of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Conscious that I was accountable to you for the discharge of the important trust which your kindness had committed to me, I have longed for such an opportunity of convincing you, that it was not without reason that this question had occupied so large a share of my parliamentary life. I wished you to know, that the cause of my complaint was no minute grievance, which, from my eyes having been continually fixed on it, had swelled by degrees into a false shew of magnitude; no ordinary question, on which my mind, warming in the pursuit of its object, and animated by repeated contentions, had at length felt emotions altogether disproportionate to their subject. Had I however erred, unintentionally, I have too long experienced your candour not to have hoped for your ready forgiveness. On the contrary, if the Slave Trade be indeed the foulest blot that ever stained our National character, you will not deem your Representative to have been unworthily employed, in having been among the foremost in wiping it away.

Besides the desire of justifying myself in the judgment of my Constituents, various other motives prompt me to the present address. Fourteen long years have now elapsed since the period when the question was fully argued in Parliament; and the large share of national attention which it then engaged, has since been occupied successively by the various public topics of the day. During the intervening period, also, such strange and interesting spectacles have been exhibited at our very doors, as to banish from the minds of most men all recollection of distant wrongs and sufferings. Thus it is not only by the ordinary effects of the lapse of time, that the impression, first produced by laying open the horrors of the Slave Trade, has been considerably effaced, but by the prodigious events of that fearful interval.

It should also be remembered, that, within the last fourteen or fifteen years, a great change has taken place in the component parts of Parliament, especially in those of the House of Commons; not merely from the ordinary causes, but also from the addition which has been made to the National Legislature by our Union with Ireland. Hence it happens, that, even in the Houses of Parliament themselves, though a distinct impression of the general outlines of the subject may remain, many of its particular features have faded from the recollection. For hence alone surely it can happen, that assertions and arguments formerly driven fairly out of the field, appear once more in array against us. Old concessions are retracted; exploded errors are revived; and we find we have the greater part of our work to do over again. But if in Parliament, nay even in the House of Commons itself, where the subject was once so well known in all its parts, the question is but imperfectly understood, much more is it natural, that great misconceptions should prevail respecting it in the minds of the people at large. Among them, accordingly, great misapprehensions are very general. To myself, as well as to other Abolitionists, opinions are often imputed which we never held, declarations which we never made, designs which we never entertained. These I desire to rectify; and now that the question is once more about to come under the consideration of the legislature, it may not be useless thus publicly to record the facts and principles on which the Abolitionists rest their cause, and for which, in the face of my country, I am willing to stand responsible.

But farther I hesitate not to avow to you; on the contrary, it would be criminal to withhold the declaration, that of all the motives by which I am prompted to address you, that which operates on me with the greatest force, is, the consideration of the present state and prospects of our country, and of the duty which at so critical a moment presses imperiously on every member of the community, to exert his utmost powers in the public cause.

That the Almighty Creator of the universe governs the world which he has made; that the sufferings of nations are to be regarded as the punishment of national crimes; and their decline and fall, as the execution of His sentence; are truths which I trust are still generally believed among us. Indeed to deny them, would be directly to contradict the express and repeated declarations of the Holy Scriptures. If these truths be admitted, and if it be also true, that fraud, oppression, and cruelty, are crimes of the blackest dye, and that guilt is aggravated in proportion as the criminal acts in defiance of clearer light, and of stronger motives to virtue (and these are positions to which we cannot refuse our assent, without rejecting the authority not only of revealed, but even of natural religion); have we not abundant cause for serious apprehension? The course of public events has, for many years, been such as human wisdom and human force have in vain endeavoured to controul or resist. The counsels of the wise have been infatuated; the valour of the brave has been turned to cowardice. Though the storm has been raging for many years, yet, instead of having ceased, it appears to be now increasing in fury; the clouds which have long been gathering around us, have at length almost overspread the whole face of the heavens with blackness. In this very moment of unexampled difficulty and danger, those great political Characters, to the counsels of the one or the other of whom the nation has been used to look in all public exigencies, have both been taken from us. If such be our condition; and if the Slave Trade be a national crime, declared by every wise and respectable man of all parties, without exception, to be a compound of the grossest wickedness and cruelty, a crime to which we cling in defiance of the clearest light, not only in opposition to our own acknowledgments of its guilt, but even of our own declared resolutions to abandon it; is not this then a time in which all who are not perfectly sure that the Providence of God is but a fable, should be strenuous in their endeavours to lighten the vessel of the state, of such a load of guilt and infamy?

Urged by these various considerations, I proceed to lay before you a summary of the principal facts and arguments on which the Abolitionists ground their cause, referring such as may be desirous of more complete information to various original records,[^[1]] and for a more detailed exposition of the reasonings of the two parties, to the printed Report of the Debates in Parliament,[^[2]] and to various excellent publications which have from time to time been sent into the world.[^[3]] The advocates for abolition court inquiry, and are solicitous that their facts should be thoroughly canvassed, and their arguments maturely weighed.

I fear I may have occasion to request your accustomed candour, not to call it partiality, for submitting to you a more defective statement than you might reasonably require from me. But when I inform you that I had just entered on my present task when I was surprized by the dissolution of Parliament, I need scarcely add, that I have been of necessity compelled to employ in a very different manner the time which was to have been allotted to this service. Under my present circumstances, I had almost resolved to delay addressing you till I could look forward to a longer interval of leisure, than the speedily approaching meeting of Parliament will now allow me; but I hope that this address, though it may be defective, will not be erroneous. It may not contain all which I might otherwise lay before you; but what it does contain will be found, I trust, correct; and if my address should bear the marks of haste, I can truly assure you that the statements and principles which I may hastily communicate to you, have been most deliberately formed, and have been often reviewed with the most serious attention. But I already foresee that my chief difficulty will consist in comprising within any moderate limits, the statements which my undertaking requires, and the arguments to be deduced from them; to select from the immense mass of materials which lies before me, such specimens of more ample details, as, without exhausting the patience of my readers, may convey to their minds some faint ideas, faint indeed in colouring but just in feature and expression, of the objects which it is my office to delineate. If my readers should at any time begin to think me prolix, let them but call to mind the almost unspeakable amount of the interests which are in question, and they will more readily bear with me.

Probable Effects of the Slave Trade.

It might almost preclude the necessity of inquiring into the actual effects of the Slave Trade, to consider, arguing from the acknowledged and never failing operation of certain given causes, what must necessarily be its consequences. How surely does a demand for any commodities produce a supply. How certainly should we anticipate the multiplication of thefts, from any increase in number of the receivers of stolen goods. In the present instance, the demand is for men, women, and children. And, can we doubt that illicit methods will be resorted to for supplying them? especially in a country like Africa, imperfectly civilized, and divided in general into petty communities? We might almost anticipate with certainty, the specific modes by which the supply of Slaves is in fact furnished, and foretell the sure effects on the laws, usages, and state of society of the African continent. But any doubts we might be willing to entertain on this head are but too decisively removed, when we proceed in the next place to examine, what are the actual means by which Slaves are commonly supplied, and what are the Slave Trade’s known and ascertained consequences? To this part of my subject I intreat peculiar attention; the rather, because I have often found an idea to prevail; that it is the state of the Slaves in the West Indies, the improvement of which is the great object of the Abolitionists. On the contrary, from first to last, I desire it may be borne in mind, that Africa is the primary subject of our regard. It is the effects of the Slave Trade on Africa, against which chiefly we raise our voices, as constituting a sum of guilt and misery, hitherto unequalled in the annals of the world.

Evidence against the Slave Trade difficult to be procured.

But, before I proceed to state the facts themselves, which are to be laid before you, it may be useful to make a few remarks on the nature of the evidence by which they are supported; and more especially on the difficulties which it was reasonable to suppose would be experienced in establishing, by positive proof, the existence of practices discreditable to the Slave Trade, notwithstanding the great numbers of British ships which for a very long period have annually visited Africa, and the ample information which on the first view might therefore appear to lie open to our inquiries.

Africa, it must be remembered, is a country which has been very little visited from motives of curiosity. It has been frequented, almost exclusively, by those who have had a direct interest in it’s peculiar traffic; as, the agents and factors of the African Company, or of individual Slave merchants, or by the Captains and Officers of slave ships. The situation of captain of an African ship is an employment, the unpleasant and even dangerous nature of which must be compensated by extraordinary profits. The same remark extends in a degree to all the other officers of slave ships; who, it should also be remarked, may reasonably entertain hopes, if they recommend themselves to their employers, of rising to be Captains. They all naturally look forward, therefore, to the command of a ship, as the prize which is to repay them for all their previous sacrifices and sufferings, and some even of the Surgeons appear, in fact, to have been promoted to it. Could these men be supposed likely to give evidence against the Slave Trade? nay, must not habit, especially when thus combined with interest, be presumed to have had it’s usual effect, in so familiarizing them to scenes of injustice and cruelty, as to prevent their being regarded with any proportion of that disgust and abhorrence which they would excite in any mind not accustomed to them? In truth, were the secrets of the prison-house ever so bad, these men could not well be expected to reveal them. But let it also be remembered, that when the call for witnesses was made by Parliament, the question of the Abolition of the Slave Trade had become a party question; and that all the West Indian as well as the African property and influence were combined together in it’s defence. The supporters of the trade were the rich and the powerful, the men of authority, influence and connection. They had ships and factories and counting houses, both at home and abroad. Theirs it was, to employ shopkeepers and artizans; theirs to give places of emolument, and the means of rising in life. On the other hand, it was but too obvious (I am sorry to say my own knowledge fully justifies the remark) that, in the great towns especially, in which the African, or West Indian Trade, or both, were principally carried on, any man who was not in an independent situation, and who should come forward to give evidence against the Slave Trade, would expose himself and his family to obloquy and persecution, perhaps to utter ruin. He would become a marked man, and be excluded from all opportunities of improving his condition, or even of acquiring a maintenance among his own natural connections, and in his accustomed mode of life. Any one who will duly weigh the combined effect of all these circumstances, will rather be surprized to hear that any of those who had been actually engaged in carrying on the Slave Trade, were found to give evidence of it’s enormities, than that this description of persons was not more numerous.

Evidence actually obtained.

For, notwithstanding all the obstacles to which I have been alluding, much oral testimony of the most valuable kind was obtained from persons who had been engaged in the actual conduct of the Slave Trade. And of by far the greatest part of those witnesses it may be truly said, that the more closely they were examined, and the more strongly their evidence was illustrated by light from other quarters, the more was it’s truth decisively established. So much I have thought it the more necessary to observe; because insinuations, to use the softest term, have been not seldom cast against some of the witnesses who gave evidence unfavourable to the Slave Trade, before the House of Commons.—Happily, however, some other sources of information were discovered; and the exact conformity of the intelligence derived from these, with that which has been already mentioned, gave to both indubitable confirmation. A very few men of science were found, who from motives of liberal curiosity had visited those parts of the coast of Africa where the Slave Trade was carried on. Some few also of His Majesty’s naval and military officers, who, while on service in Africa, had opportunities of obtaining useful information concerning the Slave Trade, consented to be examined. They were indeed little on shore, and they went to no great distance within the country; but still the facts they stated, were of the utmost importance; the more so, because of the credit which they reflect on the testimony of others, who, on account of their inferior rank in life, might in the judgment of some persons be more exceptionable witnesses.

Other sources of information:—Old Authors.

Lastly, there lay open to the Abolitionists another source of information, to which great attention was due; the acknowledged publications of several persons who at different periods had resided in Africa, some of them for many years, and in high stations, in the employ of the chief Slave trading Companies of the various European nations, and whose accounts had been given to the world long before the Slave Trade had become a subject of public discussion.

It might indeed be presumed, that though no attack had yet been made on the Slave Trade, such persons would be disposed to regard it with a partial and indulgent eye. To it they had owed their fortunes; and, even independently of all pecuniary interest, no man likes to own that he is engaged in a way of life which is hateful and dishonourable, Still, if it be not the express purpose of a narrative to deceive, the truth is apt to break out at intervals, and the Advocates for Abolition might therefore expect to find some indirect proofs, some occasional and incidental notices of the real nature and effects of the Slave Trade. They were at least entitled to claim the full benefit of any facts to the disparagement of the Slave Trade, which should be found in this class of writings; and where these earlier publications, of writers so naturally biassed in favour of the Slave Trade, should exactly accord, in what they might state to it’s disparagement, with other living witnesses, several of them, men most respectable in rank and character, and utterly uninterested either way in the decision of the question concerning it’s abolition; men too, whose testimony was the result of their own personal knowledge; the facts which should be thus proved, would be established by a force of evidence, little short of absolute demonstration.

Modern valuable information.

Lastly, there are several other printed accounts of Travels in Africa, which contain much valuable information. The authors of the publications here referred to, having visited Africa of late years, can scarcely indeed be said to be so unexceptionably free, as those who wrote before the Slave Trade had become a subject of public discussion, from all bias, either from their connections, their interest, or their preconceived opinions. No imputation, however, is hereby intended to be thrown out against them. With the character of one of them, Dr. Winterbottom, I have long been well acquainted, and it is such as must alone entitle him to the full credit which he has universally obtained. But Mr. Parke justly stands at the head of all African travellers. There prevails throughout his work a remarkable air of authenticity, and to all the facts which it contains, entire credit is due. At the same time, I have heard, from persons who saw his original minutes, that they contained several statements favourable to the views of the Abolitionists, which are not inserted in the publication. His work, however, must ever be read with avidity, from its containing that which perhaps of all human spectacles is the most interesting, the exhibition of superior energies, called into action by extraordinary difficulties and dangers. Other publications concerning Africa have since appeared. That of Golberry, was drawn up and published under the patronage of Bonaparte, about the very time when the latter entered on his crusade against the Blacks in St. Domingo; the Abolitionists may therefore claim the benefit of any facts to the discredit of the Slave Trade which it contains. Barrow’s highly interesting account of the Cape of Good Hope, and his late work, containing the account of the expedition to the Booshuana country, reflect also much light on the African character, and indirectly on the effects of the Slave Trade.

Methods by which Slaves are supplied.

Wars.

Let us now proceed to examine what are the principal sources from which the Slave market is furnished with its supplies. The result of that Inquiry will enable us to judge what effect that traffic produces on the happiness of Africa. A very large proportion of the Slaves consists of prisoners of war. But here it becomes advisable to rectify some misconceptions, which have prevailed on this head. The Abolitionists have been represented as maintaining, that in Africa, wars never arise from the various causes whence wars have so commonly originated in the other quarters of the globe; but that they are undertaken solely for the purpose of obtaining captives, who may be afterwards sold for Slaves. In contradiction to this position, various African wars have been cited, which historians state to have arisen from other causes; and it has been denied that wars furnish any considerable supply to the Slave market. Can it be necessary to declare, that the advocates for abolition never made so foolish, as well as so false an assertion, as that which has been thus imputed to them? Africans are men—The same bad passions therefore which have produced wars among other communities of human beings, produce the same wasteful effects in Africa likewise. But it will greatly elucidate this point to state, that, as we are informed by Mr. Parke, who has travelled farther into the interior of Africa than any modern traveller, there are two kinds of war in Africa. The one bears a resemblance to our European contests, is openly avowed, and previously declared. “This class however, we are assured, is generally terminated in a single campaign. A battle is fought; the vanquished seldom think of rallying; the whole inhabitants become panick struck; and the conquerors have only to bind their slaves,[^[4]] and carry off their plunder and their victims.” These are taken into the country of the invader, whence, as opportunities offer, they are sent to the Slave market.

Predatory expeditions.

But the second kind of warfare, called Tegria, which means, we are told, plundering or stealing, and which appears to be no other than the practice of predatory expeditions, is that to which the Slave market is indebted for its chief supplies, and which most clearly explains the nature and effect of the Slave Trade. Mr. Parke indeed tells us, that this species of warfare arises from a sort of hereditary feud, which subsists between the inhabitants of neighbouring nations or districts. If we take into the account that the avowed compiler of Mr. Parke’s work, the patron to whose good will he looked for the recompense of all his labours, was one of the warmest and most active opposers of the abolition of the Slave Trade, we shall not wonder that the fact alone is stated, without being traced to it’s original cause. This however is a case, if such a case ever existed, in which the features of the offspring might alone enable us to recognise the rightful parent. But in truth we know from positive testimony, that though hereditary feuds of the deadliest malignity are but too surely generated by these predatory expeditions, and consequently that hatred and revenge may sometimes have a share in producing a continued course of them, yet that, speaking generally, the grand operating motive from which they are undertaken, and to which therefore, as their primary cause, they may be referred, is the desire of obtaining Slaves. “These predatory expeditions,” Mr. Parke tells us, “are of all dimensions, from 500 horsemen, headed by the son of the king of the country; to a single individual, armed with his bow and arrow, who conceals himself among the bushes, until some young or unarmed person passes by. He then, tyger-like, springs upon his prey, drags his victim into the thicket, and at night carries him off as a slave.” (Vide note, p. [19]). “These incursions,” Mr. Parke goes on to inform us, “are generally conducted with great secresy; a few resolute individuals, led by some person of enterprize and courage, march quietly through the woods, surprize in the night some unprotected village, and carry off the inhabitants, (vide note, p. [19]) and their effects, before their neighbours can come to their assistance.”—“One morning,” says Mr. Parke, “during my residence at Kamalia, we were all much alarmed by a party of this kind. The prince of Focladoo’s son, with a strong party of horse, passed secretly through the woods, a little to the southward, and the next morning plundered three towns belonging to a powerful chief of Jollonkadoo. The success of this expedition encouraged the governor of another town to make a second inroad on a part of the same country. Having assembled about 200 of his people, he passed the river in the night, and carried off a great number of prisoners. (Vide note, p. [19]). Several of the inhabitants who had escaped these attacks, were afterwards seized by the Mandingoes (another people, let it be observed) as they wandered about in the woods, or concealed themselves in the glens and strong places in the mountains.”

Predatory expeditions very common.

“These plundering excursions are very common, and the inhabitants of different communities watch every opportunity of undertaking them.”—“They always,” as Mr. Parke adds, “produce speedy retaliation; and when large parties cannot be collected for this purpose, a few friends will combine together, and advance into the enemy’s country, with a view to plunder, or carry off the inhabitants.” (Note, vide, pa. [19]). Thus hereditary feuds are excited and perpetuated between different nations, tribes, villages, and even families, each waiting but for the favourable occasion of accomplishing it’s revenge. Such is the picture of the Interior of Africa, as it is given by one who penetrated much further inland than any other modern traveller, and of whom it must be at least confessed, that he was not disposed to exaggerate the evils produced by the Slave Trade.

Sources of supply continued.

Village-breaking.

In another part of the country, we learn from the most respectable testimony, a practice prevails called Village-breaking. It is precisely the Tegria of Mr. Parke, with this difference, that though often termed making war, it is acknowledged to be practised for the express purpose of obtaining victims for the Slave market. It is carried on, sometimes by armed parties of individuals; sometimes by the soldiers of the petty kings and chieftains, who, perhaps in a season of drunkenness, the consequences of which when recovered from the madness of intoxication they have themselves often most deeply deplored, are instigated to become the plunderers and destroyers of those very subjects whom they were bound to protect. The village is attacked in the night; if deemed needful, to increase the confusion, it is set on fire, and the wretched inhabitants, as they are flying naked from the flames, are seized and carried into slavery. This practice, especially when conducted on a smaller scale, is called panyaring; |Panyaring, or kidnapping.| for the practice has long been too general not to have created the necessity of an appropriate term. It is sometimes practised by Europeans, especially when the ships are passing along the coast, or when their boats, in going up the rivers, can seize their prey without observation; in short, whenever there is a convenient opportunity of carrying off the victims, and concealing the crime: and the unwillingness which the natives universally shew to venture into a ship of war, until they are convinced it is not a Slave ship, contrasted with the freedom and confidence with which they then come on board, is thus easily accounted for[^[5]]. But these depredations are far more commonly perpetrated by the natives on each other; and on a larger or a smaller scale, according to the power and number of the assailants, and the resort of ships to the coast, it prevails so generally, as, throughout the whole extent of Africa, to render person and property utterly insecure.

Allegation, “that a small proportion of Slaves are prisoners of war,” considered.

And here, before we proceed to other sources of supply, let us for a moment recur to the assertions formerly mentioned, on which our opponents lay very considerable stress,—that but a small proportion of the whole supply of the market consists of prisoners of war, and that African wars do not often originate from the desire of obtaining Slaves. Should we even concede these points, we are now abundantly qualified to estimate the force of the concession; for though we should grant, that declared and national wars are not often undertaken for the purpose of obtaining Slaves, yet it is at least equally undeniable, that those predatory expeditions which are so common, and of which it is the express object to acquire Slaves, are often productive of national wars on the largest scale, and of the most destructive consequences; while they also are the sure and abundant cause of those incessant quarrels and hereditary feuds, which are said to be universal in Africa, and which acts of mutual outrage cannot fail to generate, in countries where the artificial modes of controlling and terminating the disputes and hostilities of adverse tribes and nations are unknown. It appears also, that wars are in Africa rendered singularly cruel and wasteful, by the peculiar manner in which they are carried on. So that though we cannot fairly lay to the charge of the Slave Trade all the wars of Africa, we yet may allege that to the causes which produce wars elsewhere, the Slave Trade superadds one entirely new and constant source of great copiousness and efficiency, while it gives to the wars, which arise from every other cause, a character of peculiar malignity and desolation. But happy even, from what has been already stated, happy would it be for Africa, if her greatest miseries were those of avowed and open warfare. War, though the greatest scourge of other countries, is a light evil in the African estimate of suffering. Direct and avowed wars will happen but occasionally, as the circumstances which produce them may arise. Wars, besides, between uncivilized nations, scarcely ever last long; those of Africa, Mr. Parke tells us, seldom beyond a single campaign; and the very consciousness that an evil will be of short duration, mitigates the pain which it occasions. But it is not of accidental or temporary injuries that Africa complains. Her miseries, severe in degree, are also permanent; they know neither intervals or remissions.

