Froudacity | Page 5

above of the alleged facts and possibilities
of West Indian life, we had believed (even granting the correctness of
his gloomy account of the past and present positions of the two races)
that to no well-thinking West Indian White, whose ancestors may have,
innocently or culpably, participated in the gains as well as the guilt of
slavery, would the remembrance of its palmy days be otherwise than
one of regret. We Negroes, on the other hand, after a lapse of time
extending over nearly two generations, could be indebted only to
precarious tradition or scarcely accessible documents for any
knowledge we might chance upon of the sufferings endured in these
Islands of the West by those of our race who have gone before us.
Death, with undiscriminating hand, had gathered [10] in the human
harvest of masters and slaves alike, according to or out of the normal
laws of nature; while Time had been letting down on the stage of our
existence drop-scene after drop-scene of years, to the number of
something like fifty, which had been curtaining off the tragic incidents
of the past from the peaceful activities of the present. Being thus
circumstanced, thought we, what rational elements of mutual hatred
should now continue to exist in the bosoms of the two races?
With regard to the perpetual reference to Hayti, because of our oneness
with its inhabitants in origin and complexion, as a criterion for the
exact forecast of our future conduct under given circumstances, this
appeared to us, looking at actual facts, perversity gone wild in the
manufacture of analogies. The founders of the Black Republic, we had
all along understood, were not in any sense whatever equipped, as Mr.
Froude assures us they were, when starting on their self-governing
career, with the civil and intellectual advantages that had been
transplanted from Europe. On the contrary, we had been taught to
regard them as most unfortunate in the circumstances under which [11]
they so gloriously conquered their merited freedom. We saw them free,

but perfectly illiterate barbarians, impotent to use the intellectual
resources of which their valour had made them possessors, in the shape
of books on the spirit and technical details of a highly developed
national existence. We had learnt also, until this new interpreter of
history had contradicted the accepted record, that the continued failure
of Hayti to realize the dreams of Toussaint was due to the fatal want of
confidence subsisting between the fairer and darker sections of the
inhabitants, which had its sinister and disastrous origin in the action of
the Mulattoes in attempting to secure freedom for themselves, in
conjunction with the Whites, at the sacrifice of their darker-hued
kinsmen. Finally, it had been explained to us that the remembrance of
this abnormal treason had been underlying and perniciously influencing
the whole course of Haytian national history. All this established
knowledge we are called upon to throw overboard, and accept the
baseless assertions of this conjuror-up of inconceivable fables! He calls
upon us to believe that, in spite of being free, educated, progressive,
and at peace with [12] all men, we West Indian Blacks, were we ever to
become constitutionally dominant in our native islands, would emulate
in savagery our Haytian fellow- Blacks who, at the time of retaliating
upon their actual masters, were tortured slaves, bleeding and rendered
desperate under the oppressors' lash--and all this simply and merely
because of the sameness of our ancestry and the colour of our skin! One
would have thought that Liberia would have been a fitter standard of
comparison in respect of a coloured population starting a national life,
really and truly equipped with the requisites and essentials of civilized
existence. But such a reference would have been fatal to Mr. Froude's
object: the annals of Liberia being a persistent refutation of the old
pro-slavery prophecies which our author so feelingly rehearses.
Let us revert, however, to Grenada and the newly-published "Bow of
Ulysses," which had come into my hands in April, 1888.
It seemed to me, on reading that book, and deducing therefrom the
foregoing essential summary, that a critic would have little more to do,
in order to effectually exorcise this negrophobic political hobgoblin,
than to appeal to [13] impartial history, as well as to common sense, in
its application to human nature in general, and to the actual facts of
West Indian life in particular.
History, as against the hard and fast White-master and Black-slave

theory so recklessly invented and confidently built upon by Mr. Froude,
would show incontestably--(a) that for upwards of two hundred years
before the Negro Emancipation, in 1838, there had never existed in one
of those then British Colonies, which had been originally discovered
and settled for Spain by the great Columbus or by his successors, the
Conquistadores, any