The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 | Page 4

which Mr. Carlyle seems to find such a relish in believing deserve to be branded as both false and wicked. His mythical negro, up to the ears in 'pumpkin,' working half an hour a day, and not to be tempted by love or money to work more, would have been, during my whole residence in the island, as great a curiosity to me as an ornithorhynchus. Doubtless something approaching to the phenomenon can be found; for a young Scotchman, a friend of mine, who was appointed to take the census of a secluded district, came to me after visiting it, and gave me an account of the people he had found in the bush, answering pretty nearly to Mr. Carlyle's description. But though he had been in the island from a boy, he spoke of it with something of the surprise attending a new discovery. I should state, however, that my residence was in a district mostly occupied by small freeholders, and containing but few estates. In planting districts the number of worthless, idle negroes is much larger. I have been assured that the negroes of the parish of Vere are peculiarly so. The men, I have been told, do scarcely any work, except in crop time; the women do none at all, not even to keep their houses neat. There is scarcely a cottage in the parish that has a bread-fruit or a cocoanut tree on its ground.[3] Everything is dirty and forlorn. On the other hand, in Metcalfe and the adjoining parts of St. Andrew, and St. Thomas in the Vale, although the mass of the working people have certainly not learned much about comfort yet, still the number of neat, floored, and glazed houses, the fruit trees on almost every negro plot, the neat hibiscus hedges, with their gay red flowers, surrounding even the poorer huts, the small cane fields and coffee pieces noticeable at every turn, and the absence of loungers about the cottages, go to make up a very different picture from what has been drawn of Vere. It is plain, then, that the impressions which travellers bring away with them from Jamaica will vary almost to entire opposition, according to the quarters they have visited. Now what is the cause of these glaring contrasts? The negro character is remarkably uniform. If there are great differences among them, every one that knows them will ascribe it to a difference in circumstances. What is the difference then between Metcalfe and Vere? Simply this: Metcalfe is the home of small freeholders; Vere is a sugar parish, where the estates are in prosperous activity. It has been less affected by emancipation than any other parish. In Metcalfe the negroes are independent; in Vere they are completely subject to the planters. It is said that not even an ounce of sugar is permitted to be sold in the parish. All is for exportation. If the writer then attempts to vindicate the character of the blacks from the reproaches of incurable laziness and unthriftiness that have been cast upon it, he wishes it to be understood that he speaks only for the freeholders, who have homes of their own, which they have an inducement to improve and beautify, and who have land of their own which no dishonest motive prompts them to neglect, and for the estate laborers whose condition most nearly resembles theirs. If the blacks on many plantations are little disposed to adorn homes from which they may be ejected at any time; if they are discouraged from the minor industries essential to comfort, lest these should interfere with the grosser labor required of them; if they are kept idle out of crop time for fear they should not be available in crop time; if their mental improvement is discouraged by the planter instinct, unchanged in nature though circumscribed in scope; if on many estates they are herded in barracks whose promiscuous life debases still lower their already low morality; if their labors are directed for absentee masters by hired overseers, whose interest is not to create a wholesome confidence between laborers and proprietors, but to get the most they can out of them during their own term of employment; if they are treated with the old slaveholding arrogance, embittered by the consciousness of a check; and if thereby the more self-respecting are driven off, and the more abject-spirited who remain are rendered still more abject: I submit it is not fair to argue from this class of semi-slaves to the character of those who are really free, who call no man master, who have a chance to be men if they will, unhampered except by the general depressing influences that will always work in a country where slavery has lately existed, and where the slaveholding class have