Sources of supply continued.

Administration of justice.

But the Slave Trade is not sustained exclusively by acts of hostile outrage. The administration of justice is turned into another engine for its supply. The punishments, as we are told by some of the old writers,[^[6]] were formerly remarkable for their lenity; but by degrees, they have been moulded, especially on the coast, into a more productive form. The most trifling offences are punished by the fine of one or more Slaves, which if the culprit be unable to pay, he himself is to be sold into slavery, often for the benefit of the very judges by whom he is condemned.[^[7]] When the necessity for obtaining Slaves becomes more pressing, new crimes are fabricated, accusations and convictions are multiplied; the unwary are artfully seduced into the commission of crimes. The imaginary offence of witchcraft becomes often a copious source of supply, a conviction being punished by the sale of the whole family.

Native superstitions: Witchcraft.

Indeed, on some parts of the country bordering on the coast, this charge furnishes the ready means of obtaining, especially for a chieftain, the supply of European articles. A person accused of this crime is required to purge himself by the ordeal of drinking what is called ‘red water’. If the accused drinks it with impunity, he is declared innocent, but if, as more commonly happens, the red water being generally medicated for the purpose, the party is taken sick, or dies, in general the whole, or at the least a certain number of his family, are immediately sold into slavery. An eye witness, who stated the effects of this system, mentioned his having seen king Sherbro, the chief of the river of that name, kill six persons in that way in a single morning. In some extensive districts near the windward coast of Africa, almost every death is believed by the natives to be occasioned by magical influence; and the belief, it is difficult to say, whether real or pretended, in this superstition, is carried to such an extent as to break every tie of natural affection. In these districts it is estimated that two-thirds of the whole export of Slaves were sold for witchcraft. Every man who has acquired any considerable property, or who has a large family, the sale of which will produce a considerable profit, excites in the Chieftain near whom he resides, the same longings which are called forth in the wild beast, by the exhibition of his proper prey, and he himself lives in a continual state of suspicion and terror.

Famine and Insolvency.

To this long catalogue are to be added two other sources, famines, and insolvency. In times of extreme scarcity, persons sometimes sell themselves for subsistence; and still more frequently, it is said, children are sold by their parents to procure provisions for the rest of the family. These famines, Mr. Parke, who mentions this source of slavery, observes, are often produced by wars. But while on the one hand we must remark, that this effect arises chiefly out of that peculiarly wasteful manner of carrying on war in Africa, which we have already noticed; so may we not fairly presume that to the Slave Trade also, and to the habits of mind which it generates, it is to be ascribed, that in such seasons of general distress, he who possesses food refuses to part with so much as will suffice for the bare maintenance of his neighbours and fellow sufferers, at any price except that of selling themselves or their children into perpetual slavery? With respect to debt or insolvency, the laws respecting debtor and creditor which prevail in Africa, furnish a striking illustration of the effect of the Slave Trade, in gradually moulding to it’s own purpose all the institutions and habits of the country in which it prevails, and rendering them instrumental in forwarding the grand object of furnishing a supply for the Slave market. Creditors, in compensation of their claims on the debtor, have not only a right to seize his own person, and sell him for a Slave, but also any of his family; and if he or they cannot be taken, any inhabitants of the same village, or, as Mr. Parke says, any native of the same kingdom. Indeed it is very rarely that the debtor himself is molested, it is his neighbours or townsmen who are the sufferers. Hence persons become debtors more freely, because, while they gratify their appetites by obtaining the European goods they want, they are not likely to pay for their rashness in their own persons. The Captains of Slave ships are in their turn less backward in advancing goods on credit to the Black factors, and they again to other native dealers, knowing that from some quarter or another the Slaves will surely be supplied.

Distinctions between the Interior countries, and those on the Coast.

In giving this general account of the manner of procuring Slaves, it ought to be observed, that the number and extent of the countries whence the Slaves are furnished, and their varying circumstances, will doubtless occasion some variations in the manner of carrying on the traffic: still we might presume that the same causes, operating for a long course of years, on human beings, in something like the same rude state of society, would produce nearly similar effects. In fact we find, from positive testimony, that there is this general similarity in the consequences of the Slave Trade wherever it exists. But there is one distinction which ought to be noticed, that between the inland countries and those on the coast. The proportion furnished by them respectively varies in different parts of Africa; but every where the greater number is supplied from the interior. Many of them come from great distances inland, and the sufferings of these unhappy beings during their journey are such as would alone, if the voice of humanity were to be heard, prompt us to abandon at once so horrid a traffic. Mr. Parke travelled down with a small party of them; and hard indeed must be the heart of that man who can read his account without shuddering.

The difference between the circumstances of the inland districts and those adjacent to the coast, will of course create some corresponding difference in the effects produced on them by the Slave Trade. In the interior of the country, the kingdoms, though even they are often split into a number of independent states, are generally of greater extent than on the coast, which is often, especially on the Windward and Gold coast, separated into numberless petty communities, under their respective Chieftains or Aristocracies. It should likewise be remarked, that on one extensive part of the coast of Africa which is divided into a number of different states, every black or white factor who has acquired a little property, forms a settlement or village, and becomes a petty chieftain, and carries on against his neighbours a predatory warfare, by which they are of course excited to reciprocal acts of hostility. In the interior, acts of depredation on members of another community, though, as we are told, very common, are not near so frequent as on the coast; except, perhaps, on the boundaries of kingdoms: and it is remarkable, that Mr. Parke informs us, that the boundaries even of the most populous and powerful kingdoms are commonly very ill peopled. On members of the same community also, these depredations, though undoubtedly frequent, are for many reasons much less common than in the countries bordering on the shore. The concealment of any such act of rapine would be obviously much more difficult; neither might it be easy for private traders to secrete their victims, during the long interval which might elapse, before an opportunity might offer of disposing of them. Again, the chieftains or kings of these large communities, while on the one hand, their more abundant revenues place them above the necessity of resorting to such ruinous means of supplying their wants, as the pillage of their own villages, so on the other, not coming into immediate contact with the Slave Traders, they are not so liable to be suddenly instigated, in the madness of intoxication, to the commission of such outrages. The same difference in the circumstances of the interior, prevents the administration of justice, or the native superstitions, being resorted to in the same degree as on the coast. And it is remarkable, that though Mr. Parke speaks of crimes as one source of supply to the Slave Trade, we do not find in his narrative, one single instance specified of a Slave having been so furnished. |Evils of Slave Trade aggravated on the Coast.| But, above all, let it be remembered, on the coast the grand repository of temptations is palpable, and on the spot; of temptations commonly of that precise kind, which, by the gratifications they hold out to the depraved appetites, and bad passions of man, spirituous liquors, gunpowder, and fire-arms, the incentives to acts of violence, and the means of committing them, are apt to operate most powerfully on uncivilized men. The love of spirituous liquors, is a passion also, which becomes from indulgence, more craving, and difficult to be resisted. The Captains of Slave ships, who are sound practical philosophers, thoroughly conversant, at least, with all the bad parts of human nature, are well aware of these propensities, and of the advantages which may be derived from them; and hence, they often begin by giving to the petty king or chieftain a present of brandy or rum, anticipating the large returns for this liberality, which future acts of depredation will supply. It is almost a happy circumstance when the chieftain, by possessing the implements of war, is tempted to revenge some old injury, or to ravage and carry off the inhabitants of some neighbouring district, instead of preying on his own miserable subjects. Meanwhile the Slave factor himself takes no part in the quarrels between contending chieftains, but which party soever is victorious, he finds his advantage in the war. He supplies all the contending parties with fire-arms and ammunition, and receives all the Slaves which are made on both sides with perfect impartiality. Under such circumstances, might we not anticipate, what we know from positive evidence, that the factor stirs up and inflames dissensions, from which, whoever else may be the loser, he is sure to gain. It has been even imputed to neighbouring chiefs, who, assisted by their respective allies, have carried on with each other a long protracted war, that by a mutual understanding, they have abstained from wasting each other’s territories, while each carried on his ravages against the allies of his enemy with great activity and success. But it is not to kings or chieftains only, that the Slave Trade holds out strong temptations. The appetite for spirituous liquors is universal. European commodities are coveted by all. Whether for attack or defence, fire-arms and gunpowder are most desirable. In such a loose state of society, almost every one has some malice to wreak, some injury to retaliate. Thus sensuality, avarice, hostility, revenge, every bad passion is called into action; while there lies the Slave ship, ready to receive old and young, males and females, all in short who are brought to it, and, without question or exception, to furnish the desired gratification in return. The Captains of Slave ships themselves, who gave evidence before the House of Commons, frankly and invariably acknowledged, that it is the universal practice, if the price can be agreed on, to purchase all who are brought to them, without examination as to the manner in which the Slave has been obtained, as to his former condition, or the vendor’s right to sell. So well did they seem to be aware how much the success of their traffic might depend on this mode of conducting it, that they even resented it as an insult on their understandings, when they were asked whether any questions of this kind were put by the purchaser. Thus, whenever a Slave ship is on the coast, a large and general premium is immediately held out for the perpetration of acts of fraud, violence, and rapine. Every child, every unprotected female that can be seized on, can be immediately turned to account. No wonder that, as Captain Wilson informs us, the inhabitants are afraid of venturing out of their own doors without being armed; a practice of which one of themselves gave him the explanation, by significantly pointing to a Slave ship which then lay in sight, completing her cargo.

But it is not only without doors that the Slave ship holds out its lure; it is not only by open violence that it operates. When the Slave ships arrive, unjust convictions are multiplied. Accusations for witchcraft become frequent. And it is well worthy of remark, that these native superstitions, being thus maintained in continued life and action, have continued in full force in those very districts, where the intercourse of the natives with the Europeans has been the longest, and the most intimate; while in the interior, the same barbarous practices have either gone into decay of themselves, or seem to have faded away before the feeble light of Mahometanism. Even among private families the seeds of insecurity and cruelty are copiously sown; and from the pressure of present temptation, a husband or a master is often induced, in a fit of temporary anger or jealousy, to sell his wife or his domestics, whom afterwards he often in vain wishes he could recover.

Practice of receiving relations as pawns, and consequences of it.

But besides these general and powerfully operating causes of evil, which have been already noticed, there is one circumstance in the manner of conducting the trade on the coast, which so naturally tends to the production of frequent acts of violence, as to deserve a distinct specification. It affords another striking instance of the way in which the Slave Trade has in a long course of years gradually imparted a taint to all the institutions and customs of Africa. It is the general custom for Captains of Slave ships, in exchange for the goods which they advance on credit, and of which the value, as has been stated, is to be repaid to them in Slaves, to receive the children or some other near relations of the Black Factor as pledges, or as they are termed in Africa pawns, whom the Slave captains are to return when the stipulated number of Slaves has been delivered. With the goods which have been entrusted to him he commonly goes up the country; and, knowing that by some means or other the requisite number of Slaves must be furnished, or that his own nearest relatives, and he himself too if he can be taken, will be carried off into slavery, it is obvious, that when the day for the sailing of the ship draws nigh, he will not be very scrupulous in the means to which he resorts for completing his assortment. Thus even parental instinct and the domestic and social affections are rendered by the Slave Trade the incentives to acts of cruelty and rapine. But it would be endless were I to attempt to lay before you in detail all the various forms and modes of wickedness, and misery, of which, directly and indirectly, the Slave Trade is productive. It’s general and leading features have been now exhibited to you.

Recapitulation of effects of Slave Trade.

Such are the methods by which from eighty to one hundred thousand of our fellow creatures, a race of people too, declared by Mr. Parke himself, to be perhaps beyond all others, passionately attached to their native soil, are annually torn from their country, their homes, their friends, and from whatever is most dear to them. All the ties of nature, and habit, and feeling, are burst asunder; and, by a long voyage, the horrors of which were acknowledged to constitute of themselves an almost incalculable sum of misery, these victims of our injustice are carried to a distant land, to wear away the whole remainder of their lives in a state of hopeless slavery and degradation, with the same melancholy prospect for their descendants after them, for ever.

Yet even this is not all. There is one consequence of the Slave Trade, a consequence too, most important to Africa, which still remains to be pointed out. It were much to foment and aggravate, not seldom to produce, long and bloody wars—to incite to incessant acts of the most merciless depredation—to poison and embitter the administration of the laws—and in general, to give a malignant taint to religious and civil institutions; thus, turning into engines of oppression and misery, that very machinery of the social state, which is naturally conducive to the protection and comfort of mankind. It is much to compel men to live at home amid the alarm, elsewhere only felt, and with the precautions only used in an enemy’s country,—to hold out a direct premium to rapine and murder,—in short, to produce the general prevalence of selfishness, and fraud, and violence, and cruelty, and terror, and revenge. And all this; not on a small scale, or within narrow limits, but throughout an immense region, bounded by a line of coast of between three and four thousand miles, and stretching inland to various depths, not seldom to a distance which it requires several months to travel. But there is one triumph still behind; one effect of the Slave Trade; which, if it excite not at first the same lively sympathy, as some others of it’s more direct outrages, on the comforts of domestic or the peace of social life, will yet, in the deliberate judgment of a considerate mind, appear on reflection to be of more importance than all the rest. |Another most important consequence of the Slave Trade.| This is, that by keeping in a state of incessant insecurity, of person and property, the whole of the district which is visited by Europeans, we maintain an impassable barrier on that side, through which |It prevents the civilization of Africa.| alone any rays of the religious and moral light and social improvements of our happier quarter of the globe might penetrate into the interior, and thus lock up the whole of that vast continent in it’s present state of wretchedness and darkness.

No natural death of the Slave Trade.

Here, then, we see the bitter cup of Africa filled to the very brim. For the above consideration shews but too clearly, that she cannot expect any natural termination of her sufferings from the gradual progress of civilization and knowledge, which have, in some other instances, put a period to a less extended traffic for Slaves in countries differently situated. The very channels through which alone, according to all human calculation, Africa might have hoped to receive the blessings of religious and moral light, and social improvement, are precisely those through which her miseries flow in upon her with so full a tide. Thus the African Slave Trade provides for it’s own indefinite continuance. Here also, as in other instances which have been already pointed out, it turns into poison what has been elsewhere most salutary, and renders that very intercourse, which has been ordinarily the grand means of civilization, the most sure and operative instrument, in the perpetuation of barbarism.

Our aggravated guilt.

At length, then, we are prepared to form some judgment of the effects of European intercourse on the state and happiness of Africa. The darkness of Paganism were a very insufficient palliation of such a tissue of cruelty and crimes. But surely it is no small aggravation of our guilt, that We, who are the prime agents in this traffic of wickedness and blood, are ourselves the most free, enlightened, and happy people that ever existed upon earth. We profess a religion which inculcates truth and love, peace and good-will, among men—We are foremost in a commerce which exists but by war, treachery, and devastation. We enjoy a political constitution of government, eminent above all others for securing to the very meanest and weakest the blessings of civil liberty, of personal security, and equal laws—yet We take the lead in maintaining this accursed system, which begins in fraud and violence, and is consummated in bondage and degradation. Blessed ourselves with religious light and knowledge, we prolong in Africa the reign of ignorance and superstition. In short, instead of endeavouring to diffuse among nations, less favoured than ourselves, the blessings we enjoy; after our crime has been indisputably proved to us, in defiance alike of conscience and of reputation, we industriously and perseveringly continue to deprave and darken the Creation of God.

There is scarcely any point of view in which the nature and effects of our intercourse with Africa will appear so peculiarly disgraceful to us as a christian nation, as when we contemplate them in connection with the benefits which the Africans derive from their intercourse with the Mahometans. When we cast our eyes towards the south-west of Europe, and behold extensive countries, once possessed by the most polished nations, the chosen seats of literature and the liberal arts; and now behold one universal waste of ignorance and barbarism, we have always been accustomed to ascribe the fatal change to the conquest of a band of Mahometan invaders, and to regret that such fine countries should remain under the benumbing effects of a Mussulman government. On the other hand, in contemplating the superior state of our northern parts of Europe, we have been used, with reason, to ascribe much of our light and liberty, and many of our various blessings, to the influence of that pure religion which is the friend of freedom, of peace, and good-will among men. But with what shame must we acknowledge, that in Africa, Christianity and Mahometanism appear to have mutually interchanged characters.—Smith, the African Company’s own agent in 1722, tells us, “the discerning natives account it their greatest unhappiness that they were ever visited by the Europeans. They say that we Christians introduced the traffic of Slaves, and that before our coming they lived in peace. But, say they, it is observable, that wherever Christianity comes, there come with it, a sword, a gun, powder and ball.”[^[8]]

The same picture may appear to claim still greater attention from the hand of Mr. Parke, whose visit is more recent, and whose knowledge of Africa is more extensive.—Speaking of the Foulah nation, who are many of them professed Mahometans, he says, “religious persecution is not known among them, nor is it necessary, for the system of Mahomet is made to extend itself by means abundantly more efficacious. By establishing small schools in the different towns, where many of the Pagan as well as Mahometan children are taught to read the Koran, and instructed in the tenets of the prophet, the Mahometan priests fix a bias on the minds, and form the character of their young disciples, which no accidents of life can ever afterwards remove or alter. Many of these little schools I visited in my progress through the country, and observed with pleasure the great docility, and submissive deportment of the children, and heartily wished they had had better instructors, and a purer religion.” Again, speaking of the Mandingo country, and of other parts of Africa, and of the eagerness which the natives, both Pagan and Mahometan, shew to acquire some knowledge of letters, Mr. Parke speaks out still more intelligibly, and appears feelingly alive to the humiliation of his own religion; and, from motives of christian zeal as well as of humanity, he recommends our endeavouring to introduce the light of true religion into that benighted land.[^[9]] “Although,” says he, “the negroes in general have a very great idea of the wealth and power of the Europeans, I am afraid that the Mahometan converts among them think but very lightly of our superior attainments in religious knowledge. The white traders in the maritime districts take no pains to counteract this unhappy prejudice.”—“To me, therefore, it was not so much the subject of wonder, as matter of regret, to observe, that while the superstition of Mahomet has in this manner scattered a few faint beams of learning among these poor people, the precious light of Christianity is altogether excluded. I could not but lament, that although the coast of Africa has now been known and frequented by the Europeans for more than two hundred years, yet the negroes still remain entire strangers to the doctrines of our holy religion.”— “The poor Africans, whom we affect to consider as barbarians, look upon us, I fear, as little better than a race of formidable but ignorant Heathens.”

Such was Smith’s relation, near a century ago, of the judgment formed by the Africans, of the effects of their intercourse with the Christian nations. Such is the acknowledgment of Mr. Parke, who is certainly disposed to paint the effects of the Slave Trade in the softest colours. Is it possible for any one who calls himself a Christian, and a member of the British Empire, to read the passage without the deepest humiliation and sorrow, and without longing also, not only to stop the guilty commerce we have so long carried on, but to endeavour to repair, in some degree, the wrongs of Africa, and with active but tardy kindness, to impart to her some small share of the overflowings of our superabundant blessings?

“But surely,” you will long ere now have been ready to exclaim, “Surely the facts which you have laid before us, though believed by the abolitionists, could not have been established in the judgment of the majority of the House of Commons;”—and you may justly require some decisive evidence in proof of them.

Evidence by which the above statements are established.

To adduce all the specific testimony by which the above allegations were established, would be to fill a volume. I mean, as a specimen of the whole, to extract, and subjoin in an appendix, a few passages from the vast body of evidence with which we are furnished on this subject. But it would be injustice to the great cause I am pleading, not to declare, that the above statements were established beyond all possible dispute; and also, that, with occasional variations, resulting from the difference in the forms of government, and in other circumstances, they were found to be applicable not to particular parts only of Africa, but to the whole of that vast district which is visited by the European Slave ships; to be, not the exception, but the rule; not the occasional, but the general and systematic effects of the Slave Trade ships. We have the evidence of several most respectable Officers of the navy, to prove, that wherever they touched, acts of depredation were common. The same practices were found to prevail in the widely distant countries of Senegambia and the Gold coast, by men of Science, one of whom produced a journal, kept at the time, in which he daily entered all that appeared to him worthy of remark; and it was from this record that the Committee read the affecting account which has been mentioned, in which one of the African Kings, with every appearance of sincerity, repeatedly expressed his deep remorse for having been instigated, in a season of intoxication, into which he had been drawn by the Slave merchants, to oppress and pillage his subjects. Much of the Abolitionists’ information was also obtained from those who, in different capacities, chiefly as surgeons, more commonly as mates, and in some few instances as common sailors, had been actually employed in Slave ships; some of these persons had likewise been for many months on shore among the natives; and several of them had witnessed the practice of attacking villages by armed parties in the night, and carrying away, and selling all they could seize.

Opponents’ contrary evidence.

In opposition to all this testimony, the Slave Traders produced several witnesses, who were either still engaged in the Slave Trade, or who had formerly carried it on, some of whom had resided several years in Slave factories on the coast. By them it was generally declared, that acts of depredation for the purpose of procuring Slaves were never committed; they had never even heard of such practices, nor had they ever heard of the practice, or of the term, of panyaring or kidnapping.[^[10]] Crimes and witchcraft were said to be the chief sources of supply; a few were furnished by insolvency. The trials were said to be fair, the convictions just. In short, according to their report, the Africans, of whose natural dispositions and character they at the same time gave a highly unfavourable representation, and whose government was said to be very loose and imperfect, must have been a people of the most extraordinary moral excellency, who had for centuries resisted present and strong temptations, which in every other country had proved too powerful to be successfully opposed. Such, according to these witnesses, was the state of things on the coast. Of the interior, from whence the greater part of the Slaves were brought, they professed to know little or nothing.

Opponents’ evidence decisively refuted.

