The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 | Page 3

The writer is very far indeed from pretending to have carried through
such an inquiry. His personal acquaintance extends to but seven of the
twenty-two parishes of the island, and he is intimately acquainted with
not more than three of those seven. He has but a meagre knowledge of
statistical facts, bearing on the workings of emancipation in the island,
and indeed the statistics themselves, as Mr. Sewell complains, are very
meagre and very hard to get. Still the writer has been able to gather
some facts which will speak for themselves, and he claims for his
personal impressions on points concerning which he cannot give
particular facts the degree of confidence deserved by one who has
resided five years and a half in a rural district, who has lived familiarly
conversant with negroes and with whites of all classes, who has heard
all sides of the question from valued personal friends, and who neither
carried to Jamaica nor brought away from it any peculiar disposition to
an apotheosis of the negro character.
There is, however, an excess of candor affected by some writers on this
question, which is neither honorable to them nor wholesome to their
readers. They would have us believe that they began their inquiries
entirely undecided whether slavery or freedom is the normal condition
of the African race, and that their conclusions, whatever they are, have
been purely deduced from the facts that they have gathered. The writer
lays claim to no such comprehensive indifference. He would as soon
think of suspending his faith in Christ until he could resolve all the
difficulties of the first of Genesis, as of suspending his moral judgment
respecting the system which makes one man the brute instrument of
another's gain, till he knew just how the statistics of sugar and coffee
stand. Woe unto us if the fundamental principles which govern human

relations have themselves no better foundation than the fluctuating
figures of blue-books!
But if freedom is better than slavery, she will be sure to vindicate her
superiority in due time, and is little beholden to overzealous friends
who cannot be content meanwhile that present facts shall tell their own
story, whatever it be. There is much, very much, in the present
condition of Jamaica, to cause an honest man to think twice before
setting it down as testifying favorably for emancipation, or before
dismissing it as not testifying unfavorably against it.
And first, all rose-colored accounts of the Jamaica negro may be
summarily dismissed. He is not a proficient in industry, economy,
intelligence, morality, or religion, but, though rising, is yet far down on
the scale in all these respects. Nor is it true that all his peculiar vices are
to be referred to slavery. The sensuality, avarice, cunning, and
litigiousness of the Creole[1] negro correspond exactly with Du
Chaillu's and Livingstone's descriptions of the native African.[2] But
on the other hand, the accounts of these travellers bear witness to a
freshness and independence of spirit in the native African, which has
been crushed out of the enslaved negro. Several missionaries have gone
from Jamaica to Africa, and they speak with delight of the manliness
and vigor of character which they find among the blacks there, as
contrasted with the abjectness of those who have been oppressed by
slavery and infected with its sly and cringing vices. Although the faults
of the negro, except this servile abjectness, may not have been created
by slavery, yet slavery and heathenism are so identical in character and
tendency that there is scarcely a heathen vice, and, as we have found of
late to our sorrow, scarcely a heathen cruelty, which slavery would not
create if it did not exist, and of course scarcely one already existing
which it does not foster and intensify. The unsocial selfishness of the
emancipated black man, his untrustworthiness and want of confidence
in others, are traits that his race may have brought with it from Africa,
but they have been nourished by slavery, until it seems almost
impossible to eradicate them. I am happy to say, however, that the
young people who have been subjected to the best influences, exhibit
already the virtues of public spirit and faithfulness to a very gratifying

degree. The trouble is that they are a minority of the whole. And until
the character of the negroes can be so elevated as to bring them to put
some confidence in one another, they may improve in individual
industry, as they manifestly are improving, but the benefits resulting
from combined action can be enjoyed only in a very limited measure.
Even now two black men can hardly own so much as a small sugar mill
in common. They are almost sure to quarrel over the division of the
profits. The consequence is, that, whereas