The allegations of these persons, even though they had not been effectually disproved by the concurrent testimony of the various classes of witnesses already noticed, carried their refutation on the very face of them. But if any doubts could have been entertained to which of the two accounts most credit was due, to that of men who were still concerned in carrying on the Slave Trade, or had made their fortunes by it, on the one side; and of witnesses on the other, most of whom, highly respectable both in point of rank and character, had no interest at stake either way; these doubts would have been completely removed by another branch of evidence. For, happily for the cause of truth and justice, we were able to adduce, in support of our allegations, the testimony of another set of witnesses, against whom our opponents at least could urge no objections, |Especially by accounts of Africa, published by Slave Traders, and before the Slave Trade had been attacked.| persons in the employ of the African Company or of private merchants, who had been long resident in Africa, for the express purpose of carrying on the Slave Trade, and who, as was formerly mentioned, had published to the world the result of their observations and experience. It might indeed have been feared, that we should be compelled to except against their testimony; and it must be confessed, that for the sake of their own credit, and for that of the occupation by which they had made their fortunes, they would naturally be disposed, even in acknowledging abuses, to touch them with a tender and favourable hand. Yet, however short of the truth we may reasonably suppose their representations to fall, where they are discreditable to the Slave Trade, we find our charges positively and abundantly proved.

Slave Trade’s cruelty and guilt acknowledged by the parliamentary opposers of the abolition.

But it is due to our opponents themselves in the House of Commons, excepting only such of them as were personally connected with the places whence the Slave Trade is principally carried on, who are allowed a certain license of speaking and reasoning, on the ground of their being understood to utter the language of their constituents rather than their own; to the rest even of our opponents it is due, to declare, that they never for a moment affected to entertain a doubt of the substantial correctness of our statements. Of the injustice and inhumanity of the Slave Trade, there was but one opinion. The chief advocates for gradual abolition, and even the very few who resisted abolition in any form, reprobated the traffic in the plainest and strongest terms; avowing their firm conviction of its incurable wickedness and cruelty. One of them declared that he knew no language which could add to its horrors; another, that in the pursuit of the general object he felt equally warm with the Abolitionists themselves; another acknowledged the Slave Trade was the disgrace of Great Britain, and the torment of Africa. Whatever might be thought of the consistency of our opponents, who, after thus admitting our premises, stopped short of the conclusions to which such premises might be thought infallibly to lead, it was no great stretch of candour in them to speak in such terms of the Slave Trade, when, so clearly indisputable were it’s nature and effects, that Mr. Bryan Edwards, one of the ablest, and most determined enemies of abolition, while avowedly opposing the measure in an eloquent speech (which was afterwards published by authority) made the following memorable declaration. After having confessed he had not the smallest doubt that |Mr. Bryan Edward’s declaration to the same effect.| “in Africa the effects of the Slave Trade were precisely such as I had represented them to be;” he added, “the whole or the greatest part of that immense continent, is a field of warfare and desolation; a wilderness, in which the inhabitants are wolves towards each other; a scene of oppression, fraud, treachery, and blood.”—“The assertion, that a great many of the slaves are criminals and convicts, is mockery and insult.”

Pleas against abolition.

But if the charges which the Abolitionists brought against the Slave Trade were thus clearly proved, you may now be much more disposed to wonder, what arguments could be found sufficiently strong to induce the House of Commons of Great Britain to hesitate, even for a moment, to wipe away so foul a blot from our national character.

The grand operating consideration, which, from the very first discussion of the question in 1791 to the present moment, has prevented the actual abolition of the Slave Trade, though so long a period has elapsed since Mr. Pitt congratulated the House of Commons, the Country, and the World, that “its sentence was sealed, that it had received it’s condemnation,” has undoubtedly been, the persuasion that it’s continuance is necessary to the well-being of our West Indian colonies. We will, therefore, inquire into that necessity. But as several other allegations were set up, and various arguments urged, on the part of the Slave Traders, it may be best to consider, previously, such of them as are included in the African division of the subject, in order to clear the way for what may be termed, the West Indian branch of the subject.

The Negroes an inferior race.

The advocates for the Slave Trade originally took very high ground; contending, that the Negroes were an inferior race of beings. It is obvious, that, if this were once acknowledged, they might be supposed, no less than their fellow brutes, to have been comprised within the original grant of all inferior creatures to the use and service of man. A position so shameless, and so expressly contradicted by the Holy Scriptures, could not long be maintained in plain terms. But many others, which may not improperly be supposed, from their features, to belong to the same family, were afterwards brought forward. To this class belong the assertions, that, though it might scarcely be justifiable to withhold from the Africans the name of men, yet that they were manifestly inferior to the rest of the human species, both in their intellectual and moral powers. Hence, doubtless, it was, that they never had attained to any height of civilization; whence it was also inferred, that they never could be civilized; that therefore they might be reasonably regarded, as intended by Providence to be the hewers of wood and drawers of water of the species; as a race originally destined to servile offices, and fairly applicable to any purpose by which they might be rendered most subservient to the interest and comfort of the Lords of the Creation. This, indeed, was high ground, as has been already remarked; but it was not injudiciously selected, had it been but tenable; for our opponents well knew, that could they but obtain credit for their representations of the incorrigible stupidity and depravity of the Negro race, our commiseration of them would be proportionably lessened, and then all, except perhaps a few stubborn advocates for justice in the abstract, would be content to leave them to their fate.

It therefore becomes highly interesting, in a practical point of view, to ascertain the real character and qualities, both intellectual and moral, of the natives of Africa; and, remembering the advantages we derived in a former instance, from publications which had appeared before the Slave Trade became a subject of public discussion, we might be disposed to congratulate ourselves in having access, on the present occasion, to a work which was published many years before any proposition had been brought forward for abolishing the Slave Trade. |Mr. Long’s account of the Negro race.| The publication to which I allude is Mr. Long’s elaborate History of Jamaica, a work which has been long regarded as of the highest authority on all West Indian topics. We may consider it as containing a more fair representation of the opinion entertained of the Negroes, and of the estimation in which they were held by the well-informed colonists, than any statements which, having been subsequently made, may be supposed to have received a tincture from that discussion. Mr. Long’s work appeared long before the necessity of vindicating the Slave Trade, and the difficulty of finding arguments for that purpose had driven the enemies of abolition to the unworthy expedient of calumniating the African character. Yet we find this commonly respectable author speaking of the race of Negroes in such terms, as they who have read the more recent accounts of Africa will peruse with astonishment, as well as with disgust. Far be it from me to quote them with any design of injuring the reputation of a work of established credit. But the passages are in several points of view highly important, and well deserving of your most serious consideration.

Extracts from Long’s History of Jamaica.

“For my own part (says Mr. Long) I think there are extremely potent reasons for believing that the white and the negro are two distinct species.” “In general (he goes on) the African negroes are void of genius, and seem almost incapable of making any progress in civility or science. They have no plan or system of morality among them. Their barbarity to their children debases their nature even below that of brutes. They have no moral sensations; no taste, but for women, gormandizing and drinking to excess; no wish but to be idle. Their children, from their tenderest years, are suffered to deliver themselves up to all that nature suggests to them. Their houses are miserable cabins. They conceive no pleasure from the most beautiful parts of their country, preferring the most sterile. Their roads, as they call them, are mere sheep paths, twice as long as they need be, and almost impassable. Their country in most parts is one continued wilderness, beset with briars and thorns.

“They use neither carriages nor beasts of burthen. They are represented by all authors as the vilest of the human kind, to which they have little more pretension of resemblance than what arises from their exterior form.

“In so vast a continent as that of Africa, and in so great a variety of climates and provinces, we might expect to find a proportionable diversity among the inhabitants, in regard to their qualifications of body and mind; strength, agility, industry, and dexterity, on the one hand; ingenuity, learning, arts and sciences, on the other. But on the contrary, a general uniformity runs through all these various regions of people; so that if any difference be found, it is only in degrees of the same qualities; and, what is more strange, those of the worst kind; it being a common known proverb, that all people on the globe have some good as well as ill qualities, except the Africans. Whatever great personages this country might anciently have produced, and concerning whom we have no information, they are now everywhere degenerated into a brutish, ignorant, idle, crafty, bloody, thievish, mistrustful, and superstitious people, even in those states where we might expect to find them more polished, humane, docile, and industrious.”—“This brutality somewhat diminishes when they are imported young, after they become habituated to clothing, and a regular discipline of life; but many are never reclaimed, and remain savages, in every sense of the word, to their latest period. We find them marked with the same bestial manners, stupidity, and vices, which debase their brethren on the continent, who seem to be distinguished from the rest of mankind, not in person only, but in possessing in the abstract every species of inherent turpitude that is to be found dispersed at large among the rest of the human creation, with scarce a single feature to extenuate this shade of character, differing in this particular from all other men; for in other countries, the most abandoned villain we ever heard of has rarely, if ever, been known unportioned with some one good quality at least in his composition.”—“Among so great a number of provinces on this extensive continent, and among so many millions of people, we have heard but of one or two insignificant tribes, who comprehended any thing of mechanic arts, or manufacture; and even these, for the most part, are said to perform their work in a very bungling and slovenly manner, perhaps not much better than an oran-outang might with a little pains be brought to do.”

“Ludicrous as the opinion may seem, I do not think that an oran-outang husband would be any dishonour to a Hottentot female.”

“Maize, palm-oil, and a little stinking fish, make up the general bill of fare of the prince and the slave.”

“They esteem the ape species as scarcely their inferiors in humanity.”

“Their hospitality is the result of self-love; they entertain strangers only in hopes of extracting some service or profit from them.”

“Their corporeal sensations are generally of the grossest frame,” &c. &c. &c.

Such is Mr. Long’s portrait of the negro character; such was the state of contempt into which the whole race had fallen, in the estimation of those who had known them chiefly in that condition of wretchedness and degradation into which a long continued course of slavery had depressed them. Can any thing shew more clearly, with what strong prejudices against the negro race, the minds not only of low uneducated men, but of a West Indian, whose authority is great, and whose name stands high among his countrymen, were some years ago at least infected: consequently they prove with what spirit and temper, even well-informed men, among the colonists, entered on the consideration of the various questions involved in the large and complicated discussion concerning the abolition of the Slave Trade.

The question of highly important practical tendencies.

But the subject is of the very first importance in another view; for it is a truth so clear, that it would be a mere waste of time to prove it in detail—that our estimate of the intellectual and moral qualities, of the natural and acquired tempers and feelings, and habits, of any class of our fellow creatures, will determine our judgment as to what is necessary to their happiness, and still more as to the treatment they may reasonably claim at our hands. Now it be remembered, the author, whose account of the Africans has been just laid before you, was the very best informed of those on whose views and feelings, respecting the Negroes, our opponents would have had us entirely rely. Must not the representations of such witnesses against the Negroes be received with large abatement, and ought we not to lend ourselves to their suggestions with considerable diffidence? What judgment would they be likely to form of the consideration to which, whether in Africa, on shipboard, or in the West Indies, the negro Slaves were entitled? By how scanty a measure would their comforts be dispensed to them! And when, in answer to our inquiries, we were assured that in these several situations, their treatment was sufficiently mild and humane, and that due attention was paid to their wants and feelings, might we not reasonably receive these assurances with some reserve, on calling to mind that they proceeded from persons whose estimate of sufficiency was drawn from their calculations of what was due to the wants and feelings, the pleasures, and pains of a being little above the brute creation; not, of a Being of talents and passions, of anticipations and recollections, of social and domestic feelings similar to our own?

Slave Traders account of the Negro character.

The account given by the witnesses produced by the Slave Traders, of the natural and moral qualities of the Negroes, was of the same unfavourable kind, though considerably less strong in its colouring. I should detain you too long by stating it in detail. It may suffice to mention, in general, that the Africans were represented, in respect to civilization and knowledge, as but very little advanced beyond the rudest state of savage life. The population was said to be thin, their agriculture in the lowest state, their only manufacture a species of coarse mat or cloth. They very rarely used any beasts for draught or burthen, they had no public roads; no knowledge of letters, or apparent sense of their value. But the account of their personal qualities was still more melancholy; because it was such as to leave but slender hopes of their ever emerging out of this dark and barbarous state. The most respectable witnesses produced by the Slave Traders, some of whom had resided among the Africans many years, and on various parts of the coast, declared, that their stupidity, and still more their indolence, were so firmly rooted in their nature, as to be absolutely invincible; and, what may perhaps be justly regarded as indicative of the worst natural disposition, that they were deficient in domestic and parental affection.

Mr. Bryan Edwards’s account.

Even Mr. Bryan Edwards, though in common more liberal than other defenders of the Slave Trade, gives in his History of the West Indies a highly unfavourable account of the African character. It ought, however, in all fairness, to be urged in his defence, that his judgment of the Negroes was formed under circumstances highly disadvantageous to them; being grounded on what he had known and heard of them in our West India colonies, where their natural character must necessarily have derived a deep taint from the depraving effects of a long continued state of slavery. To this cause, indeed, he himself very frankly ascribes most of the bad qualities which he enumerates. After exhibiting the different shades of character of the Slaves brought from different parts of Africa, he goes on to state, what may be deemed the general properties of the Negro race, and these are of the most debasing and depraving kind. They are in general distrustful and cowardly; falsehood is one of the most prominent features in their character; they are prone to theft; sullen, selfish, unrelenting; and while the softer virtues are seldom found among them, they are so sunk in dissoluteness and licentiousness, that the attempt to introduce the ceremony of marriage among them, would be impracticable to any good purpose. One of the few pleasing traits in their character is their high veneration for old age.

Parke’s character of the Negroes.

After this melancholy picture, it is a relief to the humane mind, to peruse the accounts of the intellectual and moral dispositions and character of the Negroes, which have been given by persons who have had far superior means of information. The chief of them, Mr. Parke, and Mr. Golberry, were also, from their connections, unfriendly to the abolition, and cannot therefore be supposed to be tinctured with any of the prejudices which may be presumed to bias the minds of the avowed advocates of the negro race. It would be a grateful task to lay before you such copious extracts, as would give you a full and minute enumeration of the particulars of the negro character; but my extracts, to do justice to the subject, would almost fill a volume. I must therefore refer you to my appendix for a brief specimen of them, and content myself here with exhibiting the mere outlines of the very different portrait which has been taken of the Negroes, after a more familiar and extended survey of their tempers and conduct.

Mr. Parke represents the Africans of the interior as naturally superior, both in their intellectual and moral endowments, to almost any other uncivilized nation. He speaks in high terms of their powers of ingenuity and invention, of their quickness and cheerfulness; of the value which they set on the learning within their reach, and the price at which they are willing to acquire it for themselves, or their children; of the skill which they display in several arts and manufactures. But the natural character of the Africans rises in our estimation, when, from considering their intellectual, we take a fair survey of their moral qualities; of the reverence for truth in which the children are educated by their mothers, among the Mandingoes, who, let it be observed, constitute the bulk of the inhabitants in all the vast districts of Africa visited by Mr. Parke; of their almost universal benevolence, gentleness, and hospitality; of their courage, and, when they have any adequate motive to prompt them to work, of their industry and perseverance; of their parental and filial tenderness, of their social and domestic affection, of the conjugal fidelity of the women, combined with great cheerfulness and frankness; of the extraordinary attachment of the Negroes to their country and home; in some cases, of their magnanimity, of which two instances are given, scarcely inferior to any thing which is recorded in Greek or Roman story.

Golberry’s character of the Negroes.

Mr. Golberry’s account of the negro character is at least equally favourable. “The Foulahs, he says, are intelligent and industrious, fine, strong, brave men; but, from their habitual commerce with the Moors, they are become savage and cruel. The Mandingoes are well informed, graceful, and active, and, in their mercantile character, clever and indefatigable. The Jaloffs are honest, hospitable, generous, and faithful; their character mild, and inclined to good order and civilization.” Besides this account of particular nations, he observes of the Negroes in general, that they have both taste, ingenuity, and cleverness, and may be reckoned among the most favoured people of nature. They are, perhaps, the most prolific of all the human species, which is probably owing to the moderation they in general observe, in their habits, regimen, and pleasures. He bears, if possible, a still stronger testimony to the benevolence, hospitality, frankness, and generosity of the negro character. The mothers, says he, are passionately fond of their children, and these discover in return great filial tenderness. The women are always kind and attentive.

Mr. Winterbottom’s.

Concerning Mr. Winterbottom’s account, I will here only state, that it corresponds, in the great essentials of character, with the representations already given, though it be perhaps scarcely so favourable to the negro character.

The Hottentots vindicated.

Even the poor calumniated Hottentots, who were long regarded as among the lowest in the scale of being, have at length found respectable and able advocates. Among the many good qualities which the Hottentot possesses, there is one, says Mr. Barrow, of which he is master in an eminent degree, a rigid adherence to truth: he may be considered also as exempt from stealing. Sir James Craig, when he commanded at the Cape, attempted to form an African corps, in defiance of the most confident prediction of the colonists, whose prejudices against the Hottentot race were scarcely less strong than those of Mr. Long himself. “We were told,” says Sir James, “that their propensity to drunkenness was so great, we should never be able to reduce them to order or discipline; and that the habit of roving was so rooted in their disposition, we must expect the whole corps would desert, the moment they had received their clothing.” Both these charges were confuted by experience. Sir James goes on to remark, “Never were people more contented or more grateful for the treatment they now receive. We have upwards of three hundred, who have been with us nine months. It is therefore with the opportunity of knowing them well, that I venture to pronounce them an intelligent race of men. All who bear arms exercise well, and understand, immediately and perfectly, whatever they are taught to perform. Many of them speak English tolerably well. Of all the qualities that can be ascribed to a Hottentot, it will little be expected I should expatiate upon their cleanliness; and yet it is certain, that at this moment our Hottentot parade would not suffer in a comparison with that of some of our regular regiments. They are now likewise cleanly in their persons; the practice of smearing themselves with grease being entirely left off. I have frequently observed them washing themselves in a rivulet, where they could have in view no other object but cleanliness.” The poor Bosjesman Hottentots are also stated as a docile, tractable people, of innocent manners, and beyond expression grateful to their benefactors.

Character of Booshuana and Baroloo natives.

Some later travellers from the Cape of Good Hope, and in the service of Government, have penetrated into the heart of Africa to a great depth, but short of the region in which the Slave Trade prevails, and the account which, both from their own knowledge and from the representations of others, they give of the natives, is still of the same encouraging kind.

Character given of the Negroes by the Abolitionists witnesses.

After these accounts, you will not be surprised to hear, that the representations given of the Africans by the naval officers, and the men of science before alluded to, were highly favourable. One witness spoke of the acuteness of their perceptions; another, of the extent of their memory; a third, of their genius for commerce; others, of their good workmanship in gold, iron, and leather; the peculiarly excellent texture of their cloth, and the beautiful and indelible tincture of their dyes. It was acknowledged that they supplied the ships with many articles of provision, with wood, and water, and other necessaries. Some spoke in high terms of their peaceable disposition; all of their cheerfulness and eminent hospitality.

I have been the more diffuse on this topic, because, though our commercial connection, with Africa be of so old a date, we have scarcely, till of late years, had any authentic account of the interior. In a region so vast, there must be a great variety of nations, and very different accounts may be adduced of particular countries; accounts not always, however, of a very authentic kind. But it is highly encouraging, and it is more than enough to rescue the African race from the unjust and general stigma which has been cast on it, to know, that later travellers who have visited the interior, in parts widely distant from each other, have made such pleasing reports of the intelligence, tempers and dispositions, habits, and manners of the natives of this vast continent.

Yet Africa never was civilized.—Argument resulting from that fact considered.

But, notwithstanding all which has been here adduced in favour of the negro character, I am aware that there exists, not uncommonly, in the minds even of men of understanding and candour, a strong prejudice against the African Negroes, on the ground of their never having advanced to any considerable state of civilization and knowledge, in any period of the world. Let me be permitted, in the first place, to consider that position more particularly. They were always, it is alleged, to a considerable degree barbarous. Still more, in the remotest times to which our accounts extend, slavery, and even a Slave Trade, have been found to prevail in Africa. Hence a presumption arises, that her inhabitants are incapable of civilization, and that Africa cannot much complain of a practice which has become so congenial to her, and which seems to arise, not from European avarice, or cruelty, but rather from the genius and dispositions of her people, or from some incorrigible vice in her system of laws, institutions, and manners.

That Africa, which contains nearly a third of the habitable globe, should never at any period have been reclaimed from a state of comparative barbarism, is, indeed, on the first view, a strange phenomenon. But without stopping to comment on the precision of that reasoning which, on this ground, should argue that it is justifiable for the European nations to make Africa the scene, and her sons the objects of the Slave Trade, we may confidently affirm, that a considerate review of the history, origin, and progress of civilization and the arts, in all ages and countries, will not only explain the difficulty, but will give us good grounds for believing, that, reasoning from experience, the interior of Africa is full as much civilized as any other race of men would have been, if placed in the same situation.

How is it that civilization and the arts grow up in any country? The reign of law and of civil order must be first established. From law, says a writer of acute discernment and great historical research, from law arises security; from security, curiosity; from curiosity, knowledge. As property is accumulated, industry is excited, a taste for new gratifications is formed, comforts of all kinds multiply, and the arts and sciences naturally spring up and flourish in a soil and climate thus prepared for their reception. Yet, even under these circumstances, the progress of the arts and sciences would probably be extremely slow, if a nation were not to import the improvements of former times and other countries. And we are well warranted, by the experience of all ages, in laying it down as an incontrovertible position—that the arts and sciences, knowledge, and civilization, have never yet been found to be the native growth of any country; but that they have ever been communicated from one nation to another, from the more to the less civilized. Now, whence was Africa to receive these valuable presents?

Let us summarily and briefly trace the actual progress of human civilization from the very earliest times. We learn from the Holy Scriptures, and the researches of the ablest antiquaries strongly confirm the supposition, that Mesopotamia was the original seat of the human race. We know not to what extent the globe had been civilized before the Flood; but the single family which survived that event, inhabited the same or an adjacent part of Asia. About a century afterwards, happened the dispersion of nations, and confusion of tongues; when different races of men, like streams from one common fountain, diverged in various directions to people the whole earth. Without going into minute, and therefore difficult, inquiries, we know that Assyria and Egypt were the first nations which attained to any great heights of social improvement. Babylon, the capital of Assyria, was built about 150 years after the flood, and the Assyrian empire is supposed to have soon after risen to a high degree of splendour. The neighbouring province of Egypt, from the mildness of its climate, and its singular fertility, naturally attracted inhabitants, who, of course, brought along with them the arts of their native land. It is represented by the Mosaic writings to have been, about 450 years after the flood, a flourishing and well regulated kingdom; and all history testifies that it was one of the earliest seats of the arts and sciences.

Next to these come the Phœnicians, a colony from Egypt, situated on the coasts of Syria, whose advances towards refinement appear to have been great, and commercial opulence considerable. They gradually made settlements in the islands and on the shores of the Mediterranean. By them, the first rudiments of civilization, above all, the art of alphabetical writing, were conveyed to Greece, the various inhabitants of which were then in a far ruder state than most of the African nations in the present day. They are said to have been cannibals, and to have been ignorant even of the use of fire. Indeed, their barbarous state, had it not been proved by positive testimony, might have been almost inferred, from the single circumstance, of their assigning divine honours to him who reclaimed them from living on acorns and other spontaneous fruits of the earth, and taught them to cultivate the ground for corn. Greece, as is justly observed by Mr. Hume, was in a situation the most favourable of all others to improvements of every kind, especially in the arts and sciences. It was divided into a number of little independent communities, connected by commerce and policy, and exciting each other by mutual competition to those heights of excellence to which they at length attained, and which, in the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and oratory, have perhaps never since been reached by any other nation. About 150 years before Christ, Greece was subdued by the Romans, who thence derived their civilization and knowledge. By the extension of the Roman arms over almost the whole of Europe, the seeds of civilization were first sown in our northern regions, till then immersed in darkness and barbarism; and they sprung up and flourished during the order and security which, previous to the irruption of the northern swarms, prevailed for some centuries throughout the Roman empire. Such was the state of Europe.

In Asia also, the progress of the Roman arms was considerable, and their empire extensive: there were, besides, other great and populous nations, which, from their connection with the earliest seats of civilization, had attained to various degrees of social refinement. But of Africa, those parts alone which border on the Mediterranean Sea had been settled by colonies from any civilized nation. This will not appear extraordinary, if we consider the geographical circumstances of that quarter of the globe, and, still more, the low state of navigation among the ancients. Their knowledge of navigation was so imperfect, that they scarcely ever ventured out of sight of land; and the account of the Phœnicians having penetrated into the ocean, and having found a way into the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, although there now seems reason to believe its truth, was in general regarded as bearing on it’s very face it’s own contradiction. The Romans had therefore no access by the ocean to the interior of Africa; and it was separated from the provinces bordering on the Mediterranean by an immense sea of sandy desert, near nine hundred miles from north to south, and twice that extent from east to west, beyond which, though a few adventurous parties might venture to penetrate, there was nothing of the established regularity and order of a Roman province. The very tales which were told of the inhabitants of these districts, sufficiently denote the imperfect acquaintance and limited intercourse which subsisted with them. Hitherto, then, how or whence was civilization to find its way into the interior of Africa?

Next, the Northern nations, who, seeking for a more genial climate and a more fertile soil, in the finest provinces of both the eastern and western empire, overran the civilized world in the fifth century after Christ, were under no temptations to extend their settlements beyond those natural barriers which had formed the boundaries of the Roman conquests. While the coasts of the Mediterranean therefore were throughout ravaged and colonized, the interior of Africa was still neglected.

At length the all-conquering followers of Mahomet issued forth, and, after desolating the fine African provinces which were subject to Rome, some of their adventurous bands seem to have penetrated in various quarters into the interior, and, occupying the banks of one of the finest rivers, to have planted themselves, in greater or less numbers, beyond the immense desert which forms the northern boundary of interior Africa. But it should be remembered, that while the Mahometans, who overran the various provinces of both the eastern and western empires, became civilized by the nations they subdued, as Rome had been before by her conquest of Greece, so that they soon attained to a great degree of knowledge and refinement; the tribes which planted themselves in Africa, finding only nations as illiterate and as unpolished as themselves, retained all their original barbarism; while their ferocious tempers and habits, and their intolerant tenets, led them to keep down their negro subjects in a state of grievous subjection, and prevented that secure enjoyment of person and property which prompts men to industry, by securing to them the enjoyment and use of what they have acquired, and is indispensably necessary for enabling the mind to exercise its powers with freedom. Here, perhaps however, the first faint beams of knowledge and civilization shot into the darkness of the negro nations; and it is remarkable, that, barbarous as were the first Mahometan settlers of interior Africa, and hostile to all improvement as is the genius of Mahometanism, yet such is the effect of any regular government, that in those districts in which the Mahometans either possess the entire government, or a very considerable influence over it, there were many centuries ago great and populous cities, provinces not ill cultivated, and a considerable degree of social order and civilization.

It may therefore be boldly affirmed, that the interior, to which may be added the western coast of Africa to the south of the great desert, never enjoyed any of that intercourse with more polished nations, without which no nation on earth is known ever to have attained to any high degree of civilization; and that, contemptuously as we and the other civilized nations of Europe now speak of the Africans, had we been left in their situation, we should probably have been not more civilized than themselves.

Let the case be put, that the interior of Africa had been made by the Almighty the cradle of the world—that issuing thence, instead of from the north-western part of Asia, the several streams of nations had pervaded and settled the whole of that extensive continent—that the banks of the Niger, not less fertile than those of the Euphrates or the Nile, had been the seat of the first great empire—that the kingdoms of Tombuctoo and Houssa had been the Assyria and Egypt of Africa, and that the arts and sciences had been communicated to a cluster of little independent states, and, under the same favourable circumstances, had been carried to the same heights of excellence as that which they attained in European Greece—that these had been however in their turn swallowed up, together with the whole of that vast continent, by the arms of a single nation, the Romans of Africa, under the shelter of whose established dominion the various nations throughout that spacious extent, enjoying the blessings of civil order and security, the natural consequence had followed, that in every quarter the arts and sciences had sprung up and flourished—Might not our northern countries have been then in the same state of comparative barbarism in which Africa now lies? Might not some African philosopher, proud of his superior accomplishments, have made it a question, whether those wretched whites, the very outcasts of nature, who were banished to the cold regions of the north, were capable of civilization? And thus, might not a Slave Trade in Europeans, aye, in Britons, have then been justified by those sable reasoners, on precisely the same grounds as those on which the African Slave Trade is now supported?

However the last supposition may mortify our pride, it will appear less monstrous to those who recollect, that not only in ancient times the wisest among the Greeks considered the barbarians, including all the inhabitants of our quarter of the earth, as expressly intended by nature to be their slaves; not only that the Romans regularly sold into slavery all the captives whom they took in the wars, by which on all sides they gradually extended their empire till it was almost commensurate with the then known world; but that our own island long furnished it’s share towards the supply of the Roman market. Even at a later period of our history, we Englishmen have been the subjects of a Slave Trade, for which it is remarkable that the city of Bristol[^[11]] was the grand emporium. That ancient city has now, I trust for the last time, retired from that guilty commerce.

In fact we know from history, that the great principle, of the demand producing the supply, has been amply verified in this instance, and that when countries in which slavery has been tolerated, have been sufficiently affluent to purchase Slaves, the Slaves have been caught and brought, like other wild animals, from the less civilized regions of the earth, where the inhabitants were less secure against foreign invaders, or against internal violence. Had not our island therefore been conquered by the Romans, who lodged in the soil the seeds of civilization which sprung up afterwards, when circumstances favoured their growth; and had the neighbouring provinces on the continent, from which otherwise the rays of knowledge might have enlightened us, remained also unsubdued; what reason is there to suppose that we, any more than the inhabitants of any other savage country, should now be a civilized nation? than, for instance, the whole continent of America before it was settled by Europeans? than the islands in the Pacific Ocean to this day?

But it may be even affirmed, that the Africans, without the advantages to be derived from an intercourse with polished nations, have made greater advancements towards civilization than perhaps any other uncivilized people on earth. Nor is this the state of those nations only, which, from their having received some tincture of the Mussulman tenets, may be supposed to have owed their improvement to their Mahometan invaders, but in a considerable degree in those countries also where there are no traces whatever of any such connection.

Let us appeal to experience. In what state was Britain herself, when first visited by the Romans? More barbarous than many of the African kingdoms in the present day. Look to the aboriginal inhabitants of both the northern and southern continents of the new world, both when America was first discovered, and at the present day, with the exception, perhaps, of only the kingdom of Mexico. Look to New Holland, a tract of country as great as all Europe; look to Madagascar, to Borneo, to Sumatra, to the other islands in the Indian seas, or to those of the Pacific Ocean. Are not the Africans far more civilized than any of these? The fact is undeniable. Instead of a miserable race of wretched savages, thinly scattered over countries of immense extent; destitute almost of every art and manufacture (this is the condition of the greater part of the nations above specified), we find the Africans, in the interior, in the state of society which has been found, from history, next to precede the full enjoyment of all civil and social blessings; the inhabitants of cities and of the country mutually contributing towards each others’ support; political and civil rights recognized both by law and practice; natural advantages discerned, and turned to account; both agriculture, and, still more, manufactures, carried to a tolerable state of improvement; the population in some countries very considerable; and a strong sense of the value of knowledge, and an earnest desire of obtaining it. How great is the progress which the Africans have made compared with the scanty advantages they could derive from their barbarous Mahometan invaders!

But it has been the peculiar misery of Africa, that nations, already the most civilized, finding her in the state which has been described, instead of producing any such effects as might be hoped for from a commercial connection between a less and a more civilized people; instead of imparting to the former the superior knowledge and improvements of the latter; instead of awakening the dormant powers of the human mind, of calling forth new exertions of industry, and thus leading to a constant progression of new wants, desires, and tastes; to the acquisition of property, to the acquisition of capital, to the multiplication of comforts, and, by the more firm establishment of law and order, to that security and quiet, in which knowledge and the arts naturally grow up and flourish: instead of all these effects; it has been the sad fate of Africa, that when she did enter into an intercourse with polished nations, it was an intercourse of such a nature, as, instead of polishing and improving, has tended not merely to retard her natural progress, but to deprave and darken, and, if such a new term might be used where unhappily the novelty of the occurrence compels us to resort to one, to barbarize her wretched inhabitants.

New phenomenon: interior of Africa more civilized than the coast.

And now we are prepared both to admit and to understand a fact, which, though found to take place universally in Africa, is contrary to all former experience. In reviewing the moral history of man, and contemplating his progress from ignorance and barbarism, to the knowledge and comforts of a state of social refinement, it has been almost invariably found, that the sea coasts and the banks of navigable rivers, those districts which from their situation had most intercourse with more polished nations, have been the earliest civilized. In them, civil order, and social improvement, agriculture, industry, and at length the arts and sciences, have first flourished, and they have by degrees extended themselves into more inland regions. But the very reverse is the case in Africa. There, the countries on the coast are in a state of utter ignorance and barbarism, which also are always found to be the greatest where the intercourse with the Europeans has been the longest and most intimate;—while the interior countries, where not the face of a white man was ever seen, are far more advanced in the comforts and improvements of social life.

This is so extraordinary a phenomenon, and it points out so clearly the pernicious effects of the Slave Trade on the prosperity of Africa, that it deserves the most serious attention. However extraordinary the statement may appear, it is confirmed by the unvarying testimony of all African travellers. Such is the result of the experience of Mr. Parke, who penetrated deep into Africa in one part; such is that of Mr. Winterbottom, who travelled about 200 miles inland in another: and the same extraordinary fact has since received a most striking confirmation, in the accounts, before recited, of the Booshuana and Baroloo nations.

Surely more than enough has been stated, to shew how far the present state of Africa is from furnishing any just grounds for believing that the Africans are incapable of civilization. Our only cause for wonder is, not that on the coast, where all is anarchy and insecurity, the inhabitants should have gradually declined from the state of civilization to which they had attained, and should have at length sunk into a state of profound ignorance and barbarism; for they have long been in circumstances which have been ever found utterly incompatible with the rise and progress of civilization and knowledge; the more just subject of astonishment is, that the kingdoms in the interior should still be found in a condition of so much civil order and improvement, in spite of the pernicious effects of the Slave Trade on their moral and social state. But, through the gracious ordination of Heaven, the political, like the natural body, can exist under severe and harassing disorders. They may materially injure its health and comfort, and yet not utterly destroy it. Thus the evils which the interior countries suffer from the Slave Trade, are great and many; but their effects are not, as they commonly are on the coast, such as to break up the very foundations of society, and destroy the cohesion of its elementary parts. In the interior, the Slave Trade exercises powers of destruction which justly entitle it to the character of one of the greatest scourges of the human race. But it is on the coast that it reaches its full dimensions, and attains to the highest point of its detestable pre-eminence.

But if the foregoing remarks prove plainly that our Slave dealers have no just grounds for arguing, from the present uncivilized state of the coast, that it is incapable of civilization; surely we cannot but be astonished at the finished assurance, as well as the consummate injustice and cruelty, with which they would charge on the natural constitution and character of the natives of Africa, that very barbarism of which they themselves are the authors; and not only so, but which, after having produced it, they urge on us as a plea for continuing that wretched land under the same dreadful interdict, not only from all the comforts of the civilized state, but from all the charities of life; from all virtue and all happiness; sealing her up for ever in bondage, ignorance, and blood.

You have been detained, I fear, far too long before this melancholy picture; and yet I am almost ashamed of apologizing for prolixity, when I consider what “a world of woes” it is which I have been exhibiting to your view.

Slave Traders’ argument that the Negroes were at home in a worse state of slavery.

When men began to question the soundness of that logic, which grounded the right to carry off the natives of Africa into slavery, on their state of barbarism and ignorance; and still more, when it was retorted, that, even granting the premises, that the Africans were thus dark and savage; the conclusion of a Christian reasoner ought naturally to be, that it was the duty of more favoured nations to civilize and enlighten, not to oppress and enslave, them; another set of arguments was brought forth; that two-thirds, or perhaps three-fourths, of the Africans were Slaves in their own country; and not only so, but that partly from the cruel and bloody superstitions, partly from the political despotism common in Africa, their state was so wretched at home, (the very worst West Indian slavery, as Mr. Edwards affirms, being infinitely preferable to the very best in Africa) that, independently on any motives of interest, humanity alone would prompt us to transport them from such a condition of misery and degradation, to the comparative Paradise of West Indian servitude. |The assertion answered and refuted.| To all this the reply was obvious, that we had no right to make men happy against their will; and that whatever effect such an argument might have had on us, if urged from African lips, yet that it came before us in a very suspicious shape, when proceeding from those of a West Indian. But since all the above allegations, however unsatisfactory on grounds of justice, must be acknowledged, to have some place in determining the practical effect of the Slave Trade, on the happiness of the Africans themselves; it may not be improper to observe, that these assertions also are utterly disproved by Mr. Parke, and by other recent travellers, no less than by the witnesses produced by the Abolitionists.

African Slaves real state.

The slavery of Africa appeared, in truth, to be a species of feudal or rather of patriarchal vassalage. The Slaves could not be sold by their masters but for crimes; not without the form of a trial, nor, in several parts, even without the verdict of a jury. They were described as sitting with their masters, like members of the same family, in primitive simplicity and comfort. “In all the laborious occupations which Mr. Parke describes, both agricultural and manufacturing, the Master and the Slave work together without any distinction of superiority.” It appears also, from a passage in Parke, that Master and Slave stand towards each other in a parental and filial relation: “Have I not served you—” said an African, who had served Parke in the capacity of a domestic Slave, “Have I not served you as if you had been to me a father and a master?” Indeed it was the more ill-advised to make any comparison between the slavery of Africa and of the West Indies, because even the witnesses of our opponents give much the same account of the condition of the African Slaves.

These remarks ought ever to be borne in mind in all our considerations and reasonings concerning the state of society in Africa. They are sometimes, however, forgotten by the very writers themselves by whom they have been made. Our opponents have availed themselves of the ambiguities of language; and the state of these domestic Slaves, who are styled the bulk of the African population, is spoken of in terms applicable only to the condition of those wretched beings who are destined for the Slave market, and who are waiting in fetters for a purchaser. The existence of this milder species of vassalage may even facilitate the complete civilization of the negro nations, by having familiarized their minds to the gradations of rank, and by having accustomed them to submit to the restraints of social life, and to be controlled by the authority of law and custom.

Opponents argument from the cruelty of the African despots, and particularly from those of the King of Dahomy.

Much use was likewise attempted to be made of the cruelties of some of the African monarchs, and especially of a certain king of Dahomy. “It was mercy to the poor Negroes to rescue them from such barbarities.” But the argument was only a proof of the wretched straits to which our opponents must be reduced, when they called in the aid of such an auxiliary. Yet was this argument urged with a grave face by men of education and intelligence; and it may therefore deserve a serious, though a brief answer. It is probably true that the kingdom of Dahomy had the misfortune to be governed by a cruel tyrant. His invasion of the neighbouring kingdom of Whidah, was attended with a dreadful slaughter; and it may be fact, that, like a celebrated oriental conqueror, Nadir Shah, he thatched his palace with the heads of his prisoners. His cruelties, and still more those of the Dahoman monarchs in general, must however have been excessively exaggerated, since Mr. Devaynes, whose personal knowledge of Dahomy was greater than that of any other person, and who, though not favourably inclined to our cause, delivered his evidence with great frankness and candour, declared that the Dahomans were a very happy people. But, not to insist on the unfairness of attempting to justify the Slave Trade in general, by the cruelties said to be practised in one particular district, which constitutes not perhaps a fiftieth part of the region from which the Slaves are supplied; not to urge, moreover, that, but for the Slave Trade, this whole system of superstition would probably have been ere now at an end; the cruelties of the Dahoman court are the effect of the native superstitions, and it therefore seems very doubtful, whether or not the Slave Trade lessens the number of the victims: while, as the very witness, who dwelt most strongly on this argument, himself allowed; it leaves their place, by having taken off the convicts who would otherwise have been sacrificed, to be supplied by innocent individuals. But, what will you say, when you hear that, as Atkins[^[12]] informs us, the cruelties practised in the invasion of Whidah were committed by him in a war undertaken with a view of punishing the adjacent nation, for having stolen away some of his subjects, for the purpose of selling them for Slaves? Thus, it appears, that to the Slave Trade itself is fairly to be imputed this greatest of all recorded instances of the cruelties of an African warfare, that very instance on which our opponents have relied.

The Slaves brought to the coast for sale would be massacred in case of abolition.

But an argument for the continuance of the Slave Trade has been grounded on the massacre, which would otherwise take place, of the Slaves which had been brought down to the coast for sale. This slaughter, however, even granting it to be well founded, ought, in all fairness, to be charged to the account of the Slave Trade, which had created the demand for these wretched victims. At any rate it would only happen once; for the Slave hunters would cease to catch and bring down for sale this species of game, when it was known there could no longer be any demand for it. But in truth, as the supposition is utterly contrary to common sense, so it is abundantly contradicted by experience; |The assertion positively contradicted by opponents partisans.| for it clearly appears from Mr. Parke, as well as from the testimony of other witnesses, that Slaves, when brought down to the coast for sale, are set to work for their own maintenance, or for their master’s emolument, either when there is no demand for them, or when the price offered for them is deemed inadequate to their value. It further appears that, even at this time, “It sometimes happens, when no ships are on the coast, that a humane and considerate master incorporates his purchased Slaves among his domestics; and their offspring, at least, if not the parents, become entitled to all the privileges of the native class.”[^[13]]

Middle passage.

On the middle passage but little shall be said; but we must not pass from Africa to the West Indies, without some few observations.

When the public attention was first called to this branch of the subject, it was alleged, and with considerable plausibility, that self-interest alone would be a sufficient security against abuses; for not only was the owner of the Slave ship interested in having the Slaves brought to the port of sale in the best possible condition; but the master, officers, and surgeons of the ships had all a similar interest, their profits being made to depend, in a considerable degree, on the average value of the cargo. To this argument from self-interest, it must be confessed, that more weight was justly due in this part of the case, than in any other; because the interest was nearer, and more direct, and was not counteracted by any interest of an opposite nature; yet even here it was proved but too decisively, that, as in other cases, nature was too hard for reason, the passions too powerful for interest. The habit of viewing, and treating these wretched beings as mere articles of merchandize, had so blinded the judgment, and hardened the heart, as to produce a course of treatment highly injurious to the interest of the owners and officers of Slave ships, and at the same time abounding in almost every circumstance that could aggravate the miseries of the Slaves. When the condition therefore and treatment of the Negroes on shipboard were first laid open, the indignation of the House of Commons was excited so strongly, that though the Session of Parliament had nearly closed, a Bill was immediately brought in and passed, with a view to mitigate their sufferings, during even the short period for which, it was then conceived, the existence of the Slave Trade could be tolerated. Human ingenuity had almost been exhausted in contriving expedients for crowding the greatest possible number of bodies into a given space; and when the smallpox, the flux, or any other epidemic, broke out among them, the scene was horrible beyond description. Even where there was no such peculiar aggravation, the sufferings of the poor wretches were such as exhausted all powers of description. Accordingly, the average mortality on board the Slave ships was very considerable. Often, during a voyage of a few weeks, so many perished, that if in any country the same rate of mortality should prevail, the whole population would be swept away in a single year. The survivors also were landed in such a diseased state, that four and a half per cent. of the whole number imported were estimated to die in the short interval between the arrival of the ship and the sale of the cargo, probably not more than a fortnight; and, after the Slaves had passed into the hands of the planters, the numbers which perished from the effects of the voyage were allowed to be very considerable[^[14]].

A Bill for mitigating these evils was proposed by that justly respected member of the House of Commons, Sir William Dolben, and, after great opposition, was passed into a law. That law has since been from time to time renewed and amended, prescribing certain conditions and regulations, with a view to the health and comfort of the Slaves. For want of some effectual means of enforcing this law, many of its provisions have not, it is supposed, been carried into strict execution. Still its primary object has been attained, and the evils, arising from crowding great numbers into too small a space, have been considerably mitigated. Much good has likewise been done by turning the attention of the Slave dealers to the subject, and by convincing them that parsimony is not always œconomy.

But many of the sufferings of these wretched beings are of a sort, for which no legislative regulations can provide a remedy. Several of them, indeed, arise necessarily out of their peculiar circumstances, as connected with their condition on shipboard. It is necessary to the safety of the vessel, to secure the men by chains and fetters. It is necessary to confine them below during the night, and, in very stormy weather, during the day also. Often it happens that, even with the numbers still allowed to be taken, especially when some of those epidemic diseases prevail, which, though less frequent than formerly, will yet occasionally happen; and when men of different countries and languages, or of opposite tempers, are linked together; such scenes of misery take place as are too nauseous for description.[^[15]] Still, in rough weather, their limbs must often be excoriated by lying on the boards; still they will often be wounded by the fetters:[^[16]] still food and exercise will be deemed necessary to present the animal in good condition at the place of sale: still some of them will loath their food, and be averse to exercise, from the joint effect perhaps of sea-sickness and mental uneasiness; and still while in this state they will probably be charged with sulkiness; and eating, and dancing in their fetters will be enforced by stripes: still the high netting will be necessary, that standing precaution of an African ship against acts of suicide: but, more than all, still must the diseases of the mind remain entire, nay, they may perhaps increase in force, from the attention being less called off by the urgency of bodily suffering; the anguish of husbands torn from their wives, wives from their husbands, and parents from their children; the pangs arising from the consideration, that they are separated for ever from their country, their friends, their relatives, and connections, remain the same. In short, they have the same painful recollection of the past, and the same dreadful forebodings of the future; while they are still among strangers, whose appearance, language, and manners are new to them, and every surrounding object is such as must naturally inspire terror. In short, till we can legislate for the mind; till by an Act of Parliament we can regulate the affections of the heart, or, rather, till we can extinguish the feelings of nature; till we can completely unman and brutalize these wretched beings, in order to qualify them for being treated like brutes; the sufferings of the Slaves, during the middle passage, must still remain extreme. The stings of a wounded conscience man cannot inflict; but nearly all which man can do to make his fellow creatures miserable, without defeating his purpose by putting a speedy end to their existence, will still be here effected; and it will still continue true, that never can so much misery be found condensed into so small a space, as in a Slave ship during the middle passage.

But this part of the subject should not be quitted without the mention of one circumstance, which justly leads to a very important inference as to other parts of the case. When Parliament entered into the investigation of the situation and treatment of the Slaves, during the middle passage; notwithstanding the decisive proofs, adduced, and fatally confirmed by the dreadful mortality, of the miseries which the Slaves endured on shipboard, the Slave Traders themselves gave a directly opposite account; maintained that the Slaves were even luxuriously accommodated, and, above all, that they had abundant room, even when there was not near space sufficient for them to lie on their backs.[^[17]] They added likewise, that at that very period the trade hung by a thread, and that the proposed limitation as to numbers, if carried into a law, would infallibly and utterly ruin it. The agent for the West Indies joined in their opposition, and predicted the mischief which would follow. The limitation was adopted; and scarcely had a year elapsed, before we heard from the West Indies, from the Assembly of Jamaica itself, of the benefits which the measure was likely to produce, on account of the gross abuses which had before notoriously prevailed, fatal alike to the health of the Slaves and the interest of the planters. Many years have now elapsed, and it is at length universally acknowledged, that the measure has eminently contributed to the interest of every one of the parties concerned.[^[18]] May we not infer, that probably, in other parts of this question, the parties do not always judge very accurately with respect to their real interests; and that the prospect of immediate advantage may cause them to be insensible to a greater but more distant benefit.

Grand allegation of West Indians, that the stock of Slaves cannot be kept up without importations.

But against all, which justice and humanity could bring forward against the Slave Trade, it was still to be urged, that the continuance of it was necessary to the existence of our West Indian colonies. To put the argument in more specific form, it was objected, that the stock of Slaves then actually in the West Indies could not be maintained by natural generation, without being recruited from time to time by importations from Africa, and therefore, that the abolition of the Slave Trade would produce the sure, though gradual, ruin of our colonies, with all those effects on the wealth and strength of the mother country which must follow from the loss of so valuable a member of the empire.

To the examination of this objection, let me intreat your most serious attention; for on it, in fact, the whole argument turns, so far as policy is in question. For my own part I hesitate not to say, that, let the apparent temptation of profit be what it may, it never can be the real interest of any nation to be unjust and inhuman; to suppose the contrary, would be almost to arraign the wisdom and goodness of the Almighty, as it would undoubtedly be, to admit a principle directly at war with his revealed will. Nor can I forbear taking occasion to congratulate my country, that in the discussions on this subject, the greatest of her statesmen, both dead and living, even those who have differed almost on every other question, have declared their concurrent assent to that grand and aweful truth, that the principles of justice are immutable in their nature, and universal in their application; the duty at once, and the interest, of nations, no less than of individuals.

Fully impressed with the force of these sentiments, I could not believe that the prosperity of the West Indies must necessarily be built on a foundation of injustice and cruelty; neither could I understand why, in the West Indies alone, the Negroes could not even keep up their numbers. The contrary supposition is in truth refuted, not only by its being a contradiction of the great Law of Nature, but by its being contrary to the universal experience of all other countries. |Presumptive arguments to the contrary, furnished by experience.| For elsewhere, even under the most unfavourable circumstances, not merely the human species, but specifically the Negro race, had been found to increase; indeed Negroes were said to be by nature peculiarly prolific. The climate of the West Indies is similar to that of Africa. |In Africa| Why then should the same race of beings gradually diminish in the former country, which in the latter have so increased and multiplied, as for two centuries to bear the continual drain of their population to the opposite side of the Atlantic. On examining whether in fact the negro race has kept up its numbers in other foreign countries, we find that it has increased, and sometimes rapidly, even where the influence of the climate might be justly supposed to be highly unfavourable.

In the United States of America, Negro Slaves increase.

The climate of the United States of America is far from being well suited to the negro constitution, which, we are assured, is so little patient of cold, as even in the West Indies to suffer from it[^[19]]. The cold in America is often very severe in the winter, even in the southern states; and the peculiar nature of the employment of great numbers of the Slaves who work on the rice plantations, must operate very unfavourably on their health; yet the Negro Slaves are universally acknowledged to have so rapidly increased in that country, that, according to the last census of the American population, without taking into the account any importations, the Negroes had increased so much in the ten years last preceding the augmentation, that, advancing at the same rate, their numbers would be doubled in about twenty-four years.

Slaves increase, in Bencoolen.

Again, in Bencoolen, which has been accounted one of the most unhealthy climates on earth, the Negro Slaves had increased[^[20]].

But, lest the decrease in our Islands should be supposed to arise out of some peculiarity of the West Indian climate, |Slaves increase, in the West Indies themselves.| even in the West Indies themselves undoubted instances of negro increase can be adduced. The crew of a Slave ship had been wrecked on the unsettled island of St. Vincents, about the beginning of the 18th century. They had every difficulty to contend with, were wholly unprovided with necessaries, and were obliged to maintain a constant war with the native Charaibs; yet they had soon multiplied exceedingly.

The Maroons increase.

Even in the island of Jamaica itself, the Maroons, the descendants of the Negro Slaves, who, when the island was originally captured, made their escape into the mountains, and ever afterwards lived the life of savages; the Maroons, who were acknowledged by the West Indians themselves to be, under peculiar circumstances, so unfavourable to the maintenance of their numbers, that their decrease would furnish no fair argument for the general impossibility of keeping up the stock, were found by actual enumeration to have nearly doubled their numbers in the period between 1749 and 1782.

The Domestic Negroes increase.

The Free Blacks and Mulattoes increase.

In the same island of Jamaica, the domestic Slaves were said by Long to increase rapidly. The free Blacks and the Mulattoes, it was allowed by Mr. Long, increased. Several particular instances were adduced of gangs of Slaves having been kept up, and even having increased, without importations; and one of the most eminent of the medical men in Jamaica, who had under his care no less than 4,000 Negroes, stated, that there was a very considerable increase of Negroes on the properties of that island, particularly in the parish in which he resided, one of the largest in Jamaica. All these instances certainly afforded a strong presumptive proof, that the stock of Slaves in the islands might be kept up, and might even increase without continual importations.

But the conclusion resulting from so much and such diversified experience was established also by positive and decisive proof. The assertion, that the stock of Slaves actually in the islands could not be maintained without continual importations, received an unanswerable refutation, especially from Mr. Pitt, whose superior powers of reasoning, as well as of eloquence, were never more powerfully displayed than in the debate of that memorable night when this subject was under discussion, and whose positions were clearly deduced from the very documents and accounts which had been supplied by the islands themselves.

Importance of the question, concerning the keeping up of the stock of Slaves without Importations.

Here, undoubtedly, lies the main stress of the case, so far as policy is concerned. On the determination of this question must obviously rest all the assertions which have been so industriously circulated, and all the apprehensions which have so generally prevailed, that the immediate abolition would prove ruinous to our West Indian Colonies. Even in 1792, much less in the present day, scarcely any man will deny, that if the stock of Slaves can be kept up, the abolition will, in various ways, be highly beneficial to the islands.

Proof that Slave Trade not needed for maintaining the present stock of Slaves.

It was proved then, first, That the abuses and the obstructions to the natural increase, which too generally prevail, were sufficient to account for a rapidly decreasing population, and even to lead us to expect it.

Secondly, That the decrease, which really was considerable a century ago, had been gradually diminishing; till at length there was good reason to believe it had entirely ceased, and that the population fully maintains itself.

Thirdly, That, therefore, if the great and numerous abuses which now prevail should be materially mitigated, we might confidently anticipate a great and rapid increase in future.

These three propositions being made out, it follows of course, that the only substantial objection to the abolition, on the grounds of policy, is completely done away. |Proof of existing abuses unfavourable to increase.| To the proof, therefore, of these propositions respectively, let me beg your most serious attention. And now, in establishing the first of them, it becomes my duty to point out the various abuses of the colonial system, so far as they have any natural tendency to keep down the population below its proper level. I am well aware that I am here about to tread on very tender ground. I know that it is imputed to the Abolitionists, that they have endeavoured to excite an unjust clamour against the Colonists by tales of cruelty, which, if not utterly false, or, at least, grossly exaggerated, were, however, individual and rare instances. They have been represented as the rule, it is said, not as the exception, and as fixing a general stigma on all colonial proprietors.

That on a subject naturally calculated to call forth powerfully the feelings of every humane mind, zeal may have carried some of our advocates too far, and made them not sufficiently discriminate between particular cases of ill-treatment, and the general system of management, I will not deny. Yet I might, perhaps, retort the accusation, and object, in my turn, that our opponents have not in general acknowledged even the particular cases of cruelty, and joined with us in reprobating them; but that the facts themselves have been denied, as if it were really the common cause of the Colonists, in which all were to stand or fall together.

Yet, surely, any one who considers how great, even in men of rank and education, have ever been the abuses of absolute power; who recollects, besides, that in the West Indies, Slaves of inferior value are of very low price, and consequently, that any man who possesses a horse in this country might possess a Slave in that, would be sure that individual instances of cruelty must frequently occur. Let any one who should be inclined to pause on this position, consider how that noble animal, the horse, is too often treated in the face of day, in the very streets of the capital of this civilized country. But for myself I can truly declare, that I cannot be justly charged with having insisted on particular cases of West Indian cruelty. On the contrary, I have uniformly abstained from whatever could provoke or irritate the Colonists, as far as was possibly consistent with justice to the cause. I have sometimes even doubted whether the cause may not have suffered from my abstinence.

But, in justice to my own character, let me declare, that I have observed this line of conduct, not merely from interested motives, that our opponents might not be heated into still stronger opposition, but from feelings of a more generous nature. I have borne in mind, that the present generation of West Indian proprietors are not the first settlers of the colonies, or the first maintainers of the Slave Trade; excepting, however, the formers of the new settlements, which, alas! have been made to a prodigious extent within the last sixteen years. The older proprietors inherited their estates as we in Britain inherited ours; and must we not expect them to be naturally tinctured with the prejudices arising out of their circumstances and situations, since it is almost as difficult to be exempted from the operation of these in the moral world, as for natural productions not to possess the peculiar qualities and flavour of their climate and soil.

But, speaking generally, for the absentees I feel above all other proprietors; many of them born and educated in the mother country, and therefore possessing all the principles, sympathies, and feelings which belong to our state of society. They are most of them ignorant of the real state of things in the colonies; they naturally give credit to the accounts which they receive from their agents and correspondents. They often, I doubt not, in some cases I know, they send over orders to their managers to treat their Slaves with the utmost humanity and liberality. There are among them, men who consider the Slaves whom they inherit, as a family of unfortunate men, with whose protection and comfort Providence has charged them, and whose well-being they are therefore bound, by the highest obligations, to promote.

Far therefore be it from me to throw out a general reproach against the whole West Indian body. In this case indeed, as in others of a similar nature, the more the general mass is liable to any taint, the more to be found exempt from it, is honourable. Surely those proprietors whose own consciences acquit them of all inhumanity, nay more, whose general conduct bears testimony to their kind and liberal feelings towards these unfortunate dependants, ought rather to aid our endeavours to reform the existing abuses, than to strive, by interposing their character, to shield them from the view, and, by so doing, to promote their continuance.

Let the West Indians of more enlarged and generous minds join me rather in examining into the vices of the existing system, more especially into those which have hitherto obstructed the increase of the Negro population. But to lay before you the various proofs which could be adduced of those abuses, would require a volume, and that not a small one. Want of time, therefore, will compel me to take a very cursory view of this very important part of my subject. I must content myself with specifying the chief abuses, referring generally for the proofs of them, to authentic, but too often voluminous documents.

It might alone however be sufficient, to establish the positions for which I shall contend, to refer you to a recent and most valuable publication, the work of a professional planter. The author was from the first an active and able opponent of the Abolitionists. But being a man of truth and candour, he has at once furnished a strong argument in support of their cause, and an invaluable service to his brethren, the planters, by not only stating the prevalent vices of the existing system, but by relating the remedies of them, which he himself applied, and the reforms by which, however inadequate, he acquired, in a few years, a large fortune, while at the end of that time, he had the satisfaction to see the number of his Slaves rapidly and greatly increased.

Actuated by motives at once benevolent and patriotic, desirous of mitigating the sufferings of the Negroes, and of directing the planters to those judicious and salutary reforms which would be found in the end to have been not more humane than politic, he addressed publicly his West Indian brethren, by whom, both from his general character for understanding and experience, he was naturally much respected, and among whom he was entitled to the more credit for having been among the foremost to repel the attack of the Abolitionists. But it was impossible to address the planters publicly, without his work being at the same time read by the friends of abolition. He must be on his guard therefore, lest he should afford a triumph to the latter by laying open the various evils of the West Indian system in their full extent. He had obviously a most difficult task to perform; and it is no more than justice to say that few men ever performed a difficult task with more ability. It is impossible, however, to peruse his work without perceiving in every page that he felt extremely embarrassed, by wishing to suggest the most salutary remedies without letting the world know too much of the disease. He writes like a man who on the one hand is conscious that he is prescribing to a patient who is very liable to take offence, and who wishes on the other not to disparage the reputation of the system of management which had been pursued by the former practitioner. Hence he rather hints a fault, and hesitates dislike, than speaks out plainly. We ought to bear in mind the author’s peculiar situation, and its effects, during our perusal of his work, or we shall form a very inadequate idea of the real strength of the various abuses, from the soft colouring with which he paints them.

The increase a subordinate object of attention.

And here I ought to commence with stating, as a grand and universally operative cause why the numbers of the Slaves did not increase more rapidly, that their increase was not made in general a primary object of attention. Here also there were individual instances of a contrary sort, but still the position is generally true. The dependance for keeping up the stock of Slaves was placed not on the increase to be obtained by births, but on the power of purchasing from time to time from the Slave market. This was abundantly proved by positive evidence; nay, even by the express declaration of the managers and overseers themselves; but it was established perhaps still more decisively, by its being almost invariably found that the most intelligent West Indians, who were the most fully acquainted with every other particular of the system, were commonly utterly ignorant of all that related to this important topic. On this head, their minds were a mere blank, wholly unfurnished with any of those particulars with which they must have been familiar, had the increase of their Negroes been any great object of their care. Even medical men, though perfect adepts in all which regarded planting, appeared quite at a loss, when questions were asked of them connected with the breeding and rearing of children.

In some instances, even the colonial statutes have been framed on the same principles, and an annual poll-tax has been laid on Negro Slaves from their earliest infancy.

It is not however, that I impute even to the managers, much less to the proprietors of West Indian estates, that they entered into any grave and minute comparison between the breeding system on the one hand, and the working down and buying system on the other, and that they deliberately gave the preference to the latter as the most economical, in the full view of all its horrid consequences; but the truth is, that under all the circumstances of the West Indian colonies, it was perfectly natural that the buying rather than the breeding system should be pursued; nay, reasoning from experience, I had almost said, it was scarcely possible that the case should be otherwise, for it was a mode of proceeding which resulted from causes of sure and universal operation. Mr. Hume has clearly proved the truth of this position, in his celebrated Essay on the populousness of ancient nations; and he himself, after stating why the buying system had been preferred among the ancients, applies the reasoning to our Trans-Atlantic colonies, and speaks of the confirmation which his doctrine receives, from the maxims of our planters, as a known and acknowledged fact.[^[21]] From the operation of similar causes, buying rather than breeding Slaves became the general policy, among the nations of antiquity; and hence it will infallibly continue the general policy in the West Indies, so long as a Slave market remains open for a purchaser’s supply.

Will not they, who might hesitate to adopt this position, be disposed at least to deem it probable, when they hear, that, notwithstanding all the steps which have been taken, for so many years, towards the abolition of the Slave Trade; even yet, the price of women Slaves continues, as it has always been, inferior to that of men. This is the more curious, because our opponents have uniformly alleged their not having a due proportion of females, as a primary cause of their not keeping up their numbers. It is obvious, that this is a cause which could, at the utmost, only exist among the imported Africans, and that there would be the usual proportion of males and females among the Slaves born in the islands, which, in all but the new settlements, constitute beyond all comparison the bulk of the Black population. What then can shew more clearly, that the planters do not, even yet, set themselves in earnest to produce an increase by breeding, than that, under an exaggerated impression of the effects of importing a too small proportion of females, and with a probability, at least, of abolition before their eyes, they suffer it to continue the interest of the Slave merchant, in preference to bring over males.

Vices of the West Indian system:—Insufficient feeding.

I must begin my enumeration of the abuses of the West Indian system, by mentioning insufficient feeding. It must be granted, indeed, that in this particular, the Slaves are very differently circumstanced in different islands. In the larger island of Jamaica, for instance, and in Dominica, wherein the Slaves can be chiefly fed by provisions produced on the estate, their quantity of food is far more ample than in those islands where the land is so valuable, that little or none of it can be spared for this service; where also the droughts are so frequent and great, that the Negroes own provision grounds furnish but a very precarious and scanty supply. It might be sufficient to mention, that the allowance of provisions alleged to have been commonly given to the working Slaves, in most of the Leeward Islands, was not above half the quantity which, by an act of Assembly, lately passed in Jamaica, was required to be given to such runaway Slaves as, having been taken up, were lodged in prison till they could be returned to their masters. A prison allowance is not meant to be such as will pamper the body; yet double the food given in the former case to the working Negroes, was prescribed for a Slave in prison, who had nothing to do. I might also mention that acknowledged truth, that during the five or six months of crop time, when the labour is the most severe, the Slaves uniformly become much stouter and fatter, from the nourishment derived from the cane juice.

But as time will not allow me to prove the point completely, let me abstain from an imperfect enumeration of arguments, and satisfy myself with affirming, that I am fully warranted by the very respectable authority just now alluded to, in placing insufficient feeding among the general vices of the West Indian system; though in Jamaica, and in some of the other islands, the lands allotted to the Slaves for raising their food is sufficient, had they but time enough for working it.[^[22]] I will only remark farther, that in America, where the Slaves increase so rapidly, the quantity of food allowed to the Negroes was vastly greater than the largest West Indian allowance.

Defects in point of clothing and lodging.

Clothing and lodging are, in the West Indian climate, less important particulars; yet in them too there is room for improvement, as there is also in the point of medical care. |Overworking.| Overworking is a still more important hindrance, in which perhaps the excess in the continuance of the labour, is more injurious than in its intensity. And here I might call in Mr. Long as a witness, from whose experience on this head there ought to be no appeal. The passage is well worthy of attention: “I will not deny that those Negroes breed the best, whose labour is least, or easiest. Thus the domestic Negroes have more children than those on penns, and the latter than those who are employed on sugar plantations. If the number of hogsheads, annually made from any estate, exceeds, or even equals, the whole aggregate of Negroes employed upon it, but few children will be brought up on such estate, whatever number may be born. But, where the proportion of the annual produce is about half a hogshead for every Negro, there they will, in all likelihood, increase very rapidly; and not much less so, where the ratio is of two hogsheads to every three Negroes, which I take to be a good mesne proportion.” Does it not then indisputably follow, that where the Slaves diminish, it is owing to the labour being disproportionate to their strength?

Moral defects of the West Indian system.

But of all the vices of the West Indian system which tend to prevent the increase, those which may be termed the moral vices and preventives, are those on which I must insist most strongly, and on which also I must dwell more particularly, because even by benevolent and liberal minds they have been too generally neglected. These are of all others the most efficient; since, in their consequences, they naturally produce the existence, or at least the aggravation of all the rest. Of these let me first specify the practice of polygamy, and much more the almost universal dissoluteness and debauchery of the Negro Slaves. These are evils which have been almost always assigned by the West Indian gentlemen themselves, as the grand obstacle to the production and rearing of children. And yet, strange as it may seem, no attempts whatever appear to have been made, excepting by three or four enlightened and liberal proprietors, to reform these abuses. Can a more decisive proof be afforded, either that the increase of the Negroes was never any serious object of general attention, or that the prejudices and passions of men often make them act contrary to their clear and known interest? |Neglect of religious instruction.| No efforts have been made for the religious instruction and moral improvement of the Negroes, and any plans of that kind, when adopted by others, have been considered as chimerical, if not dangerous. This is the more extraordinary, because an example on a large scale, has been of late years furnished in the little Danish islands, and in one settlement, at least, of our own smaller islands, of the happiest effects resulting from such endeavours: so that men of great knowledge and experience in West Indian affairs, in estimating the effects of the labours of the missionaries, who were employed in this benevolent service, by a pecuniary standard, declared, that a Slave, by becoming one of their converts, was worth half as much more than his former value, on account of his superior morality, sobriety, industry, subordination, and general good conduct.[^[23]]

In the French islands, likewise, the religious instruction of the Slaves was an object of very general care; and the intelligent West Indian Writer before alluded to, frankly declares, “that no person who has visited the French islands can deny, that in consequence of the improvements derived from this source, their Slaves are incomparably better disposed than our own.” This is no singular opinion, and the Governor of Dominica stated an undeniable truth, when, in answer to the queries sent out by his Majesty, he declared, that “he was satisfied it was principally from this cause (of religious instruction), that the French Slaves were, in general, better, more attached, more contented, more healthy, more cleanly than ours.” Their greater attachment and contentment are the more worthy of remark, because it is pretty generally agreed, that they were treated with more severity, and worked harder than our own.

In the Portuguese settlements also, and probably in the Spanish likewise, the religious instruction of the Slaves has ever been regarded as a concern of high importance.

Might we not then have expected that our own West Indian Proprietors would be prompted, not only by considerations of self-interest, but by motives of a still higher order, to pay some attention to the religious instruction of their Negroes? Might not mere humanity have enforced the same important duty? Might we not have hoped, that the Slaves of this Protestant and free nation, might have had some compensation made to them, for the evils of their temporal bondage, by a prospect being opened to them of a happier world hereafter, a world of light and liberty? But, alas! no such cheering prospects are pointed out to them. It is left, alas! to Paganism to administer to them, I had almost said happily, a faint imitation of that more animating hope which Christianity should impart; and these poor beings are comforted by the idea, that death will once more restore them to their native land; on which account it is, that, as we learn from most respectable testimony, the negro funerals in the West Indies are seasons of joy and triumph, whereas in Africa, they are accompanied with the usual indications of dejection and sorrow.[^[24]]

|Degradation of the Negro race.|

But though this neglect of the religious and moral instruction of the Slaves, so manifestly leading to the master’s immediate interest, may surprize on the first view, the problem will be completely solved on a farther insight into the system of management; and the mischief may be traced, if I mistake not, to a sure source of numerous and most malignant evils. |Degradation of the Negro race.| For the various moral defects of the negro system appear to me often to be almost entirely caused, and always to be extremely augmented, by the Negroes, as a race, being sunk into the lowest state of degradation.

That this was to be naturally expected, will be obvious to every reflecting mind, which considers, that, for many successive generations, the Negroes have not only been an inferior cast, a race of slaves, the slaves too of men enjoying themselves, political freedom, and therefore elevated above them to a still higher point; but that there is a variety of circumstances, not forgetting that most important particular of colour, all tending powerfully to designate, and stamp them, as a peculiar, and that a base and degraded order of beings.

These are considerations of inexpressible importance; for these are they, which, by extinguishing sympathy, render the yoke of African slavery so peculiarly galling, and make it press on the West Indian Slave with such aggravated weight. |West Indian compared with ancient slavery.| Slavery, we know, existed among the ancients; and according to the savage maxims of Pagan warfare,(too strikingly agreeing with the mode of carrying on war which the Slave Trade has produced in Africa), not only the soldiery of an enemy, but the peaceable inhabitants of conquered countries were commonly sold as Slaves. But what an idea does it convey of the abhorred system, which, with coadjutors abler than myself, I have been so long endeavouring to abolish; that, just as in Africa, it has forced Christianity to acknowledge the superior power of Mahometanism, in rooting out the native superstitions, and in instructing and civilizing the inhabitants—so in our possessions in the western Hemisphere, it combines the profession of the christian faith with a description of slavery, in many respects more bitter in its sufferings, than that which the very darkness of Paganism itself could scarcely tolerate.

This is the more grievous to those who duly venerate and love our most pure and excellent form of christian faith, because to have first mitigated the evils of slavery, and at length in a great degree to have abolished the institution itself, have been numbered among the peculiar glories of Christianity;[^[25]] and because, what we deem a corrupted system of Christianity, has produced highly beneficial effects on the negro Slaves of our Roman Catholic neighbours in the same quarter. I cannot now enlarge on this topic; but thus much I must state, that the single particular, that the Slaves among the ancients were in general of the same complexion, features, and form, with their masters, was of itself a consideration of extreme importance. These masters were aware their situation was one, into which they themselves might be reduced by the fortune of war: this circumstance, together with the frequent elevation of Slaves to occupations of the highest confidence and importance, with a prospect, frequently realized, of emerging by emancipation into a state of liberty and comfort, was sufficient to render their condition infinitely preferable to that of our West Indian Slaves.[^[26]] In the case of ancient slavery, instead of there being no place for sympathy, it was often in lively exercise; but even still more, hope was not extinguished; hope, the cordial drop of life, that on which, perhaps, more than on all which rank, and wealth; and power, and prosperity can give, depends the happiness of man. But to the West Indian Slave, on the contrary, his colour, his features, his form, his language, his employment, all tend on the one hand to extinguish sympathy, and on the other to shut him up as it were close and bound in his dreary dungeon, without a ray of light, without a chance of escape, the victim at once of degradation and despair.

Can it be necessary for me, in order to justify myself for dilating on so invidious a topic as that of the degradation of the negro race, to insist on the important effects which this degradation must necessarily produce in all the various particulars of negro treatment? |Important effects of Negro degradation.| Let me not here be misunderstood. The degradation of which I shall speak, and of which, while it continues, I must ever speak in terms of indignation, as of a gross infraction on the just claims of our common species, is not to be regarded as important, only, or chiefly, in the view of its being an outrage on the feelings of the Negroes themselves. If that were all, I might perhaps be charged with over-refining, and with measuring the opinions and feelings of the Slaves by a standard justly applicable only to men of far more enlightened and elevated minds. Though, even in this view, what an idea does it convey to us of their wretched state! How scanty must be their stock of comforts, when their very happiness is to arise from their being insensible to circumstances of humiliation, which all but a brute must understand and feel.

Hitherto it has been deemed one of the most debasing effects of slavery, to render men insensible to the extremity of their own degradation; and it is a new way of considering things to regard this insensibility as an alleviation of their wretchedness. But, alas! this degradation makes itself but too intelligible to the meanest capacity, and the most unfeeling heart. Its effects are such as come home at every turn to the Negroes’ “business and bosoms.”

Surely it would be a waste of time to prove to you in detail, that, throughout all nature, but especially in the human species, in proportion as any being is considered as possessing a higher or a lower place in the scale of existence, in that same proportion shall we be disposed to consider him as entitled to a larger share of our kind consideration; in short, in the same proportion will sympathy be awakened in his behalf, and sympathy is the great author and cherisher of every benevolent emotion. In that same proportion shall we be inclined to reflect on his situation, to spare his feelings, to multiply his comforts; in short, to pour, even though with a cautious hand, some drops of comfort into a cup, which, at best, must be but bitter, and of which, wherever sympathy is in exercise, we feel that we ourselves might have been fated to drink. Whatever, therefore, tends to depress that wretched class of our fellow creatures, beneath that low level which in any case they are doomed to occupy, tends compendiously and infallibly to the counteraction of every thing good, and the aggravation of every thing evil, in their unhappy lot.

Let it not then be thought, that in the odious recital which will follow, I am influenced by any invidious or ungenerous feelings towards the colonial Proprietors. I have a solemn duty to discharge, and however painful the task, however invidious, however liable to misconstruction, I must not shrink from it. It may be enough, I hope, to touch on the chief humiliating particulars.

Instances of degradation.

And, first, comes in that most degrading spectacle of a negro sale.

A negro sale.

Mr. Edwards himself acknowledges with frankness and liberality, that “there is something extremely shocking to a humane and cultivated mind, in the idea of beholding a numerous body of our unfortunate fellow creatures in captivity and exile, exposed naked to public view, and sold like a herd of cattle.”[^[27]] But the account given of one of those sales by a late traveller, in his highly instructive and interesting work,[^[28]] will convey a more precise idea of the scene:—“The poor Africans, says he, who were to be sold, were exposed naked, in a large empty building like an open barn. Those who came with intention to purchase, minutely inspected them; handled them, made them jump, and stamp with their feet, and throw out their arms and their legs; turned them about; looked into their mouths; and, according to the usual rules of traffic with respect to cattle, examined them; and made them show themselves in a variety ways, to try if they were sound and healthy. All this was distressful and humiliating; but a wound still more severe was inflicted on the feelings, by some of the purchasers selecting only such as their judgment led them to prefer, regardless of the bonds of nature and affection.”

“The husband was taken from the wife, children separated from their parents, and the lover torn from his mistress.”

“In one part of the building was seen a wife clinging to her husband. Here was a sister hanging upon the neck of her brother. There stood two brothers enfolded in each others arms, mutually bewailing their threatened separation. In other parts were friends, relatives, and companions, praying to be sold to the same master, using signs to signify that they would be content with slavery, might they but toil together.”

“Silent tears, deep sighs, and heavy lamentations, bespoke the universal suffering of these poor Blacks. Never was the scene more distressful. Among these unhappy, degraded Africans, scarcely was there an unclouded countenance.”

To the honour of the Legislature of Jamaica, the consolidated Slave Act, which passed in 1788, contained a proviso, which Mr. Edwards himself subsequently endeavored to carry into more complete effect, that, as far as possible, there should be no separation of the different branches of the same family. I might remark that such a law, from the very nature of the case, would be very imperfectly executed. But even where no such humane condition has been prescribed, let me observe, that it is not so much to my present purpose to notice the violence done to the domestic and social feelings of the Slaves, as to point out the tendency which the whole scene must have, to degrade and vilify the wretched beings in the eyes of the spectators.

Sales of Negroes for Owners’ debts.

It is another particular in the situation of these poor creatures, which should here be noticed; that they are personal estate, or moveable property, and that hence they are liable to be seized and sold for their Owner’s debts. This operates the more unfavourably towards them, because, in the West Indies, there is always a more rapid change of property than in any other country; and never has there been more speculation, never more general difficulty and distress, consequently never more seizures and sales, than during the last twenty or thirty years.

These continual sales, often commonly by auction, not only of recently imported, but of homeborn and long-settled Negroes, are productive of the most acute sufferings to the Slaves, by tearing open, in the Africans, the old wounds, which might after many years have closed, and by forcing them once more from their homes, their families, and connections, when they had perhaps taken root in their West Indian soil, and multiplied their domestic and social holdings. These transplantations, besides, greatly tend to lessen the little disposition which the Slaves, circumstanced as they are, naturally feel, to endeavour to gain a good character, and obtain a master’s confidence, in the hope that they and their families may possess a place in his esteem. There is an object which it is obvious will operate most severely in the case of the most industrious and best-conditioned Slaves. In proportion as they are of this character, they are likely to have multiplied their domestic and friendly relations, and in and about their dwelling-places to have collected such little comforts as have been within their reach, and as have tended to cause home to present, even to them, an idea of consolation and refreshment. But all of them have some home, all have some relatives and acquaintances. From all these they are hurried away, often necessarily separated from the closest of all connections. They are sent, probably, to form new settlements, when, perhaps, past the prime of life, and to encounter hardships, and endure labours, to which their bodily strength is scarcely equal.[^[29]] At least they have to form a new home, new connections, new attachments; and, when the best of their days have now been spent in vain, how must the spirits, even of the well disposed, sink within them, under the consciousness that they have to recommend themselves to a new master, when, from the mere decay of their bodily powers, they cannot hope, by the alacrity and vigour of their services, to obtain any considerable share of notice or esteem; or when, if at an earlier period of life, they are discouraged from attempting it, by the probability, that ere long they may again be transferred to a new owner.

But I wish you not so much to keep in view the deep wounds which the happiness of the Slaves must sustain from these frequent sales. It is to my present purpose to consider their effect in accustoming men to disregard their comforts and feelings. It is impossible but that such incidents must tend powerfully, and in various ways, to vilify and degrade the Blacks in the general estimation, and hence to produce an habitual disregard to their comforts and feelings.

It may be proper to state, that it was urged by our West Indian opponents, that the grievance we have been now considering, may fairly be laid to the charge of the British Parliament, having been sanctioned by a statute passed in the time of George the Second, for the security of the creditor in the mother country. The West Indian legislatures, it was added, were bound not to enact any provision contrary to the laws of England, and were therefore forced to endure this cruel and pernicious law.

It would not be difficult to shew that this charge is not well founded; but it may suffice, for the present, to remark, that, even granting that the effect of the 5th of Geo. 2d was such as is here supposed, yet that Slaves were not for the first time rendered by that law personal property, and liable to be sold separate from the land for the payment of the simple contract debts of the Master. They have always been in that wretched state. Still more it might truly be alleged, that the Legislature of this country was utterly ignorant of the effect of the law on the happiness of the Negroes, and not even a hint was dropped on that subject by any one of the many West Indian Gentlemen in Parliament; and, when the mischievous effects of the statute were explained, Parliament immediately and unanimously consented to the very first proposal which was made for repealing it. We do not find however, that the West Indian legislatures have availed themselves of the acknowledged right of rescinding it, which they now enjoy. Supposing therefore, what is not however the fact, that, in this instance only, the British Parliament and the Colonial legislatures, the former utterly ignorant of all the practical evils resulting to the Slaves from the law in question, the latter having them daily before their eyes, to have been both parties to the wrong; we have at least done our part towards redressing the injury; they have not done theirs.

The universal practice of working under the whip.

The next particular which must be mentioned, is, like all the rest, at once an evidence and an effect of the degraded state of the Negroes. It is that universal and established practice of working them under the whip like cattle.[^[30]] And here is it possible for any one not to feel peculiarly shocked at the idea of working females in this method; the consequence of which must unavoidably be, that notwithstanding the immunities which may be allowed in more advanced stages of pregnancy, or even as soon as a woman is known to be in that state, yet that females will in fact be often worked in this mode, at times, and under circumstances, when Nature peculiarly calls for forbearance, tenderness, and support. Let me repeat, that it is not civilization merely, and politeness, as sometimes happens in the case of artificial wants; it is Nature herself, which, in such circumstances, claims some sympathy and indulgence. And is this a time, are these circumstances, in which a female should be urged to her labour by the stroke, or even the crack of the whip? To view the practice in a mere mercenary view, surely if the West Indian Gentlemen had been seriously and earnestly intent on superseding the necessity of purchasing from the Slave market, by rearing Negroes on their own estates, the younger women at least, if employed in field-work at all, would not be worked in this rude and undistinguishing manner, when a single inconsiderate lash of the driver’s whip, intended not as a punishment, but as a quickener, or a memento, may in its consequences, prevent the birth of a future infant. Surely I need not enlarge on this disgusting topic, or enumerate in detail the various evils which must result from so hateful a practice; it’s tendency greatly to lessen, if not almost utterly to extinguish in the Slaves, all honest, I had almost said, all mercenary emulation or competition, all the hopes of obtaining a master’s approbation and confidence; it’s admitting no occasional remissions of labour, afterwards to be compensated by increased exertions; it’s making no allowance for different states of mind or body; but, without inquiry as to these, as the post-horse is to go through his stage, so the Slave under the same impulse is to keep up with his fellows: In short, it’s utter forgetfulness of mind in the human subject, who is thus considered and treated as of an inferior species, as not capable of being worked upon by the ordinary motives of the hope of reward, or even the fear of punishment; as one who, like the vilest of the brute species, has no foresight or recollection, and must therefore be subjected to the same humiliating regimen.

Cruel and indecent public punishments of Slaves.

Another particular, concerning which I am doubtful whether it ought to be noticed chiefly as a cause of the degradation of the Negro race, or as an evidence and effect of that degradation, is the cruel, and, in the case of the female sex, still more the highly indecent punishments inflicted in places of public resort, and in the face of day. Unless the feelings of sympathy towards Blacks, as fellow creatures, or of decency respecting them as of our own species, were not, to so great a degree, extinct, such exhibitions would not be continued, if from no better motive, yet because they would counteract their own effect, when they were the execution of a public sentence, by interesting all beholders in favour of the criminal, and bringing, to use the phrase of our law, the Government into hatred and contempt; or because, when they were punishments ordered by a master or mistress, besides probably producing a riot, they would render those who ordered them the subject of general obloquy. But, regarded as Blacks now are by the bulk of the population, there seems to have been no fear lest public executions, by the most cruel and protracted tortures, should be matter of public scandal. As for the punishments of Owners, when General T. saw the shameless and cruel flogging, on the public parade, of two very decent women, who, while waiting at table where he was visiting, had been ordered by their mistress, in spite of his expostulations, to go with the Jumper (or public Flogger), to receive a dozen, each stroke of which brought flesh from them, we do not find that the incident excited any surprize or attention in any one but the General himself.[^[31]] If such could be the treatment sanctioned by public opinion, and general feeling, of decent young women, publicly and in the face of day, what consideration would be likely to be paid to the comforts and feelings of the field Negroes, who are regarded as a far inferior race to the domestics, especially when there are no officious bystanders to witness what may take place.

Let me but ask, what must be the effect necessarily produced on the mind from having been habituated to such scenes as these from early infancy? Can we be surprized to hear that, too often, even the delicacy and tenderness of the female sex is not proof against the natural consequences of daily beholding such spectacles?[^[32]] Should we not be almost prepared to find, the particular which I confess has ever most deeply affected my mind as being of all others the most decisive proof of the utter vileness and degradation of the Negro race, |Other signs of degradation.| that utter contempt which too generally prevails of their social and domestic feelings; that they are too commonly regarded as below instruction, below the range of moral precepts and prohibitions, below the sphere of the obligations, duties, restraints, and comforts of conjugal, domestic, and social life.

Hence, doubtless, proceeds their being in some degree regarded, like their fellow brutes, as below the necessity of observing towards others the proper decencies of life, or of having these decencies observed by others towards them. Hence, while Mr. Parke assures us, that in Africa, adultery is not more frequent than in this country, we hear the most respectable Colonists treat the very idea of introducing marriage among the Slaves, in their present state, as perfectly hopeless or ridiculous.

Do we not here find the explanation of that strange phenomenon, formerly mentioned, that while the prevalence and evils of dissoluteness are universally acknowledged, scarcely any one thinks of applying that which has already appeared from experience so safe, so appropriate, and so beneficial a remedy?

Inadequate legal protection.

But it is time to pass to another most important particular, which, like those already mentioned, is at once both cause and effect, both an evidence and a consequence of degradation—the inadequate protection afforded to the Slaves by the laws.

Here again let me not be misunderstood. It is not the matter of my present complaint, that, from the inadequate penalties annexed to the ill-treatment of Negro Slaves, and that still more from the evidence of black and coloured men not being admissible, they are subject to the restraints of civilized society, without being partakers of its benefits. Much might be said, much has been said, to prove how insufficiently they are secured by the laws against injuries and insults. On the other hand, considerable stress, too has sometimes been laid on the mildness of the penalties where the offences of Slaves were to be punished, and still more on the laws which have from time to time been passed for the protection of Slaves. The former assertion might be but too effectually disproved, by appealing to various passages in the Colonial statute book; and, where admitted, the lenity might be traced to a cause less generous than disinterested humanity. It might have been suggested to one of the most powerful of our colonial opponents, who urged that capital executions of Slaves had taken place in very few instances, that they might naturally be expected to be more rare, and punishments in general more lenient, where men’s own property would suffer from severity.

Concerning all laws for the protection of the Slaves, it might be justly remarked, that so far as the protection of Slaves is concerned against ill usage from all but their Masters, it was natural that the Slaves of any man should be protected equally with his cattle, or any other articles of his property; nor did the Slaves, any more than the cattle, owe this protection to the humanity of the legislature. They were protected merely like the rest of his substance.

But as to the far more important consideration, concerning legal protection from the Owner’s ill usage, it is unquestionably true, that be the laws what they may, “so long as the evidence of black or coloured men against whites continues inadmissible,” the latter, in all that respects the treatment of Negroes, are “in a manner put beyond the reach of the law.” Such were the very words in which a much respected Colonial Proprietor, though called as one of our opponents witnesses, acknowledged the important truth.

His testimony on this head was the more worthy of attention, because, besides his long residence in the West Indies, and his known intelligence and habits of observation, he was for some time Chief Justice of one of our islands. He also acknowledged, that till black evidence should be admissible, he knew no possible mode of preventing the most gross infractions of any laws against the ill-treatment of Negroes. The subsequent death of this valuable man is deeply to be regretted; because, with several of his immediate connections, he was exempt from many of the prejudices which, in colonial proprietors, too often obstruct the reform of West Indian abuses.

A remarkable proof was afforded how little the Slaves were regarded as under the protection of law, against their Masters ill usage, by a transaction which took place a few years ago, in one of our oldest sugar colonies, and of which an account is contained in the Privy Council report:

A man, named Herbert, in low circumstances, and of very indifferent character, had been guilty of an act of the most wanton cruelty, which was rendered still more atrocious by being committed against the helplessness of infancy. He had most wantonly and cruelly lacerated the mouth and face of a child six years old, his own Slave, in a shocking manner, and bruised various parts of its little body. The crime happened to be committed under circumstances which admitted of legal proof, and, owing to the benevolent and spirited exertions of a man of legal eminence, who then resided in the neighbourhood, and who himself was able to give decisive evidence, a prosecution was carried on against the perpetrator. The facts were clearly established, and most horrible they were; yet so strange and novel a doctrine did it appear to the jury, that a Master was liable to punishment for any act of cruelty exercised on his own Slave, that, after long consultation, they brought in a conditional verdict, “Guilty, subject to the opinion of the Court, if immoderate correction of a Slave, by his Master, be a crime indictable.” The Court determined in the affirmative; and what was the punishment of this abominable act of barbarity? A fine of forty shillings currency, equivalent to about thirty shillings of our money! This was the more extraordinary, because only two years before, in consequence of some recent acts of abominable cruelty, an Act of Assembly had been passed for the express purpose of preventing barbarities of a similar nature, and a fine of £.500 currency, together with six months imprisonment, had been annexed as the punishment of such offences. But so little were the enactments of law in unison with the general feelings of the bulk of the people, that even after this statute had been passed, not only did a jury doubt whether the most wanton barbarity towards an infant, by its owner, was liable to any punishment; but the idea of calling a Master to account for this ill-treatment of one of his own Slaves created a popular ferment, and a violent cry against the prosecutors of the delinquent, and was resented as a gross and novel infraction of the rights and privileges of ownership. This very Herbert afterwards brought his action against the Provost Marshal, for having taken the poor unoffending boy into his custody, partly that the child might be forth-coming, partly to save him from the violence of his brutal Master. The Provost Marshal, after a long course of judicial proceeding, would have had heavy penalties to pay, had he not got off on a point of law. Herbert was considered as a persecuted man, and became a highly popular character in the community.

But that which renders this incident most of all worthy of remark, is, that unsatisfactory as the issue might appear to us to have been, a detailed account of it, with some other instances too much in the same spirit, was sent over to the Privy Council, by the Council and Assembly of the island, with some apparent satisfaction, as a proof of the protection enjoyed by the Slaves against immoderate punishment or cruelty on the part of their Masters.

Not to insist in this place on the impossibility of enforcing any laws which may be enacted for the protection and comfort of Slaves, a topic on which I may have occasion to say more hereafter, law and slavery are, in their own nature, absolutely and universally incompatible. The Slave’s best protection must ever be found in his Master’s kindness, especially where kindness is combined with affluence; and, by giving to the Slaves a nominal right to definite legal privileges, you only infuse a spirit of discontent into them, and a spirit of suspicion and resentment into their Masters; at least, until the absolute nullity of the law be clearly manifest to both parties. The Master has not the same motives for tenderness, (motives ever powerful in a generous mind) as when all right, all rivalship are excluded, and he knows that his Slaves are given up completely into his power; that they are entirely dependent on his will, and that they must receive every favour as flowing altogether from his spontaneous beneficence. It is not therefore going too far, to affirm, that by destroying, or at least impairing, the force of these feelings, you do the Slave more harm, than can be compensated by any benefit he can derive from the laws.

Considered in the view of its degrading effects.

But to quit this view of the subject, it is the effect, in another direction, of this inadequate protection of the laws, to which I wish to point your particular attention. I wish you to observe the proofs which it affords of the low estimate of the Negro race; as well as the tendency which it must have to keep them in their present abject and depressed condition.

But here, instead of quoting passages from the statute books and judicial records of the several islands, which might be objected to, as an unfair test of the opinions and feelings of the present generation, I will extract from a set of papers, laid not long ago before the House of Commons by Government, the account, given from the most respectable authority, of some transactions which have recently taken place, and which shew the degraded state of the Negro race in, excepting Jamaica, the largest and oldest settled of all our West Indian colonies.

Late incidents in Barbadoes.

The Governor of Barbadoes, Lord Seaforth himself, I understand, an old West Indian proprietor, in consonance with the wishes of many respectable inhabitants, endeavoured lately, from the most honourable motives, to procure the repeal of a law which had long been the disgrace of the Barbadoes statute book, and for the rescinding of which an effort had been in vain made a few years before; a law, by which the wilful murder of a Slave was punishable only by a fine of £.15. currency, or about £.11. 4s. sterling[^[33]]. His Lordship therefore sent a message in the common form to the House of Assembly, recommending that an act should be passed to make the murder of a Slave a capital felony. There seems every reason to believe that the Council, or Colonial House of Lords, would gladly have assented to the proposition. But, strange as it may appear to those who are unacquainted with the West Indian prejudices, notwithstanding the time and manner in which the proposition was brought forward, the House of Assembly absolutely refused to make the alteration. But if the bare statement of this fact must shock every liberal mind, how much will the shock be increased, when it is known under what circumstances it was that this refusal took place.

For it happened, that, very recently, several of the most wanton and atrocious murders had been committed. Some of these were accompanied with circumstances of such horrid and disgusting barbarity, as to be too shocking for recital; and yet it scarcely seems justifiable to allow such horrid deeds, from their very atrociousness, to derive impunity. But one of the accounts you must submit to hear, because the narrative contains circumstances which strikingly illustrate the condition and estimation of the Negro race. To myself, to say the truth, it tells me, in the view in which I shall here regard it, nothing more than I already knew; but it was scarcely to be expected that Providence would furnish such undeniable and glaring proofs, of the assertions we had before established by the most respectable testimony.

Extract of a Letter from the Right Hon. Lord Seaforth, to Earl Camden, one of His Majesty’s principal Secretaries of State, dated Barbadoes, 7th Jan. 1805.

“I inclose the Attorney General’s letter to me on the subject of the Negroes so most wantonly murdered. I am sorry to say, several other instances of the same barbarity have occurred, with which I have not troubled your Lordship, as I only wished to make you acquainted with the subject in general.”

It will be enough for me to quote that part of the Attorney General’s letter in which he gives the account of the single murder which I wish to lay before you:

Extract of a Letter from the Attorney General of Barbadoes, to the Governor of the Island.

“A Mr. ——, the manager of a plantation in the neighbourhood, had some months before purchased an African lad, who was much attached to his person, and slept in a passage contiguous to his chamber. On Sunday night there was an alarm of fire in the plantation, which induced Mr. —— to go out hastily, and the next morning he missed the lad, who he supposed intended to follow him in the night, and had mistaken his way. He sent to his neighbours, and to Mr. C—— among the rest, to inform them that his African lad had accidently strayed from him; that he could not speak a word of English, and that possibly he might be found breaking canes, or taking something else for his support; in which case he requested that they would not injure him, but return him, and he would pay any damage he might have committed. A day or two after, the Owner of the boy was informed, that Mr. C. and H. had killed a Negro in a neighbouring gully, and buried him there. He went to Mr. C—— to inquire into the truth of the report, and intended to have the grave opened, to see whether it was his African lad. Mr. C—— told him, a Negro had been killed and buried there; but assured him it was not his, for he knew him very well, and he need not be at the trouble of opening the grave. Upon this the Owner went away satisfied. But receiving further information, which left no doubt upon his mind that it was his Negro, he returned and opened the grave, and found it to be so. I was his leading counsel, and the facts stated in my brief were as follow: That C. and H. being informed that there was a Negro lurking in the gully, went armed with muskets, and took several negro men with them. The poor African seeing a parcel of men coming to attack him, was frightened; he took up a stone to defend himself, and retreated into a cleft rock, where they could not easily come at him; they then went for some trash, put it into the crevice of the rock behind him, and set it on fire; after it had burnt so as to scorch the poor fellow, he ran into a pool of water near by; they sent a Negro to bring him out, and he threw the stone at the Negro; upon which the two white men fired several times at him with the guns loaded with shot, and the Negroes pelted him with stones. He was at length dragged out of the pool in a dying condition, for he had not only received several bruises from the stones, but his breast was so pierced with the shot, that it was like a cullender. The white savages ordered the Negroes to dig a grave, and whilst they were digging it, the poor creature made signs of begging for water; which was not given to him, but as soon as the grave was dug, he was thrown into it, and covered over; and there seems to be some doubt whether he was then quite dead.—C. and H. deny this; but the Owner assured me that he could prove it by more than one witness; and I have reason to believe it to be true, because on the day of trial, C. and H. did not suffer the cause to come to a hearing, but paid the penalties and the costs of suit, which it is not supposed they would have done had they been innocent.

I have the honour to be, &c.”

The same transaction, with another far more dreadful murder, in which there was a deliberate ingenuity of cruelty which almost exceeds belief, is related, with scarcely any variation as to circumstances, by the Advocate General, who, as well as the gentleman of whose estate the criminal was the manager, and who was at the time absent, expressed their most lively indignation against such horrid cruelty. After so shocking a recital, lest you should be instinctively urged to be chiefly affected by the barbarity of this horrid transaction, let me once more remind you, that it is not in the view of its cruelty that I wish you to regard the foregoing narrative but in that of the decisive evidence which it affords of the utter degradation of the negro race.

How striking a proof is afforded of this, in the conduct even of the Owner of the boy, the prosecutor of the delinquent, a man too, as the beginning of the story indicates “of kind and liberal feelings.” Can any thing suggest more strongly, that the protection which the Negro Slave receives from the laws, is too often to be ascribed rather to a Master’s care of his property, than to any more generous motive. When he had only reason to believe that a Negro had been killed, and buried out of the way, and not that it was his own Slave, he goes away satisfied. Again, it is a suggestion which the circumstances of the story enforce on us, that the crowd, which was now collected, instead of being shocked at such barbarity, were rather abettors of it; and then we hear, the White Savages, as the Attorney General justly styles them, order the Negroes who were present to dig a grave for their wretched countryman; they knew their state too well to refuse, and accordingly we see them immediately obey the order; yet I confess, that with all my ideas of their sunk and prostrate spirit, I was myself surprized, under all the circumstances, by this promptitude of obedience.

But I have not leisure to deduce half of the important lessons which we are taught by the above horrid recital. Let us pass to the circumstance which is most of all important; because it proves how little we can expect an identity of sympathies and feelings between the Colonists and ourselves: that this and several other murders, some of them attended with circumstances far more shocking, instead of exciting any just commiseration for the Negro race, had actually worked in a contrary direction, and that not merely among the populace, but in a majority of the House of Assembly itself. This is a problem by no means of difficult solution. It is not that the Barbadian (I say it seriously and with sincerity) is less humane, in general, than the inhabitants of other countries; but Negro Slaves are not comprised within the scale of his humanity; or, to be more accurate, they do not assume, in his estimate of things, the rate and value of human beings. Hence, the proposition for punishing a white man capitally for murdering a Slave, appeared to him a punishment as much disproportionate to the crime, as if, in compliance with the opinion of some speculator on the rights of the brute creation, or, of some lover of domestic animals, we were to propose to execute a man in this country for killing a favourite pointer.

One of the other murders supplies so striking an illustration of the nature of this feeling, and of its almost necessary effects in producing a disposition to injury and insult, that, contrary to my original intention, I will lay before you a very brief and summary view of the chief particulars of it.

As a private militiaman was returning home from his duty upon an alarm, with his musket, and bayonet fixed, over his shoulder, he overtook several Negroes returning from their daily labour on the road, and among them, a woman big with child. He began abusing, and threatening to kill them, if they would not get out of the way. Most of them escaped him; but he made after the woman, and, without the least provocation on her part, plunged his bayonet into her, and, as one of the accounts states, very coolly and deliberately stabbed her several times in the breast. Providentially it happened, that a very respectable Gentleman, who was also returning from town, was a witness of the whole transaction. And now comes the curious part of the story; for, when Mr. H. went to him, “spoke harshly to him, and said, he ought to be hanged, for he never saw a more wicked unprovoked murder, and that he would certainly carry him before a magistrate and that he should be sent to gaol;” the man replied, “for what? killing a Negro!”—Some of the accounts state that the man was in liquor; but it is clear from the circumstances, that it was in no such degree as to affect his reason; for neither is this circumstance mentioned by Mr. H. the eyewitness, nor by the magistrate before whom Mr. H., having got assistance, immediately brought him, nor by the President of the Island, before whom, from having no right to commit him, they next carried him. On the contrary, they state distinctly, that the murder was committed in the most wanton, malicious manner, and that he seemed afterwards to be very indifferent about the crime.

It may seem only candid to state the sequel. The President did commit him, though aware that it was a stretch of power; the man’s person was thereby secured, and he remained answerable to the amount both of the King’s fine, £. 11. 4. s. sterling, and of the Negro’s value, for which he was afterwards arrested by the Owner’s representative, and which, as she is stated to have been a valuable Slave, who had five or six children, would be a still larger sum. The man was not worth a shilling, in possession or expectancy, and therefore, as the President adds, may possibly be in confinement for life. It is only due to the President, to add, that in the conclusion of his letter, he expresses himself in terms of the warmest and most indignant feeling, that the Assembly should look on such things with cool indifference, and not provide “that just remedy which has been found productive of no evil in the still larger island of Jamaica, and which, in every other civilized community, is provided by the law, both of God and man.”

Let me subjoin one additional remark, that, but for the circumstance of Mr. H.’s happening to have been at the same time returning from town, this barbarous murder must have remained unpunished for want of evidence. It is fair, also, to acknowledge, that the murder above stated, however horrid, appears (very different, indeed, in that respect, from another shocking incident, which I suppress) to have been an act of wanton insult and contempt, rather than of deliberate cruelty; and to have been precisely such in nature, (though I doubt not, above the ordinary rate of insults in measure) as I have supposed to proceed from a low estimate of Negroes, as such. Hence the criminal’s exclamation, when he was told he deserved to be hanged, and was further threatened with being committed to gaol. For what? he replied; killing a Negro!—Surely I need not add a word—the fact supplies its own inference.

Shall we allege, in behalf of this poor militiaman, that he was, probably, half drunk; that he was a low uneducated man; that it was the exclamation of passion; or that it was suggested by self-preservation or self-defence? But what shall we say, then, for the Assembly of the Island? They consist of men of liberal education, and liberal manners; yet it is grievous to reflect, that their conduct is but too much in the same spirit as that of this militiaman. Their estimation of a Negro is much the same. Hence, on its being proposed to inflict a capital punishment, not on themselves, but on others, for the murder, though attended with the most horrid circumstances, of a Negro, they resent the suggestion, not by a transient and passionate exclamation, but by a deliberate and continued opposition of some years; not unguardedly, not privately, when a man will sometimes hint an opinion he would not avow; but publicly; in opposition to clear explanation; to powerful influence; to eloquent enforcement of the principles of justice and humanity; in opposition, one should have thought, to the natural suggestion of self-interest, and of regard to their own property, when gravely sitting in their capacity of Legislators.

Let me again, however, declare most seriously, that it is not so much of defective, as of misplaced humanity, that I here complain. They had not been used to think and feel concerning Negroes, as concerning their fellow creatures; and to consider that their rights, and comforts, and feelings, were to be protected by the same powerful sanctions. Hence, when it was proposed to inflict a capital punishment for the murder of a Black, their sympathy was excited on the wrong side. They felt, but it was for the offended dignity of a White Man, not for the murdered Negro. The truth is, a certain esprit de corps was now called into action, and all the barbarities of which the wretched Negroes might be the victims, would, in such a temper, and such circumstances (taken, I mean, in connection with such a proposed punishment) serve rather to inflame than to mitigate the general fury. Hence, Lord Seaforth, in another letter, declares, “that though he had received no contradiction of the horrible facts, yet that nothing had given him so much trouble as to get to the bottom of these affairs, so horribly absurd were the prejudices of the people.”

There are no persons, I am persuaded, who will be more shocked by the above transactions than the West Indian Proprietors themselves, and none especially more than those of the very island of Barbadoes, in which these tragedies were acted. They, like other absentee Proprietors, are most of them, I doubt not, almost utterly ignorant of the real state of things in the West Indies; and they will read with equal astonishment and concern, Lord Seaforth’s horrid communication. Let them however remember, these cannot be styled, as some former relations have unjustly been, exaggerations of Abolitionists; but, like Governor Parry’s famous charge against the African Captains, they are the official communication of the Executive Government laid before the House of Commons.

Let them, therefore, join with me, in seriously considering the practical conclusions to be drawn from these shocking incidents, and the remedy which should be applied to such crying evils. Let them not retort, as has been sometimes done, that instances of monstrous cruelty have taken place in this country also. It is true, that even in this land of liberty and humanity, we heard some years ago of an apprentice being starved to death. We heard more recently of a British Governor of an African possession, causing the death of a soldier by excessive punishment. But let us complete the parallel; not only were these crimes punished by the death of the criminals, but here, in Lord Bacon’s phrase, “mark the diversity;” it was difficult to prevent the indignation even of the populace, from anticipating the sentence of the law. In the West Indies, on the contrary, when you begin to talk of punishing capitally far more horrible murders, the sympathy, among the majority of the community, the highest classes excepted, is for the criminal, not for the wretched and innocent sufferer; and that, not merely among low illiterate men, in whom such prejudices might be somewhat less astonishing, but in the House of Assembly of the Island, the body to which it especially belongs to watch over the rights, and which naturally gives the tone, and fixes the standard for the opinions and feelings of the whole community.[^[34]]

Let the absentee Proprietors attend, above all, to this, because it leads to the most important practical conclusions. I have been assured privately, (though the information has not yet been laid before Parliament, and therefore I cannot speak with certainty) that Lord Seaforth has at length been able to carry his point, and to prevail on the Assembly as well as the Council, to make the murder of a Slave a capital offence. In my view of the above transactions, this is a matter of small importance. It will not, I trust, appear uncandid; but I must frankly declare, that had the Assembly originally consented to Lord Seaforth’s recommendation and made the murder of a Slave a capital crime, I should not have admitted it as any proof of their feeling for the Negroes with any tenderness of sensibility. It would only have shewn that there was no apparent want of common humanity, and therefore have belonged to that class of actions, from the performance of which no man arrogates to himself praise, though to be defective in them we consider as blameworthy. For, might we not fairly have questioned whether the members might not be influenced, not so much by motives of benevolence, as by deference for their Governor, by a regard for their character, by a respect for the feelings, call them, if you will, the prejudices, of the more liberal few among their own community; or even by the apprehensions of the effects which their refusal might produce in forwarding the abolition of the Slave Trade? Surely, however, the rejection of the proposition shews, that they not only do not themselves regard the Negroes as entitled to the consideration and treatment due to a human being, considered as such, but that they cannot even persuade themselves that he will be regarded as entitled to them by the world in general.

Supposing, therefore, that Lord Seaforth’s law has passed, and even supposing (what it is far too much to suppose, considering the extreme difficulty, or rather impossibility of obtaining legal proof, if a murderer would be tolerably cautious) that it does prevent absolute murders; yet how wide a range is still left for the exercise of the worst of passions? To this case surely we may justly apply the maxim, and the important lesson which it inculcates may well excuse a trite quotation, “Quid leges sine moribus?” Will such a law, passed contrary to the real wishes, feelings, and judgment, deliberately entertained and repeatedly avowed for many years, change the real estimation of a Black man in the Barbadian scale of being? Or will not rather the contrariety between the law and the feelings of men, be likely to stir up a spirit of indignation and hatred towards the Blacks, which must be productive of innumerable injuries and insults towards the Negro race; while, Black evidence not being admissible, they may be almost always injured and insulted with impunity?

This esprit de corps naturally results from the relative circumstances of Blacks and Whites in a West Indian community; and it is the more operative and pernicious, because with pride, itself a passion sufficiently regardless of the claims and comforts of others, another principle still more pernicious associates itself but too naturally; a principle of fear, arising out of the consciousness of the immense disproportion in number between the Blacks and the Whites. This fear again but too surely gives rise to hatred; and what may not be expected from the effects of an esprit de corps made up of such powerful ingredients? It is not that they who are actuated by it are conscious of these several feelings; but they are not on that account less real or less efficient. This esprit de corps which has long prevailed, was many years ago nearly proving fatal to the life of a most honourable, upright, and resolute Judge, who, in the discharge of his public function, dared to act as duty and conscience prescribed to him. But among the inferior orders of Whites especially, this spirit has been naturally called forth of late years into more lively exercise, by the very efforts which have been made to ameliorate the condition of the Negro race.

I have detained you very long on this topic: but I have dwelt the more largely on the vileness and degradation of the Negro race, because it appears to me to be the grand master vice of the colonial system. If duly considered, and traced into its almost infallible operations, it will establish the prevalence of all the other evils which have been specified; for it is of a nature so subtle and powerful, as to extend its effects into every branch of negro management; and wherever its influence does extend, it has a natural and sure tendency to lessen the enjoyments of the Slaves, and to aggravate their sufferings. If all the various other causes which operate unfavourably on the condition and treatment of the Slaves could be done away, it contains within itself the pregnant source of numerous, most important, and, so long as it continues, incurable mischiefs.

Let me, therefore, once more conjure the West Indian Proprietors to give their due weight to all the foregoing facts and considerations; to observe how low a point in the scale of being is now allotted to the Negro race; and to estimate duly the effects on their treatment, and comforts, and feelings, which must necessarily result from such vileness and degradation. I cannot quit this head without once more assuring them, that it is unspeakably painful to me to appear to be charging the bulk of the resident White population of the West Indies with having too low an estimate of the Negroes as a race, and of the consideration and comforts which are due to them. But the nature of my undertaking renders it my duty to state facts, such as I really believe them to be. If I have fallen into any error, I shall be most willing to correct it, and shall be sincerely thankful to any one who will set me right. But I will frankly own, also, to the resident West Indians, that, judged at the bar of equity and candour, we in this country are more in fault than they in that. Of them it can only be said, that causes of powerful, and, where great numbers of human beings are concerned, of almost infallible operation, have produced their natural effects. We have no such excuse to allege. We have not been familiarized by habit, or misled by interest, or prejudice, or party spirit, into contemplating without pain, a system from which, at first, both they and we must have shrunk back with horror. We cannot allege, that all the consequences, greatly as they are to be deplored, are not such as we might have anticipated with ease, or rather might have predicted with certainty, reasoning from the acknowledged principles both of speculation and experience. Could we not have foretold what would necessarily be the consequences of a system of slavery continued for centuries, where the Slaves, as in the West Indies, were to be of a peculiar race and colour, and under all the other circumstances of the African Negroes? We cannot, at least, plead a prejudice in favour of slavery, in consequence of having long been habituated to its evils. Surely if those who have lived all their lives in Great Britain, are tainted with such a prejudice, they are of all men inexcusable. I repeat it, therefore, we are more criminal than the West Indians, for having suffered such a system to gain an establishment, and to grow to its present size; and we shall be still a thousand times more criminal than they, if, with our eyes at length opened to its evils, we suffer it to continue unreformed.

But though from these considerations, as well as others which have been formerly mentioned, it has been with deep reluctance that I have dwelt on these invidious topics, would it be consistent not only with humanity and justice, but even with common fairness and truth, that transactions like those which have been here stated, when communicated from the highest authority; and, for the instruction and guidance of the British Legislature, laid before the House of Commons, should be suppressed, from any motives of personal delicacy; or if noticed, that just conclusions should not be drawn from them? I am almost fearful that I am wanting to the claims of duty, in not detailing the particulars of a far more horrible narrative, which has also been laid before Parliament. For duties too serious, and even interests too high, for the admission of such an inferior principle as delicacy, are here in question. If such a system must still exist, surely it ought only to be with our fullest knowledge, the result of our most deliberate consideration; not because we are unacquainted with its horrors, from our having instinctively turned away our eyes from objects too painful to be beheld.

Consider if these enormities are too shocking to be seen and heard, what are they to be felt and suffered? When we are thoroughly acquainted with the abuses of the West Indian system, we may, perhaps, be able to mitigate, if we cannot cure them. If policy and interest are still to be admitted as a plea for injustice and cruelty, let us at least not take for granted, as if it were a self-evident truth, what I never can myself believe, that injustice and cruelty must forward the views of policy and interest. Let us scrutinize the evils point by point, and be sure of each individual particular of them which we leave in being, that on grounds of policy and interest it is indispensable. If we are to tolerate such enormous evils, let it be at least by weight and measure; let us deal them out, grain by grain, as absolute necessity shall require; and not in a wholesale way, give our sanction to such a mass of miseries, because the close inspection and scrupulous examination of them shock our delicacy, and wound our humanity. Let us remember what was beautifully said of this last virtue by one, than whom none possessed a larger share; “True humanity consists not in a squeamish ear. It consists not in starting or shrinking at such tales as these, but in a disposition of heart to relieve misery. True humanity appertains rather to the mind than to the nerves, and prompts men to use real and active endeavours to execute the actions which it suggests.”

To this long catalogue of the vices of the West Indian system, there remain yet to be added two others, which tend powerfully to aggravate almost all its various evils.

Absenteeship.

The first is, Absenteeship, particularly of the more affluent Proprietor, who could afford to be liberal, whose presence among his Slaves would naturally produce a sort of parental feeling, and cause him habitually to interest himself in their comfort and improvement; and whose affluence might enable him to carry into effect the plans, whether in the way of exemption or beneficence, which his liberality should devise.

I have not leisure to point out in detail the various bad consequences which follow from the Owner’s absence; but they will naturally occur to any one who will consider the peculiar circumstances of the West Indian Slaves, in connection with this subject.

But let me point out one consequence which has been less attended to than it deserves to be, the unspeakable loss to the society, of that very class of men, not only in the legislature, but in private life also, who, from their rank and fortune, must in general be supposed to have received the best education, and to possess the most enlarged and liberal minds; who consequently would raise the general standard of morals and manners, whose presence, and the desire of being admitted into whose company, would be a check to dissoluteness; who would not only abound themselves in acts of kindness to the wretched Negroes, but who might make liberality popular, and render, more than it now is, the ill-treatment of Negroes disreputable; for I trust it is already so in no small degree, where it is discovered. Many absentee Proprietors, of large property, even if they do, once or twice in their lives, visit their estates; yet, while living in the West Indies, they consider themselves not at home, but only on a visit, and on a visit commonly which is not very agreeable to them, and which, therefore, especially when, as often is the case, constrained by œconomical motives, they mean to end, as soon as they have saved enough to enable them to live again in the mother country in ease and affluence. Hence they are too naturally persuaded to adopt the generally prevailing practice as to feeding and clothing, and other particulars; and, however desirous they may be of introducing a more liberal system, they are easily dissuaded from it, knowing that they shall not be able themselves to superintend the actual observance of their own regulations.

As for the far larger class of absentee Proprietors, who reside constantly in the mother country, though I give them all due credit for benevolent intentions, yet they are commonly precluded by their very ignorance of plantation affairs, from interfering with any confidence, or to any good purpose, in the detail of management. How little they are often acquainted with these particulars, I was not even myself aware till lately, when it appeared, that an old West Indian Proprietor, acknowledged by all who know him to be remarkable for the extent and accuracy of his information, and intimately conversant with all the detail of political and commercial œconomy, was wholly ignorant of its being the universal practice to work the Negroes in their field-work under the whip. This is the more remarkable, because the practice is not a partial or an occasional procedure, but the constant and universal mode; because for several years, men in general in this country, though personally unconnected with the West Indies, had been naturally led to turn their attention to the system of negro management.

I doubt not that the absentee Proprietor directs his manager to treat the Slaves with all due kindness and liberality; yet it must not be conceded with equal readiness, that the orders even of these benevolent Absentees will be faithfully executed. For in supposing this to be the case, we suppose a combination of incidents, and an assemblage of qualities, each of which, unconnected with the others, is sufficiently rare; how much more rare, then, must it be, to suppose them all concurring. We must suppose this benevolent Absentee to be affluent also, that he may be able to give effect to his benevolence. Benevolence, I trust and believe, will generally be found in the higher class of Proprietors; but I fear affluence, in proportion to their rank and way of living, is not so common. Again, we have also to suppose the more rare occurrence, not merely of equal but of far superior benevolence, in a man of inferior rank, fortune, connections, and manners, most probably of inferior education also. We must suppose this man of extraordinary benevolence to select for himself the situation of a manager in the West Indies, a somewhat unlikely choice; and that this benevolent owner, and this still more benevolent manager, happen to come together; I repeat it, still more benevolent, because this quality in the owner, though a generous, is a transient effusion, when the mind is in close contact with its object; or we may assign to it the higher character, of the habitual generosity of a just judgment, and a liberal heart. But such a judgment and such a feeling may often be found in a moment of serious reflection, in men, who from various infirmities, are not practically kind and beneficent in all the homely occurrences of daily life; especially under circumstances in which there are many little trials to be borne, and many vexatious obstacles to be surmounted.

But we are to suppose a manager whose benevolence is of this hardier and firmer kind. It must be a principle ever wakeful and observant; combined with judgment, and improved by experience; the very acquisition of which experience implies the having been long practically conversant with the system. We must suppose also, what is very extraordinary, that this long familiarity with prevailing abuses has not, in any degree, impaired the power to perceive, or the promptitude to redress them. In short, we are to suppose a principle so vigorous as to resist the strongest counteractions, and not only to maintain its existence, but to support a continued activity, under circumstances the most powerfully calculated to impair and destroy it.

But we have not yet done. Besides this extraordinary portion of benevolence, this rare manager must have some other qualities not less uncommon. He must not only have the firmness to dare to be singular, and to expose himself to the imputation of wishing to be thought to have more humanity than his neighbours, a sort of courage the most difficult of all to be found in our days; but, above all, he must resist the consciousness, that in return for all his humane exertions he may be misrepresented to his employer; that, having acquired the character of a visionary schemer, who sends home comparatively small returns, and calls for great expences, he may, in consequence of such representations, be dismissed from his present office, and in vain solicit another. To find such a man, of so much benevolence, combined with so much resolute integrity, must be acknowledged to be no common occurrence. That such a man should be in the precise situation of overseer of a West Indian estate we should still less expect; and that this rare manager should meet with this more than commonly benevolent owner, is a still more curious coincidence. Yet all these expectations must be realized, for an Absentee’s plantation to be regulated as it ought to be, under the present circumstances of the West Indies.

This subject is of such primary practical importance, that I must still be permitted to add one word more. Any man who will consider what his own feelings and temptations would be likely to be, were he the absentee Proprietor of a West Indian estate, will acknowledge the force of my reasoning; and they who may see no reason to suspect themselves, will be precisely those, concerning whom all other men would be apt to entertain the strongest suspicions. Were we ourselves West Indian proprietors, we naturally should wish that the income of our estate might be as large, and the outgoings as small as might be; and though in a benevolent, or rather let me call it, a just mind, this wish would be qualified by the understood condition, that the Slaves should be sufficiently provided for; yet, ever allowing most honourable exceptions to the contrary, that which would in general constitute a manager’s recommendation, which would obtain him a character, would be his increasing the clear profits of the estate. All this depends on principles of universal, infallible, and constant operation. It was the case in Mr. Long’s time. He pointed out to the West Indian Proprietors, in the strongest terms, the mischief done by “overseers,[^[35]] whose chief aim it was to raise to themselves a character as able planters, by increasing the produce of the respective estates; this is too frequently attempted, by forcing the Negroes to labour beyond their abilities; of course, they drop off, and if not recruited incessantly, the gentleman steals away, like a rat from a barn in flames, and carries the credit of great plantership, and vast crops in his hand, to obtain advanced wages from some new employer in another district of the island. The Absentees are too often deceived, who measure the condition of their properties by the large remittances sent to them for one or two years, without adverting to the heavy losses sustained in the production of them.”

Let me likewise again remind the benevolent absentee Proprietor to beware lest he is misled by the ambiguities of language. Let him bear in mind that when he receives from his manager in the West Indies, assurances that his Negroes have sufficient supply of food, and clothing, and medical care; that their work is not unduly hard, nor their treatment unduly rigorous; that sufficient regard is paid to their comforts, and their feelings: Let me again remind him, that this sufficiency is not necessarily estimated by the measure of the claims and wants and feelings of a human being. Of course, I mean to speak only of managers in general. Individuals there are of that class, I doubt not, of a liberality and feeling, which would do honour to any rank. But it must be remembered, that it would be unreasonable to expect them to be exempt from prejudices and feelings, to which they are peculiarly exposed, and which have been so lately proved to prevail in the majority of a body of men like the Assembly of Barbadoes, greatly superior to them in rank, connections, and fortune. If such a prejudice could shew itself also, and exert its influence in the sight of the world, and in the face of so many opposing considerations, how much more must it not be expected to operate, when there is no bystander to witness its acts, and when indolence, self-interest, habit, example, and various other motives, conspire to give effect to it?

Effect of the pressure of the times.

But if, in the way which has been lately stated, the Slaves suffered from absenteeship thirty or forty years ago, for it is so long since Mr. Long remarked the evil, how much must their sufferings have been aggravated in our days, when (this is the second circumstance to which I alluded some time ago) the increased extravagance of the age on the one hand, and the increased price of all articles of consumption on the other, furnish to every man, strong additional inducements for raising his estate to its utmost value? Above all, how powerfully must this principle operate in the case of those whose estates are considerably encumbered with debts? And this, remember, is actually the case of probably nine tenths of all West Indian Proprietors. Here in truth consists the grand obstacle in the way of all those regulations, in the present system, which would call for any additional expenditure in the first instance. Proprietors, whose estates, after paying the interest of their mortgages, leave scarcely enough, in our times of pecuniary difficulty and pressure, for merely decent subsistence, much less sufficient to live upon in the way naturally acceptable to the West Indians, who are, in general, men of liberal and hospitable habits; such Proprietors, so circumstanced, must naturally be endeavouring in every instance to discover the minimum of charge, and the maximum of production. The manager of the estate will not be long in learning this, and his endeavours will be directed to the same objects. The effects of lessening the allowances of the Slaves may not be immediately visible, and he may really conceive that, without injury to them, somewhat may be saved for the master. But I will not pursue this invidious topic into its too obvious consequences. The professional Planter has just sketched a faint outline of some of the effects.[^[36]]

Let me, however, remind all Proprietors who are thus circumstanced, that however inconvenient it may be to them, to increase, for a time, the outgoings, and subtract from the receipts of their estate, to go on as they are now doing, is sure and utter ruin. Will they say, that the course which I recommend, however politic ultimately, yet at the moment, and in their circumstances, deserves no better a name? I must reply, the professional Planter will tell them, that the opposite system of working down their gangs of Negroes, and making them good from the Slave market, is murder added to ruin, murder too in its most painful and shocking, because a protracted form.

The topic on which I have just now touched, so lightly, considering its importance, reminds me of another circumstance, which, in various ways, has a most unfavourable tendency on the treatment and happiness of the Slaves; and which, though it has operated powerfully in the West Indies, has never, perhaps, produced such extensive effects as within the last twenty or thirty years. This is, the buying of West Indian property on speculation. |West Indian speculations injurious to the Slaves.| Wherever this is the principle of purchase, it is for the most part connected with the formation of new settlements, and this is in various ways, some of which have been already specified, productive of unspeakable misery to the Negroes employed in forming them.

But besides this probable class of evils, where any one is engaged in planting speculations, there must naturally be a disposition to regard the undertaking as a mercantile transaction, in which the investiture of capital is to be made as small, and the returns as large as possible; rather than as a landed property, or as (for that is the light in which a West Indian estate ought still more to be considered) as a little sovereignty of a feudal nature, the vassals of which have a claim to their lord’s protection, with whom, therefore, he is instituting a connection of mutual duties, services, and attachments, which is to subsist on both sides through generations yet unborn.

I scarcely need state, that, most commonly, West Indian speculations fail; and in that failure, at whatever number of years it happens, is most probably involved the sale of such of the Slaves as survive, to a new owner. But I must forbear from enlarging on this important topic, and hurry you through what remains of our painful journey. It is a course furnishing, at every moment, numerous and interesting objects: But in the case of the greater part of them, I must be forced to content myself with doing little more than barely pointing them out for your own more deliberate consideration. Other duties now demand my time, and I should be strongly tempted to desist from my undertaking, from the consciousness that in such a brief and hasty progress, I cannot do justice to the great interests which are at stake, if I were not deeply impressed with a sense of the importance of stating at this time, though but imperfectly, the real views and principles of the Abolitionists.

To resume my subject. I have now stated the chief vices of the present West Indian system. But before I quit the discussion concerning West Indian abuses, |Admirals and other most respectable witnesses gave evidence of the good treatment of Slaves.| I might appear wanting in justice to the cause, and even in deference towards many gentlemen of high respectability, if I were not to acknowledge, that the condition and treatment of the Negro Slaves were painted in colours which were almost a direct contrast to all which have been here used, by several West Indian Proprietors of great consideration and affluence; and still more by several persons of high rank, who resided for some time in the West Indies, either in a naval and military capacity, or, in some few instances, as governors of islands.

It is no disparagement to the characters of these justly respected men, to affirm, that this was not the stage which they trod to the most advantage. It is due to them however, to say, in general, that they came forward from the impulse of grateful and generous feelings. While in the West Indies, they had been treated with that liberality and kindness which strangers never fail to experience in those hospitable islands. If they visited a country plantation, it was commonly on a scheme of pleasure; every countenance around them was lighted up with cheerfulness and gaiety; they themselves naturally partook of the same feelings, and looked on every object with a good-humoured eye.

But even when a longer residence afforded more ample means of acquiring information, they looked down from an elevation far too high to allow of their having a just perception of the state and circumstances of the poor depressed Negro Slaves. It will not, I trust, be deemed disrespectful treatment of men, towards whom, in common with their countrymen, in general, I feel great respect and gratitude, to say, that they came forward under the influence of strong prejudices. And who needs be told of the wonder-working powers of prejudice, in colouring, adding to, or subtracting from the scene which it contemplates? What can render this more apparent, than that they had come to a conclusion, without touching on the premises on which it must depend. They expressed a decided opinion, that the abolition must ruin the Colonies; an opinion which, it is obvious, must necessarily depend on the practicability of keeping up, or increasing, the stock of Slaves; and yet on the latter point they had formed no opinion. In others of their statements, the effects of prejudice were not less visible.

In truth, it scarcely needs be remarked, that these respectable visitors could know very little of the general treatment of the Negroes, of their allowance of food, and ordinary amount of labour, and still less of the temper and disposition of the manager, on which so much must depend. If he were ever so severe, or even ever so cruel, the visit of an Admiral would not be his time for shewing these dispositions. In short, these gentlemen appeared almost utterly unacquainted with those details, an accurate knowledge of which would alone warrant the opinions which they delivered. Such are the conclusions which we should naturally form, from a general knowledge of the circumstances of the case.

But, added to all these, we fortunately obtained access to one of the party, a West Indian gentleman, who resided many years in Jamaica; whose high respectability and ample fortune had not so estranged him from the poor despised Negroes, as to prevent his seeing, and pitying their distresses; and who, with a resolute benevolence and integrity, rarely found in these days, dared to come forward and deliver his evidence in behalf of that injured race.

He declared that he had often accompanied Governors and Admirals in their visits to the different plantations. That the estates naturally being those of persons of distinction, were such as must be supposed to be under the best management; and that all possible care would be taken to keep every disgusting object out of sight, that the feelings of those high personages might not be wounded.

Opponents witnesses: Effects of Selection.

There is also a remark which must be made, concerning the evidence of several very respectable West Indian Proprietors, who appeared as witnesses. The West Indian body, it is obvious, would naturally look through the whole range of Proprietors, and call as witnesses those whom they knew to be most affluent and humane. But nothing can possibly be so unreasonable as to suppose, that we are hereby furnished with any fair sample of the general treatment of the Negroes, which, as has been already stated, must necessarily vary according to the temper and disposition of the owner (and also of their manager,) and still more than on his temper, on his being in affluent or distressed circumstances, on the nature of his views and undertakings. But from this selection of witnesses, which however was perfectly natural, the treatment and the allowances of some peculiarly liberal and affluent proprietors are taken as the treatment and allowances of all masters, in all their several varieties. Indeed, these witnesses themselves were disposed to take for granted, and thence to state, that their own was the general mode of proceeding, partly from the natural repugnance which is felt by men of liberal minds to say any thing which might have the appearance of boasting of their own peculiar liberality; partly, from the real ignorance of one man as to the conduct of another, in all matters of private management.

It would, however, be gross injustice to my cause, not to mention one instance, in which the effect of this mode of proceeding, in conveying, quite unintentionally I doubt not, a very exaggerated idea of the allowances and comforts of Slaves, was established by indisputable proof.[^[37]] The Agent for the Island of Jamaica, a gentleman truly respectable and well-informed, with some other coadjutors of equal respectability, when questioned by the Privy Council as to the provisions allowed to the Slaves, stated; that the common allowance of herrings, which are used for the Slaves as a seasoning of their vegetable food, was from twenty to twenty-five barrels of herrings annually, to every one hundred Slaves. Now, taking an average of five years of peace immediately after a long war, from 1783 to 1787, the whole number of Slaves in the island being estimated at about 230,000, and the field Slaves, according to the usual calculation, as seven-eighths of the whole number, the barrels of herrings consumed ought to have been near 46,000 barrels. But the accounts of imports shew, that the average quantity of herrings, and all other cured fish, annually imported during the five years, not for the Negroes alone, but for all the inhabitants of the island, amounted to not half the quantity, to but 21,089 barrels. Surely this circumstance powerfully confirms the supposition, which, on our reasoning from what we know of the manner of selecting and bringing forward witnesses, would be suggested to our minds.

It is curious likewise to observe concerning both those most respectable witnesses who were formerly mentioned, and concerning several justly respected members of the West Indian body who delivered their testimony, that their evidence covers a considerable extent both of time and space, and yet they make no distinction whatever as to periods and places. In every island, equally, during the whole period of their acquaintance with the West Indies, the Slaves were treated as well as possible. Now the West Indians themselves tell us, that the treatment of Negroes has been exceedingly improved within the last twenty or thirty years: if this be so, there were at least defects in the system formerly; yet in speaking of that former period, no such hint is given; but the treatment is stated to have been uniformly excellent. These declarations are manifestly incompatible.

The question itself, whether the treatment has or has not improved of late years, is of great importance; but far too large and difficult to be here discussed. Still, as the assertion is often made, and as, in the opinion of some, it may be of great practical influence, a few words ought to be said on it. That there are fewer individual instances of cruelty now than formerly, I believe to be true. It is alleged, and I hope truly, that an improvement has taken place in the education and manners of the book-keepers, or overseers, who are in immediate and continual contact with the Slaves; and whose characters and tempers must therefore have a decisive effect one way or another on the treatment they receive. But the system continues the same; and it is greatly to be feared that the increasing pressure of the times has tended in too many instances to abridge the stock, before but too contracted, of the Slave’s comforts, and perhaps to increase his labours.

It is worthy also of remark, that the West Indian colonies, and their inhabitants, are almost always mentioned, by the witnesses before mentioned, in general terms; and scarcely a hint is given us, that greater attention is paid to the comforts and feelings of the Slaves in one island, than in another. Now in the case of one island, and that next to Jamaica, by far the largest and most populous of them all, we have had such proof, I had almost used Shakespeare’s expression, such damning proof, of the low estimate of Negroes, and of the treatment to which they are liable, as even our opponents themselves must own to be utterly inconsistent with the accounts of those respectable witnesses of whom I have before spoken. And indeed in others of the islands we have the same facts established by individual testimony of the most respectable sort. Are we not, then, entitled to extend the application of the instances, and to consider them, such as indeed from their number also they must be regarded, as fair samples, by no means of the universal, but of the general condition and treatment of the negro Slaves?

Assertion, that Negro Slaves are happier than our Peasantry.

But another broad and general objection may be urged against the testimony of the same respectable class of witnesses, that it proves by far too much. For they tell us not only that the Slaves are in general treated with liberality and kindness; not only that they are protected by law equally with white men, in their lives and property; but that they are in a situation superior to that of the bulk of our English peasantry: and one most respectable and amiable man, of whose humanity no one thinks more highly than myself, declared, that they were so happy that he often wished himself one of them.